I’ll be speaking on “Postmodernism: Philosophy and Politics” as part of The Mill Series of lectures at Lafayette College.
The series is named for John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty, especially its second chapter, is essential reading for free speech and liberal education advocates (and their opponents):
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
Thanks very much to Professor Brandon Van Dyck for the invitation.
Hello Dr Hicks – I attended your event and it was delightful. I felt as though I was exercising parts of my brain that had been dormant for quite some time. Particularly in the multiple different meanings for the ideas of “truth” and “reality”.
After I left I thought that I would have like to have asked a question about the process that a person with the Postmodernist thinking style might use to distinguish between “Ordinary Truths” and “Self-Chosen / Self-Perceived Truths”
I used to work as an EMT. When we would assess a patient, one of the parameters that we always needed to test for was “normal” mental functioning. So we asked four questions: What is your name, What are you doing, What day is this and Who is the POTUS? If a patient could not answer correctly, then that meant “Altered Mental Status” – which meant that we definitely had to take them to the hospital.
My thinking is that a Pomo-leaning person would always be able and willing to answer these four questions “correctly” in the normal sense of truth. But, in other areas of (for lack of a better word) non-objectively provable truths, they would be less likely to answer in the “commonly understood to be correct” sense of truth.
So we could imagine that all statements that a Pomo-leaning person might face about the world could be shuttled into the fold of either “I will answer in the common-sense way” or “I will answer in the make-up-my-own-perception way.”
The question that I wish that I had asked you would have been: What is the the process that a person with the Pomo-thinking style will use to distinguish between perceiving a question as a matter of “Ordinary Truth” vs a “Self-Chosen / Self-Perceived Truth”?
I would guess that the Pomo-leaning person’s most truthful answer would simply be: “I pick and choose which version of perceiving reality I want to use depending on whichever happens to be the most suitable in a particular case to help me to achieve the ends that I want to achieve. And since it serves my best interests to have you believe that I am a ‘normal’ person, I will answer the EMT mental-status questions using the ‘common-sense’ perception of reality.”
Thanks for this comment, and the perceptive follow-up. Too long for a quick answer here, but I like the “ordinary” truth test. One can, as a realist say there are ordinary simple truths and things get complicated and take work. Though the pomo will bracket all of the “truth” claims under a strong subjectivity, including a subjective choice to switch strategies along lines you suggest.