WHO LIVES IN A POSTMODERN WORLD?



I'm writing this following the recent debate on Puskas's blog (see sidebar) on truth v happiness, and the nature of truth.

I've always been curious about postmodernism, and never quite grasped what it is, probably because there's nothing concrete to grasp. It mostly to do with fragmentation, perspectivism and flux: the intellectual result of millions of trans-cultural interactions on a global scale. The most lucid explanation of postmodernism I've read is towards the end of Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind. His style involves endless reformulation of the same idea, which, in the case of such an elusive phenomenon as this one, proves incredibly useful.

Here are some extracts:

"The mind is not the passive reflector of an external world and its intrinsic order, but is active and creative in the process of perception and cognition." "There is no empirical 'fact' that is not already theory-laden." These ideas seem to me to be uncontroversial.

What follows, however, is a real bombshell: "Reality is in some sense constructed by the mind, not simply perceived by it, and many such constructions are possible, none necessarily sovereign." "All human understanding is interpretation, and no interpretation is final." "Every object of knowledge is already part of a preinterpreted context, and beyond that are only other preinterpreted contexts. All human knowledge is mediated by signs and symbols of uncertain provenance, constituted by historically and culturally variable predispositions... Hence the nature of truth and reality, in science no less than in philosophy, religion, or art, is radically ambiguous." (italics mine) You get the idea. And through this chink in the city wall of Scientopolis marches the whole magical, mystical New Age carnival parade - beliefs become a kind of lifestyle choice, and no longer have to submit to the rigour of scientific testing. Why should they? They are all equally valid. There are no meta-narratives.

Is the (clearly stunning) success of science in predicting everyday occurrences the only philosophical reply to this radical perspectivism? This is a genuine question. Could the success of science be merely a huge coincidence, and end tomorrow?