|
book reviews
Books by Paul Boghossianreviewed by T. Nelson |
|
|
book reviews
Books by Paul Boghossianreviewed by T. Nelson |
Reviewed by T. Nelson
Postmodernism was like the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail: even after both arms and both legs were chopped off, he still insisted he was invincible.
Boghossian gives as an example the belief of the Zuni Indians that they are descendants of buffalo people, not apes. Some archaeologists insisted that the Zuni worldview was just as valid as the archaeologists', claiming that there are no objectively true facts.
This, of course, is a contradiction: the two claims are mutually contradictory. And Boghossian has no difficulty refuting the view of postmodernists that there was no such thing as an objective fact: if true, then the postmodernist's claim itself could not be a fact.
But there's another arm left to chop off: epistemic relativism, which claims that all epistemic systems are equivalent and it's impossible to justify an epistemic system using its own rules. A person who believes tea leaves are a valid system would use tea leaves to prove the system valid. This would be little different, the postmodernists would say, from using logic to prove logical reasoning is valid.
Thomas Nagel made a start on this problem by saying that an argument invites the use of logic. Boghossian argues that epistemic systems are just more general versions of particular epistemic judgments. The relativist claims that particular epistemic judgments are uniformly false. If this is so, then it makes no sense to accept the general system, because the general system is made up of generalizations of particular judgments, which the relativist has already acknowledged to be false.
Does this argument finish off social constructivism? What if someone claims that incoherence is a virtue? Or if they claim that all evidence against the tea leaf theory was manufactured by an evil cabal? Or that anti-constructivism is racist? There are many more limbs to chop off, but after a while it just gets silly.
jun 12 2022