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Definition and Introduction to Postmodern PhilosophyPostmodernism is a philosophical movement of the 20th, 21st century founded on the belief that the discovery of objective truth and reality is impossible. This extreme skepticism, of which Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn are particularly famous, assumes that;
a) All truth is limited, approximate, and is constantly evolving
b) No theory can ever be proved true (we can only show that a theory is false)
c) No theory can ever explain all things
d) Thus absolute and certain truth that explains all things is unobtainable.
As Taborsky and Edward O.Wilson write of Postmodernism philosophy;
".. the Mediated concept of Truth, is that it first admits that there is no such thing as absolute, pure Truth. There is a reality, which may be abstract or sensual ... but one cannot access it/know it ..'in-itself'. One can only 'know' it within the socially constructed (or species-constructed) 'mediative-habits' of one's particular society/species/whatever." (Taborsky)
"All movements tend towards extremes, which is where we are today. The exuberant self-realisation that ran from Romanticism to modernism has now given rise to philosophical postmodernism (often called poststructuralism). Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment. The difference between the two extremes can be expressed roughly as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.
The philosophical postmodernists, a rebel crew miling beneath the black flag of anarchy, challenge the very foundations of science and traditional philosophy. Reality is a state constructed by the mind, not perceived by it. In the most extravagant version of this constructivism, there is no 'real' reality, no objective truths external to mental activity, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups. (Edward O. Wilson, Consilience)
The post modern understanding that our language is too imprecise and relative in meaning to ever absolutely describe Reality, has been caused by the failure of Physicists and Philosophers (over many centuries) to discover Reality.
"The quest for certainty has played a considerable part in the history of philosophy: it has been assumed that without a basis of certainty all our claims to knowledge must be suspect." (A.J. Ayer)
"Nothing seems of more importance, towards erecting a firm system of sound and real knowledge, which may be proof against the assaults of scepticism, than to lay the beginning in a distinct explication of what is meant by thing, reality, existence: for in vain shall we dispute concerning the real existence of things, or pretend to any knowledge thereof, so long as we have not fixed the meaning of those words." (George Berkeley)
In 1940, two hundred years after David Hume first formalized the Metaphysical Problem of Causation, Albert Einstein confirms that the problem remained unsolved;
"For the time being we have to admit that we do not possess any general theoretical basis for physics which can be regarded as its logical foundation." (Einstein, 1940)
This failure has continued to the present day, and it is only natural human behavior (psychological) that this has resulted in our current Postmodern belief that it is impossible to directly describe and understand the reality of what exists.
The problem with Postmodernism is that it leaves us without absolute foundations, encourages a separate / individual sense of self and gives too much power to our imagination and how we may choose to live. While this may liberating, it unfortunately offers little guidance and does not abide by the fact that humans are constructed of matter, interact with all other matter in the universe and have evolved certain genetic traits as part of their evolutionary ancestry. Thus there are certain absolute truths that humans (all things) must abide by if they are to live by the truth and the wisdom this attains.
As Gottfried Leibniz wrote; "A distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man's imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection." (Leibniz, 1620)
There is a tacit assumption within postmodernism that no theory will ever explain all things, but there is no real reason for this assumption (other than that history showed that no theory had yet explained all things).
Some postmodern philosophers and scientists (or those who influenced / contributed to rise of postmodernism) are Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A.J. Ayer, Jean Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Ernst Mach and Rudolf Carnap.
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 Finally, if nothing can be truly asserted, even the following claim would be false, the claim that there is no true assertion. (Aristotle)
If anyone thinks nothing is to be known, he does not even know whether that can be known, as he says he knows nothing. (Lucretius)
 I must confess that a man is guilty of unpardonable arrogance who concludes, because an argument has escaped his own investigation, that therefore it does not really exist. I must also confess that, though all the learned, for several ages, should have employed themselves in fruitless search upon any subject, it may still, perhaps, be rash to conclude positively that the subject must, therefore, pass all human comprehension. (David Hume, 1737)
If I ask you why you believe any particular matter of fact, which you relate, you must tell me some reason; and this reason will be some other fact, connected with it. But as you cannot proceed after this manner, in infinitum, you must at last terminate in some fact, which is present to your memory or senses; or must allow that your belief is entirely without foundation. (David Hume, 1737)
 A piece of knowledge is never false or true - but only more or less biologically and evolutionary useful. All dogmatic creeds are approximations: these approximations form a humus from which better approximations grow. (Ernst Mach)
The ONLY ABSOLUTE TRUTH is that there are NO ABSOLUTE TRUTHS (Feyerabend)
And isn't it a bad thing to be deceived about the truth, and a good thing to know what the truth is? For I assume that by knowing the truth you mean knowing things as they really are. (Plato)
 There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value.
This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive?
One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1890)
What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind? (Nietzsche, 1890)
Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical. (Nietzsche, 1890)
 But what are the simple constituent parts of which reality is composed? - What are the simple constituent parts of a chair? - The bits of wood of which it is made? Or the molecules or atoms? (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
 My thesis is that realism is neither demonstrable nor refutable. Realism like anything else outside logic and finite arithmetic is not demonstrable; but while empirical scientific theories are refutable, realism is not even refutable. (It shares this irrefutability with many philosophical or 'metaphysical' theories, in particular also with idealism.) But it is arguable, and the weight of the arguments is overwhelmingly in its favor. (Popper, 1975)
All we can do is to search for the falsity content of our best theory. We do so by trying to refute our theory; that is, by trying to test it severely in the light of all our objective knowledge and all our ingenuity. It is, of course, always possible that the theory may be false even if it passes all these tests; that is allowed for by our search for verisimilitude. But if it passes all these tests then we may have good reason to conjecture that our theory, which (we know) has a greater truth content than its predecessor, may have no greater falsity content. And if we fail to refute the new theory, especially in fields in which its predecessor has been refuted, then we can claim this as one of the objective reasons for the conjecture that the new theory is a better approximation to truth than the old theory. (Popper, 1975)
 .. each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent. .. no paradigm ever solves all the problems it defines .. (T.S. Kuhn, 1962)
.. the puzzles that constitute normal science exist only because no paradigm that provides a basis for scientific research ever completely resolves all its problems. (Kuhn, 1962)
Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can do for those who study it. (Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy)
'Truth' is an organized formulation of energy, and is contextual, current, flexible ... according to the individual who does the formulation, the group which does the formulation. (Taborsky)
Over much of the philosophical world in this century the doctrine of the impossibility of metaphysics became almost an orthodoxy, and the adjective 'metaphysical' a pejorative word. Some of the reasons for this devaluation should now be clear. The conceptual distortions and final incoherence of systems, the abstract myths parading as Reality, the grandiose claims and the conflicting results - these seemed to many the essence of the metaphysical enterprise and sufficient reason for condemning it. ... Having the avowed aim of arriving at profound truths about everything, it is sometimes held to result only in obscure nonsense about nothing. (Twentieth Century Philosophers, 1998)
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