Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Postmodernism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Postmodernism emerged in the late 1970s to capture the changed character of the sciences in the twentieth century, which called into question the idea that the organized pursuit of knowledge has a unique and natural course of development that can provide the basis for the general improvement of humanity, typically in the form of rational statecraft. This “modernist” ideal had gone under a variety of names, from positivism in philosophical circles to simply progress in more popular ones. However, far from denying the fundamental importance of knowledge, postmodernists hold that knowledge is constitutive of social and individual identity. (See knowledge society and social constructivism) Instead, what they deny is that knowledge functions in some situation-transcendent capacity as a goal or regulative ideal in terms of which progress may be measured. In this respect, postmodernism is a revolt against the normativity of knowledge. Michel Foucault's stress on the embodied and self-disciplining character of knowledge is indicative of this position. Generally speaking, social epistemology attempts to reconstruct knowledge's normativity, given the features of our epistemic predicament that Jean-François Lyotard originally called the “postmodern condition”.
The term “Enlightenment” is often used for the tendency in the history of Western thought that postmodernism is said to oppose, if not undermine. However, principled opponents of postmodernism such as Jürgen Habermas generally mean by the term something rather different from the movement's eighteenth-century originators, such as Voltaire, Diderot, Hume and Kant.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Knowledge BookKey Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture, pp. 123 - 127Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007