Okay, that would be very unlikely, unless we were to read “wanker” literally, and were dealing with some sort of onanistic issue. (Pun intentional.) It works with “liar”, though, as being a liar often is relevant to whether or not someone is likely to be saying things that are true. Same with “troll”, in internet contexts. Some philosophers get a bit hung up on the fact of abuse, ignoring that sometimes abuse is (morally and epistemically) deserved.
I think you may still be being a tish loose with postmodernism. Relativism isn’t a postmodern idea. Epistemic relativism is Protagoras, after all, and ethical relativism can be found possibly in Hume. The pragmatists are also somewhat relativistic, and I think they’ve taught us some very useful things. It’s more the deconstructivism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and all that business that’s problematic. (And even those may work, in limited scopes; it’s when they go global that, I think, they really lead us seriously astray.)
]]>I never said that. I said that there are two issues, one that involves everyone (the crimes) and one that involves skeptics (the supernatural motives). In fact, in several places in my post I say that skeptics need to step in and tackle this issue.
]]>On ad hominens specifically I was thinking when I read that that Pigliucci got his definitions a bit mixed. An argument of De Dora is wrong because he’s a wanker is fallacious while saying he’s a wanker because his arguments are wrong is just an opinion.
And yes, I was sloppy in my use of postmodern. I was more imagining the postmodern application of philosophy – where you have relativists abusing some basic philosophical ideas.
]]>That said, there’s nothing postmodern about acknowledging the limits of human knowledge. It’s a modern claim — you can find it in Kant, for example (wherein we can’t know God exists or doesn’t exist, for God is not a possible object of experience). Furthermore, the problems with induction are identified by moderns, classically by Hume. The postmodern move is to deny the possibility of any epistemic privilege — to overgeneralize from the failure of the grandest projects of the early moderns (Hobbes and Descartes come to mind) to a kind of epistemological pessimism, or even nihilism.
The funny things about postmodern philosophy are that, one, most of it isn’t done in philosophy departments (it’s more common in departments that end in “Studies” or English departments) and, two, it’s inspired by people (such as Hegel and Heidegger) who would find most of its claims shocking, if not offensive.
I don’t want to be too parochial regarding the first point, BTW. Philosophy departments don’t have the patent on philosophy, no more than science faculties do on science. But when an entire set of theories are systematically, for the most part, weeded out of the traditional disciplinary sphere, that has to mean something.
]]>That’s my take on it, and I think its perfectly reasonable!
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