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Olympe started the Postmodernism - What Exactly Is It? thread in search of some answers:

I've heard the word "postmodernism" thrown around a lot, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. "Postmodern" is used (generally by people on the right), semi-insultingly, to describe those like Susan Sontag who oppose the war on terror and can see the terrorists "point of view". I've heard that this "postmodernist" movement, whatever it is, is prevalent in certain universities, but I majored in biology so I wouldn't know much about it.

From what I've gathered, it's a philosophical viewpoint that places great emphasis on moral and cultural relativism, the idea that people can never really understand each other particularly if they're from different cultures, and social influence on behavior. But I really don't quite get what it is, and typing "postmodernism" into google.com hasn't really helped much, so I was wondering: 1)can you folks, since you're interested in philosophy, describe it and 2)what do you think about it?

From what I've heard, it sounds kind of flaky, but like I said, I've heard very little.

Dave replied:

I haven't replied to this one in so long because, honestly, it's a tough one for me to tackle; 'postmodernism' is one of those terms that's so hard to pin down because many of the people who use it have an agenda of some sort.

In philosophy, 'modernism' often refers to the period of the 1500s-1800s, when the Enlightenment and scientific revolution were getting underway. (This is why Descartes, Locke, etc. are often referred to as 'modern philosophers,' with 'contemporary' sometimes being used to describe philosophers of the late 1800s and 1900s.) Many of the thinkers of this age were trying to articulate the truth as it 'really is' -- to find the one set of rules, standards, whatever that describe how the universe works. They felt that not only was the universe stable enough to have such rules, human minds were constructed in such a way that we could discover them. The truth was out there, waiting to be found.

Now, broadly, post-modernism would be what came after that -- namely, the idea that maybe things weren't so simple. Maybe the universe isn't quite so stable -- maybe some of the rules do change from time to time. Maybe there ARE no hard and fast rules. And maybe human perception and interpretation invariably lends some degree of subjectivity to our beliefs and propositions, so that there's no way to articulate a universal truth that everyone would accept.

Under this broad definition, pragmatists are certainly post-modernists, so I definitely fall in with that crowd. It's possible to be a relativist and not say 'anything goes' -- to say that while sometimes there are no answers or truths, sometimes there are. The trick is in figuring out which is which, and it's a trick I don't think anyone's really mastered yet. But we're working on it.

There is a more narrow sense of postmodernism that plays up the subjectivity and the barriers to cultural exchange and understanding. These postmodernists emphasize flux and instability and so on; these are the folks that often get caricatured and in my opinion occasionally even degenerate into self-caricature. I think that extreme relativism is ultimately self-defeating, but that doesn't seem to stop a large number of people from publishing papers and books.