UMEÅ UNIVERSITET

Institutionen för Informatik

Kristo Ivanov — tel 166030 / Fax 166550 9 april 1997 (revision 1)

Rather than answers, warnings through hints about possible studies, in connection with my "Brev från professorn" in March (rev. version distributed today). See also attachment at http://www.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/PostmodDesignDef9704.html.

Honderich, T. (1995) The Oxford companion to philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.708. See quotation below.

Bullock, A., & Stallybrass, O. (Eds.) (1977). The Fontana dictionary of modern thought. London: Fontana/Collins. See quotation below.

Modernism as presupposition of post-modernism? Lindbom, T. (1995). Modernismen. Borås: Norma.

Disputation a few years ago (Nordiska Språk): the meaning of concepts or, rather, words, change along the text, and the conclusions are the reactions of readers (but no pragmatism).

In informatics: postmodern reflections, language games, perspectives, Marx vs. Heidegger vs Wittgenstein (cf. Christopher Norris on marxist disappointment), bricolage, metaphor-narratives, pluralism vs relativism, situated action—situated ethics, tacit knowledge and practice as in Turner, S. (1994). The social theory of practices: Tradition, tacit knowledge, and presuppositions. My initial goodwill towards the taken for granted "meaning in use" in references to Wittgenstein, or to "pragmatism" in references to Rorty.

More specifically: model vs. context or conceptual framework or frame of reference, concept vs metaphor (e.g. tool vs. instrumentalism), aesthetics, definition, decision (choice - deliberation) vs judgement based on aesthetical feeling (Åintuition), experimentalism vs bricolage trial & error and improvisation.

Available formulations of the possible grounds for the feelings of uneasiness or outrage in front of perspectivism: cf. "perspectivism" in Reichmann, S. (1993). Kulturen utan Gud [Culture without God] . Stockholm: Interskrift, pp. 125-132, and on its relations to Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre in op.cit., pp. 297ff.

Protagoras (491/481-?) and sophistic rhetorical aestheticism — Compare with Plato (427-347), and Socrates (470/469-399). Gnoseologic "humanistic" relativism but pragmatic (utilitarian) practice.

Kant /1724-1804), vs Hamann (1730-1788) forerunner of (non-secular) romanticism, phenomenology and existentialism. Cf. Berlin, I. (1993). The magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the origins of modern irrationalism. London: John Murray, and Fontana.

Nietzsche (1844-1900) -> Spengler, Jung, etc.: Aeschilus & Sofocles vs Euripides & Socrates; critique of Socrates; perspectivism and provisional "cultural" truth, anticipation of critique of rationalism and positivism; nazi utilization of Nietzsche's thought. Influence of subversive interpretations of Nietzsche's thought in French surrealism and Heidegger.

If we cannot invest enough time and effort in the hard work that is necessary in order to realize that we are incompetent in talking about rationality, methodology, etc. then we should "shut up"? Or, despite of it all, keep struggling about the fundaments without becoming a "fundamentalist" while all other kinds of things have to be done? For instance, start with a few foundational matters "close at home":

"The methodology of modelling", pp. 100-110 in Gordon, S. (1991). The history and philosophy of social science . London and New York: Routledge. Distributed today. In turn, see also on models, with an eye on validation, validity, and verifiability, in Kaplan, A. (1964). The conduct of inquiry: Methodology for behavioral science . New York: Thomas Crowell, and Churchman, C. W. (1979). The systems approach and its enemies. New York: Basic Books, pp. 56-69. Compare with discussions of intuition in design theories.

"Defining", pp. 141-163 in Ackoff, R. L. (1962). Scientific method: Optimizing applied research decisions . New York: Wiley. (Swedish trans. published by Beckman's.). Distributed today. Cf. example of applications, as well as relation to non-postmodern matters of pragmatist truth in Ivanov, K. (1972). Quality-control of information: On the concept of accuracy of information in data banks and in management information systems . The University of Stockholm and The Royal Institute of Technology. (Doctoral diss. Diss. Abstracts Int. 1974, Vol 35A, 3, p. 1611-A. Nat. Techn. Info. Service NTIS No. PB-219297.)

"Definitions of design" and aesthetics, a "reader" of various definitions in available literature, by K. Ivanov, distributed today. Same exercise could be done in trying to define "meaning". Cf. references to theories of meaning in transcendentalism and empiricism on p. 134 in Gellner, E. (1974). The new idealism: Cause and meaning in the social sciences, in A. Giddens (Ed.), Positivism and sociology (pp. 129-156). London: Heinemann.

"On psychological understanding" in volume 3, pp. 179-193 by Jung, C. G. (1953-1979). Collected Works - CW (20 volumes) . Princeton: Princeton University Press. (R.F.C. Hull et al., Trans.). Definition vs. (or following) amplification. Distributed today. Cf. p. 35n of Panofsky, E. (1955). Meaning in the visual arts: Papers in and on Art history. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books.

"Culture as metaphor and metaphors for culture" in Alvesson, M. (1993). Cultural perspectives on organizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 9-26.

Aesthetic intuition as a solution to the tension beween knowledge and doubt, or, rather belief and faith? Cf. Per Landgren's book Fundamentalism (InterSkrift, 1989) introduced in Reichmann, S. (1992). Vad är sanning? [What is truth?] . Stockholm: Interskrift, pp.256-260.

Ernest Gellner and Christopher Norris, Norris distributed today only to particularly interested people (selections according to specification in my "Brev från professorn" in March 1997).

"Classic" refutation of Winch-Wittgenstein's "meaning" and "forms of life" (Å "pragmatic" use, contexts and "cultures) in Gellner, E. (1974). The new idealism: Cause and meaning in the social sciences. In A. Giddens (Ed.), Positivism and sociology (pp. 129-156). London: Heinemann. Distributed today. This article is very deep-going and difficult to read, while the opposite happens with the rather popularly and superficially written Gellner, E. (1992). Postmodernism, reason and religion. London: Routledge.

(beyond those in the "Brev från professorn" and those on "design" in the handout-complement

POSTMODERNISM from Honderich, T. (Ed.) (1995). The Oxford companion to philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 708: In its broad usage, this is the "family resemblance" term deployed in a variety of contexts (architecture, painting, music, poetry, fiction, etc.) for things which seemed to be related — if at all — by a laid-back pluralism of styles and a vague desire to have done with the pretensions of high-modernist culture. In philosophical terms post-modernism shares something with the critique of Enlightenment values and truth-claims mounted by thinkers of a liberal-communitarian persuasion: also with neo-pragmatists like Richard Rorty who welcome the end of philosophy's presumptive role as a privileged, truth-telling discourse. There is another point of contact with post-modern fiction and art in the current preoccupation, among some philosophers, with themes of "self-reflexivity", or the puzzles induced by allowing language to become the object of its own scrutiny in a kind of dizzying rhetorical regress. To this extent post-modernism might seem as a ludic [cf. bricolage, my note] development of the so-called "linguistic turn" that has characterized much philosophical thinking of late.

MODERNISM-POSTMODERNISM, From "Modernism" in Bullock, A., & Stallybrass, O. (Eds.) (1977). The Fontana dictionary of modern thought. London: Fonatan/Collins:

Frank Kermode has suggested a useful rough distinction between two phases of modernism: palaeo-modernism and neo-modernism, the former being the earlier developments, the latter being the surrealist and post-surrealist developments. Others, especially in America (Ihab Hassan, Leslie Fiedler, etc.) have proposed a sharp distinction, a new post-modernist style amounting to a reaction against modernist formalism, a choric, global village art, the product of a "post-cultural" age, emphasizing developments dealt with here under the keywords aleatory, anti-art, anti-literature, auto-destructive art, and new novel. As a stylistic term, modernism contains and conceals a wide variety of different, smaller movements, usually reckoned to be those post-dating Naturalism and characterized by the anti-positivistic and anti-representational leanings of many late-19th century artists and thinkers. It would thus include the tendencies of Symbolism, Impressionism, and Decadence around the turn of the century; Fauvism, Cubism, Post-impressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, Imagism, and Vorticism inte the period up to and over World-War I; and Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism during and after that war....Modernism has a high aesthetic and formal constituent, and can often be seen as a movement attempting to preserve the aesthetic realm agains intellectual, social, and historical forces threatening it. But it has been seen as a change larger than simply formal. Its relation to modern thought and modern pluralism, to the military, political, and ideological dislocations of the century, is considerable. Indeed its forms, with their element of fragmentation, introversion, and crisis, have sometimes been held to register the collapse of the entire tradition of the arts in human history. They can be seen either as a last-ditch stand on behalf of the aesthetic in the face of barbarism (as in much Symbolism) or as a probe towards something new.

Aristotle. (1984). The complete work of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation (2 Vol.). Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. (Ed. by Jonathan Barnes.), Metaphysics, vol 4, 1009a1 - 1010b1.

[I]f all opinions and appearances are true, all statements must be at the same time true and false...If, then, reality is such as the view in question supposes, all will be right in their beliefs....Those who really feel the difficulties have been led to this opinion by observation of the sensible world. They think that contradictions or contraries are true at the same time, because they see contraries coming into existence out of the same thing...[However] the same thing can at the same time be and not be — but not in the same respect. For the same thing can be potentially at the same time two contraries, but it cannot actually....For Empedocles says that when men change their conditions they change their knowledge....A saying of Anaxagoras to some of his friends is also related, — that things would be for them such as they supposed them to be...If these have such opinions and express these views about truth, is it not natural that beginners in philosophy should lose heart? [My italics]. For to seek the truth would be to pursue a flying game....But the reason for this opinion is that while these thinkers were inquiring into the truth of that which is, they thought that which is was identical with the sensible world...And again, they held these views because they saw that all this world of nature is movement, and that about that which changes no true statement can be made; at least, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing nothing could truly be affirmed....[However] regarding the nature of truth, we must maintain that not everything which appears is true. Firstly, even if sensation — at least of the object special to the sense in question — is not false; still appearance is not the same as sensation...

Norris, C. (1994). Truth and the ethics of criticism . Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 22-23, 102-103, 108-109, 125:

On the [neo-]pragmatist account there is simply no difference — no difference that makes a difference — between truth as construed in relation to current societal or cultural norms and truth as the end-point of reasoned inquiry...It is within the reach of the larger question...how far reason can legitimately claim to contest or to criticize what is currently held as "good in the way of belief". Such criticism may assume a variety of forms....What unites them...is an argued and principles resistance to any version of the claim that truth comes down to a matter of local knowledge, consensus values, or cultural forms of life....This counter-argument can be set out very briefly as a series of propositions....from which follows...that argument does'nt have an end point of acknowledging diverse (incommensurable) language-games, paradigms, conceptual schemes, interpretive horizons, or whatever.

Of course one may argue, like Stanley Fish, that "theory" is an inconsequential activity; that it cannot do other than rhetorically endorse the views of some more-or less widespread "interpretive community"; and therefore that one might as well relinquish talk of reasons, principles, validating grounds etc. and settle for a straightforward [neo]-pragmatist appeal to what's good in the way of belief. [Cf. aesthetic intuition]. But his position looks plausible only if one starts out from something like the post-structuralist premise that discourse (or rhetoric) goes "all the way down", with the consequence...that henceforth all truth claims and subject-positions must be viewed as relative to the language-game in question, and thus as mere products of suasive contrivance of localized cultural consensus...Other philosophers...have likewise insisted on the close relation between ethical theory and practice, and on the fallacy involved in any thinking (like Hume's) that treats them as separate realms. For such thinking itself has consequences...it produces a generalized scepticism with regard to theory in whatever form, so that reason is regarded as a "slave of the passions", and ethics reduces to a matter of moral sentiment without need for any further (reasoned or principled) justification. One arrives at much the same position — vide Rorty — by pushing the linguistic turn to a point where high-toned talk about truth, justice, the "political responsibility of the intellectuals", and so forth shows up as just another transient contender for the role of "final vocabulary".

We are now better placed to understand why "theory" (or the version of it promoted by post-structuralists, Foucauldians, New Historicists and others) has fallen in so readily with this current of counter-enlightenment trend. By "decentering" the subject to the point of non-existence — reducing it to a mere position within a discourse or a figment of the humanist Imaginary — post-structuralism has removed the very possibility of reasoned, reflective, and principled ethical choice. From Foucault comes the Nietzsche-inspired (but ultimately Hobbesian) notion that "subjectivity" and "subjection" are synonymous terms; that all truth-claims — including ethico-political ideas of reason — are reducible to effects of power/knowledge; and hence that we might as well abandon any hope of achieving progress through the exercise of reason in its enlightened (critical-emancipatory) role. New Historicism ends up advocating much the same attitude, despite its methodological verve and its resourcefulness in conjuring novel relations between literary texts (canonical or otherwise) and all manner of so-called "extraneous" source material. Where it joins the current litany of wanhope is in pushing this "strong" intertextualist argument to the point of collapsing all generic distinctions between literary and other types of discourse, whether historical, philosophical, anthropological, or whatever. This way cultural solipsism lies.

[T]here remain some unresolved tensions in Foucault's late move toward a partial rapprochement with Kant. Chief among them is his desire — shared with postmodernists like Richard Rorty — to aestheticize ethics by construing "autonomy" as a matter of private self-fashioning, a project carried on (or so it would seem) in virtual isolation from what Kant conceived as the public realm of collectively articulated reasons, motives, and interests.