I have only made it part-way through the interview, and am not really qualified to comment because my own knowledge of philosophy is about as deep as my knowledge of brain surgery. I haven't done much in the way of fancy book larnin' myself.
But I do have to say that post-modernism seems to be a concept that I arrived at on my own and never had a name for previously. A while back in another thread I was talking about the idea that objective news coverage doesn't (and can't) exist because a complete factual description of reality is too much to fit into a broadcast, or a newspaper, or a website. Those things can show you a portion of reality, but the portion they show is somebody's idea of what is most important and disregards everything else. You get a brief look at some politics items, some local traffic news, some local weather, a few world events, some stock market news, some sports items, and a human interest story. That's not everything that happened, that's some editor's idea of what they think their viewers will find most useful. Trying to describe reality is unavoidably a situation like the story about the three blind men trying to describe an elephant by touch.
And that problem isn't limited to a news show trying to explain the world in 30 minutes. That problem is our selves trying to understand a universe that we can barely perceive at all. Our attempt to understand our world or anything in it is like the three blind men trying to describe an elephant. We see only a tiny portion of our world. We see what's happening on the street we're walking down, but we don't see what's happening the next street over. We read one news source but disregard another. We can only see a tiny piece of the world, and which tiny piece we choose to look at is a result of the choices we make.
And even our perception of the piece we choose to look at is edited by our own biases. Two people can look at the exact same news story and come to different conclusions about its significance because our biases inform us as to which facts are most important. Our brain itself isn't a perfect rational instrument. Our perception and our choices at any given time can be influenced by anything from our the amount of sleep we've had and our blood sugar level and how much we've had to drink, to some terrible experience you had back in high school that your current situation reminds you of.
There is an objective reality, but all of us are looking at it through a distorted lens that we have constructed ourselves. You experience reality through your own set of filters and biases and even biological differences that make your experience different from the person next to you. The viewer's own lens is an unavoidable part of what they're seeing. In a sense, we ourselves create the way we experience things. I think that's an unavoidable conclusion. And if my understanding of the term is correct, that's the basic idea behind post-modernism.
-k
**** hell, Kimmy. This is a better understanding of post-modernism than most professors have. Your view on it is exactly what I keep trying to tell my colleagues who seem to think post-modernism means that there is literally "no objective reality." In way, they can say that because we only understand reality through our perception and knowledge/understanding, which are extremely limited. However, it's not a useful shorthand, in my opinion, when people confuse that to mean that there's no such thing as
facts or that rationality and reason are moot.
Your description is exactly what the purpose of post-modernism was. Modernism was the idea that only privileged individuals, who got to be objective observers, could define the contexts and situations that other people are in. The problem in the social sciences and humanities is that this was usually reserved for those who could even have a place in academia in the mid-20th century in the first place, ie, wealthy, white men. Black kids couldn't even go to college. Some women worked outside the home, most took on the responsibility of raising children--very few went to college. So what you're left with is a bunch of rich, white dudes talking about society and defining the experience of others. Needless to say, it's from a very specific perspective.
So post-modernism does not completely reject objectivity. What it's supposed to do is make people aware of the subjectivity in their narratives and their research methods. Take interviewing respondents as case in point. Some believed when you interview a respondent, their answers are wholly theirs and objective data. What post-modernism highlights is the fact that the interviewer and interviewee
create knowledge together through the interview process. An interview is a social interaction with actions and reactions. The interviewer's very presence changes the interview process. How they word questions, the affect they have on their faces, the emphasis they place on words--these all change how the interviewee responds. Further still, when the researcher drafts up their report, what they choose to emphasize, what theoretical framework informs their interpretation, how they analyze the interview, these are all inputs into the final product. There is no such thing as completely distanced objectivity here.
Now that's not to say that things are entirely and radically subjective either. It's about recognizing subjectivity and understanding its influences and effects, while trying to maintain the description of the experience or social phenomena you're looking to understand or explore. The value of the researcher is the theoretical contexts that they're able to situate these experiences in to tell a broader, more generalizable story. Post-modernism just begs the social sciences and humanities to recognize the element of subjectivity, in contrast to the modernism era where absolute objectivity was believed to be possible.