Abstract
The Paradox of PostmodernismModernism is, roughly speaking, the Enlightenment belief in a single unified rational perspective, founded on some indubitable evidence given in human experience – either innate conceptsà laDescartes and the rationalists, or sensationsà laLocke and the empiricists – and elaborated according to reliable logical rules. This view was first attacked for its ‘foundationalism.’ Philosophers, such as Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, denied that there is any indubitable given upon which truth can be founded. There is no experience, no testimony of the senses or of reason that blazons forth the undeniable truth. Rather the ‘given’ is, so to speak, constructed - which is to say, not given to us, but made by us. Some experience or other evidence is interpreted as this or that with this or that epistemological status, on the basis of beliefs that one already has about, say, space or mathematics or sense perception or the nature of what is ultimately real. Postmodernism is an intensification of this attack, with a distinctive political spin.