:ok:

Thanks for clarifying; it's a very long time since I read 1984 and to be honest even having being reminded, I don't remember the aspidistras...

For example, postmodernism and its emphasis on deconstruction was about looking at ideologies but it could also be seen as a form of ideology in its attempts to break down those of past eras. — Jack Cummins

I think that this has gained more popularity nowdays: to break down past eras thinking.

The basic problem I guess with every "post" -ism is that it genuinely needs extremely well understanding of what is criticized, yet if the study (as usual) is just the conclusions, then the whole idea of just what is passed is blurred to some stereotypical simplification. The past thinking to be criticized isn't at all understood. And this breaks the link to the previous scientific understanding.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying is another, earlier novel, more biographical, concerning selling out to middle class values for the sake of comfort. The aspidistra is a symbol of lower-middle-class complacency... or for me, an

...indoor-irony-decoration. — Tom Storm

It was filmed as A Merry War.

Maybe Agent Smith and myself are ' post-truth' imaginary entities emerging in the surreal world of cyber language games, in a post-Wittenstein illusory wasteland, such as that which TS Eliot stumbled upon once upon a time. — Jack Cummins

Is that true?

See? You cannot escape truth.

Is not a very good argument. You can use lots of words in that place with inequivalent meanings:

Is that true?
Is that accurate?
Is that representative?
Is that right?
Is that a good interpretation?

You can recurse the procedure, asking if it's true that it's accurate, but the other concepts aren't necessarily boolean whereas truth, by stipulation, is. Accuracy is a continuum or qualitative assessment, representativeness is multifaceted, right has multiple overlapping senses and in some regard is broader than accuracy, and a decent chunk of what a good interpretation is depends upon the context (whereas truth, by stipulation, does not).

Right, thanks, I haven't ever heard of it...until now. For me the Aspidistra is an attractive understory plant; I'm not that big on it as an indoor plant, in fact I don't much like indoor plants.

You can use lots of words in that place with inequivalent meanings — fdrake

Sure you can. And then ask if each and every one is true...

But also there are non-boolean notions of truth.

Sure you can. And then ask if each and every one is true... — Banno

See the bit in my post about recursing the procedure.

But also there are non-boolean notions of truth. — Banno

AFAIK those notions require precise interpretations of their truth values. The words I used have meanings which are far less precise and sometimes are a cluster of overlapping but distinct themes. I doubt the required underlying logic is even polyvalent because that requires the demarcation of sense into a countable set of values; I can't see how you'd map the sense of "representative" or "right" to a subset of the set of non-overlapping senses (valences) in that manner.

Do you think that truth is something some people fear?

You can recurse the procedure, asking if it's true that it's accurate, — fdrake

You can equally ask if it's accurate that it's true. It seems that all those terms; true, accurate, representative, right, "a good interpretation" all presuppose an actuality against which they represent the general idea of assessment. If there were no actuality there would nothing against which truth, accuracy, representation, rightness, and interpretations could be assessed.

You can equally ask if it's accurate that it's true. It seems that all those terms; true, accurate, representative, right, "a good interpretation" all presuppose an actuality against which they represent the general idea of assessment. If there were no actuality there would nothing against which truth, accuracy, representation, rightness, and interpretations could be assessed. — Janus

That's about my criticism of the argument, yeah! Seems were on about the same page. Up to possible quibbles about whether actuality is only articulable with reference to the others. If you're using that as a proxy for the word use needing to "terminate" in a relation to things/events not words, I think I agree for the most part.

Well, that's a puzzling question. I suppose some folk do.

Putin, for one?

Looks to me like you are agreeing with the argument rather than disagreeing. Truth (accuracy, representation, rectitude, understanding) is were language meshes inescapably with the world. In so far as post truth denies the match between word and world, it fails.

Well, that's a puzzling question. I suppose some folk do. — Banno

I guess I was wondering if some of those plaintive cries that there is no truth is a type of commitment avoidance.

Mmm... I agree that the cluster of concepts is inescapable, but not that any particular one is. They also don't seem to be equivalent concepts as there's matters of degree, qualitative evaluations, one has only two distinct values (that's truth), might have many values, have fuzzy boundaries, and the cluster elements are partially articulable in terms of the others. Implying that an account which features one also needs to account for the others and their interdependence, as well as their fuzzy boundaries and differences. None more fundamental than the others.

:wink: Ah, a way of keeping one's aspidistra flying in the face of reality. Why not?

Hmm. I see truth as that around which the other terms orbit, since it fits the T-sentence while they are not so apt.

"The kettle is boiling" is accurate IFF the kettle is boiling?
"The kettle is boiling" is representative IFF the kettle is boiling?
"The kettle is boiling" is right IFF the kettle is boiling?
"The kettle is boiling" is a good interpretation IFF the kettle is boiling?

Each says a bit more than the truth. The truth is central in being simple.

Oh, as for comment on OP: the philosophical analysis of the truth of sentences does little to explain a social transition towards how narratives' relationship to truth has changed.

'What has happened in recent years is that the shrinking of the moral arena from 'We' to 'I' has converged with the new technologies of communication to a damaging effect. What was once a public respect for truth has been replaced by the noise of the social media...'He also introduces the postmodernist perspective and its querying of objective meaning. This is what makes the concept of 'truth' in itself questionable. — Jack Cummins

Two things, postmodernism, as much as it is a philosophical concept with one meaning, is a bunch of arguments and analyses about how concepts are unstable in interpretation. That claim itself is true or false, but difficult to check. That the discourse has presumptions (stabilities) might make various destabilisations (regarding meaning, single senses of words, access to uninterpreted reality) within it performatively contradictory. However performative contradictions are commonplace in reality, and still have social presence. The bunch of philosophers in that group are as varied as metaphysicians (Deleuze), psychoanalysts (Lacan), philosophers of language and interpretation (Derrida) and social theorists (Foucault).

The second, postmodernism didn't arise from nowhere. Philosophically it was prefigured by Kant; he was the trope codifier in the Western tradition of relativising judgement to humanities interpretations without relativising accuracy of those judgements with respect to what's judged (though Kant people will hate me for writing that). But socially, you have to remember the context was after the second world war, the rise and fall of social revolutions and the Soviets, a transition of economic paradigms, the death of socialism, the fragmentation of popular political projects like unions and the incredible rise of communication technologies and mass media. These things served to speed up communication, make society more interconnected, but at the same time totally destabilise any sense of order. You had simultaneous acceleration of the fragmentation of the social body at the same time as the proliferation of new representations of it (like movie theatres, personal TVs, broadcasting...). The world also became increasingly secular over this time period, making religious fixed references unable to re-stablise the growing chaos. Postmodernism itself is a product of this climate, and so inherits or reacts against these themes; the death of institutions, the reimagination of the human subject, the destabilisation of narrative, the growth of interconnection and the domination of representations over what they represent (movies more real than reality).

"post-truth" is an inevitable consequence of this fragmentation and accelerated communication; but you will probably have noticed that fixed reference points and stable subgroups do believe the same things. "post-truth" is not really an attack on truth; things still fall down due to gravity; but a result of how banjaxed people came to realise sharing common frameworks, and even the idea of common frameworks, actually are in practice. You can easily come to agreement about the trivial; things fall down;, but the chaos makes agreement over what matters most in life and what guides society largely a matter of ideology (which is oscillatory, destablised, isolated in echo chambers, containing internal contradictions, known to be historically conditioned etc etc). "post-truth" is a statement of the irrelevance of truth to the world's trajectory except on things which are either trivial to verify; things fall down when dropped, you need water to live...; or sufficiently contextually demarcated; scientific knowledge in a given paradigm, legal interpretations. And even then, the latter two can have its presumptions doubted; the validity/incommensurability of paradigms + the suspicion towards the narratives of experts and the class bias introduced into law by who gets to lobby for its changes.

The social role of truth changed. Or it was realised to never be as it seemed to be.

I'd argue those T sentences aren't really "iffs". Since they are either sufficient but not necessary (truth is a concept requiring an exact match of a statement to a value, so may imply accuracy but not the other way around), or necessary but not sufficient. EG, a good interpretation of the kettle boiling might be that it was boiled for tea, there's nothing about an interpretation which means it has to be identified solely with the event referenced by the statement/its truth maker or equivalent event, even if it's granted that the equivalent event must have happened for the interpretation to be good.

You also picked a very easy example. Try parsing it for the original post. I'm not really interested in another discussion about whether the kettle is boiling and its T-sentence. I would be interested in you trying to address the argument regarding how the concepts can be recursed and thus are inequivalent by your original argument. In addition, you made each concept in the cluster all 'iff' each other with your repeated T-schema; the kettle is boiling is accurate iff it is a good interpretation; which a sneaky way to reject a claim of inequivalence without arguing against it.

I would also be interested in you trying to parse the post you originally responded to with this argument. Pick the first path or the second, otherwise I'm out.

I read that twice, but don't see what it is you want. Ellipsis is a bugger.

Of course, they are not "iff"s. Iffs are truth-functional, not accuracy-functional...

For me the Aspidistra is an attractive understory plant; I'm not that big on it as an indoor plant, in fact I don't much like indoor plants. — Janus

It was known as the 'cast iron plant' because it would survive the darkness and neglect of London rooming houses. It is Orwell's symbol of a struggling lower middle class, people who valued education and class division but remained poor, surviving on pride and a certain snobbishness to distinguish them from labourers and servants. The aspidistra is the only concession to beauty in dingy houses and it clings to life as the people clung to their self-image of respectability. As often with Orwell, it is difficult sometimes to tell whether he is sneering or compassionate - some fascinating combination of the two.

I was aware of the 'cast-iron-plant' persona, and tendency to inhabits dark lobbies, of the Aspidistra, but the rest is novel. some interesting thoughts.

"post-truth" is an inevitable consequence of this fragmentation and accelerated communication; but you will probably have noticed that fixed reference points and stable subgroups do believe the same things. "post-truth" is not really an attack on truth; things still fall down due to gravity; but a result of how banjaxed people came to realise sharing common frameworks, and even the idea of common frameworks, actually are in practice. You can easily come to agreement about the trivial; things fall down;, but the chaos makes agreement over what matters most in life and what guides society largely a matter of ideology (which is oscillatory, destablised, isolated in echo chambers, containing internal contradictions, known to be historically conditioned etc etc). "post-truth" is a statement of the irrelevance of truth to the world's trajectory except on things which are either trivial to verify; things fall down when dropped, you need water to live...; or sufficiently contextually demarcated; scientific knowledge in a given paradigm, legal interpretations. And even then, the latter two can have its presumptions doubted; the validity/incommensurability of paradigms + the suspicion towards the narratives of experts and the class bias introduced into law by who gets to lobby for its changes.

The social role of truth changed. Or it was realised to never be as it seemed to be. — fdrake

Thanks. I enjoyed this acute summary of postmodernism.

Philosophically it was prefigured by Kant; he was the trope codifier in the Western tradition of relativising judgement to humanities interpretations without relativising accuracy of those judgements with respect to what's judged — fdrake

Can you provide a few points more on this?

Two things, postmodernism, as much as it is a philosophical concept with one meaning, is a bunch of arguments and analyses about how concepts are unstable in interpretation. That claim itself is true or false, but difficult to check. — fdrake

I'm interested that you say this is difficult to check. Are you saying it is hard to tell if there are multiple interpretations regarding a given concept?

I am not sure that it is possible to escape the issue of 'truth' if one has any serious interest in philosophy. If anything, relativism and potential post-truth create a maze of possibilities and make finding it a hard task.

Postmodernism definitely makes concepts unstable. It involves some kind of collapse of meaning and fragmentation. It may lead to the deeper understanding of the human construction of values. In many ways, the idea of post-truth does give rise to the question of whether there is any possibility of truth amidst so many untruths and lies. This is the extreme though and even though the construct of post-truth makes all verification of truth difficult it may lead to deeper reflection about the way in which any valid ideas are established. It could be a possibility for a more careful and critical formation of knowledge, based on the underlying approach of sceptical thinking about ideas, facts and objective knowledge.

I'm interested that you say this is difficult to check. Are you saying it is hard to tell if there are multiple interpretations regarding a given concept? — Tom Storm

It was a nod to attacks on relativising narratives requiring a fixed background to articulate the relativising critique in. How do you even start doing anything without some conceptual framing device or shared standard of intelligibility?

Can you provide a few points more on this? — Tom Storm

Broadly speaking, Kant thought humans have concepts which configure our interpretations of the world. Without them, interpretation would be impossible. These are innate ideas like space and time, if we didn't have those we couldn't make sense of any experience.. To stress (again very roughly) Kant thought some of them were innate. Postmodern thinkers historicised that mechanism which shaped information which goes into interpretations, meaning that historical context can come to literally change how people interpret the world at a fundamental level. You move from the structure of the intellect/cognition structuring experience to that and historical and social circumstances. Foucault is particularly notable for their analysis of institutions and "epistemes", which are roughly epochs of knowledge and their social institutions.

Regardless of these commitments, people still experience stuff in common ways, and the underlying reality itself doesn't need to change much between interpretive paradigms. Two different methods of thinking bout physics can still agree on gravity, even if there is no context above and beyond the development of science to judge those claims (and thus no "context independent justification". These themes are different over all the thinkers AFAIK, but there's some commonality in a theme of contextualising judgements and tracking epochal shifts in how humans interpret things. You can't guarantee an interpretive paradigm is true (except from the vantage of another paradigm), but you can agree on what moves are valid and produce truths within it. In that regard there is a distinction between constraints on entity interpretation and how those entities manifest within the the context - for Kant the context of manifestation is the cognitive (ideal) structure of our minds (roughly), for eg Foucault it's relative to social institutions, for Derrida it's relative to (destabilising potentials in) discourses...

Nice. Thank you

It was a nod to attacks on relativising narratives requiring a fixed background to articulate the relativising critique in. How do you even start doing anything without some conceptual framing device or shared standard of intelligibility? — fdrake

This frequently intrigues me. I guess it is difficult to contextualize a thing without a conception of its opposite. I bet there's a clever-arsed way out of this, or around it.

Are you saying it is hard to tell if there are multiple interpretations regarding a given concept? — Tom Storm

I hope you don't mind me interjecting here. The way I read it @fdrake seemed to be suggesting that there might be a true interpretation among all the others, but that it is difficult to tell which one is true or even if there is one that is true; which means it is difficult to tell if concepts are unstable in interpretation or not.

That's a nice point. I often think that if there is a true interpretation but it is impossible to identify in practice, is this almost like saying there's 'no truth', or at least that the true interpretation remains as inaccessible to us as Kant's noumena and therefore almost moot?

and how those entities manifest within the the context - for Kant the context of manifestation is the cognitive (ideal) structure of our minds (roughly), for eg Foucault it's relative to social institutions, for Derrida it's relative to discourses — fdrake

For Derrida it’s relative to time . The same self is already an other with respect to itself moment to moment.

people still experience stuff in common ways, and the underlying reality itself doesn't need to change much between interpretive paradigms. Two different methods of thinking bout physics can still agree on gravity, even if there is no context above and beyond the development of science to judge those claims (and thus no "context independent justification". — fdrake

Paradigm shifts in physics aren’t a good example of worldview differences because natural science makes use of a conventionalized, abstractive empirical vocabulary that is designed to mask individual differences in outlook and interpretation. The political, religious , philosophical and ethical realms are more sensitive to differences in worldview , which is why they often shown profound gaps in interpretation of fundamental features of the world.