When quantum arrived, the logical positivists strove valiantly to incorporate it into their new rationalism. They didn’t get far, and the attempt was overwhelmed as new blows to rationalism kept coming. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was the next most influential culturally.
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Logical positivism finally disintegrated altogether in the 1960s. It failed not for one reason, but for dozens, each individually fatal. I know of no discussion enumerating them all. _The Eggplant_ covers more of them than any source I’ve found.https://meaningness.com/eggplant
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Logical positivism was the last serious attempt to rescue rationalism. All subsequent rationalisms have been unserious, in the sense that they don’t even try to address the well-known problems that wrecked the logical positivist program.
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No coincidence the postmodern era began shortly after logical positivism collapsed. Rationalism was the foundational ideology of modernity. Without that, the essential chain of justification broke, and the ship of modernity was wrecked on the stormy seas of meaning.pic.twitter.com/F0m2yM2M9u
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Replying to @Meaningness
Again I wonder if you have the causality incorrect. I think LEGIBILITY was the foundational ideology of modernity. Legibility could be justified as "rational" but wasn't actually. (cf Soviet economics...)
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Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
Of course governments, organizations, individuals always wanted some legibility in some aspects of life for the obvious reasons of control and understanding. Science/tech provided ways to demand more legibility, and suggested more things to be legible about.
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Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
But I think the thing that captured minds (govt, business, artistic) was the legibility, NOT rationality. That's why you get Le Corbusier giving us buildings that might look cool but are totally impractical.
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Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
In my story, then, postmodernism is not about the academy saying "rationalism doesn't work", it's about the academy saying "you claim you're demanding legibility for society's benefit, but I say you're doing it for your own benefit. (And btw legibility ISN'T always rational.)"
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Replying to @handleym99
You are missing the distinction between rationality and rationalism. Rationalism and “legibility” are more-or-less the same thing.
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Replying to @Meaningness
OK fair enough! I got ya. Do you have any thoughts as to why rationalism/legibility had its ~50 years of glory?
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The Eggplant explains why systematic rationality works when it does. (In short, because we do non-rational work to make it work.) Why it worked so well during modernity, then stopped, is complex and we probably won’t fully understand it for decades. But:https://meaningness.com/systematic-mode
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