Thoughts on the book "Truth and Unstable"

Shalom Rabbi Avraham

I read your book "Truth and Unstable" and enjoyed it. I thank you for the systematic, enlightening, and in-depth analysis. The book is also popular among our students in the yeshiva, and for many of them it constitutes an important voice in constructing their worldview.
The book seeks to deal with the postmodern critique [while explaining fundamentalism as its opposite]. While I identify with the book's principled conclusion, I think it does not touch on some of the central and difficult claims that postmodernism raises. And in this sense it solves an important problem, but not the main problem at hand.

I will expand.

Brief introduction:
Of course, the term postmodernism is a verbal invention. Having become an intellectual fad, it has also become a subject of debate about what exactly it means. Like many intellectual fads, and perhaps more so than usual, it also includes a great deal of gibberish, and claims that are more of a curiosity than anything serious. But it is my duty to seek out and confront the serious claims, and not to resolve myself by ridiculing the unserious positions. I would like to argue that postmodernism has a very serious claim that your book does not contest.

The central argument of the book is that the error of postmodernism stems from the expectation of proven and certain truth. This expectation stems from a misunderstanding of rational thinking. After explaining the essential limitations of analytical thinking, you turn to offer a synthetic alternative, based on probability and intuition, which you explain in the last part of the book.
But this is precisely where the argument of postmodernism comes in – that it is this intuition that is deeply influenced by cultural connections.
Between rationalism and empiricism, this is not a rationalist argument but an empirical one. It does not make a philosophical claim about the possibility or impossibility of truth, but deals with the empirical study of the ways in which human consciousness and cognition are created. Historical, sociological, and psychological research seeks to point to the influence of the period (history), the environment (sociology), and the drives (psychology) on the most basic ways in which our intuitions are created, and therefore to argue that they are culture-dependent. According to this position, the rational explanation of our attitudes is a posteriori rationalization – the unique human ability to give a thousand and one explanations for its preconceived intuitions (as Nietzsche wrote, philosophers are nothing but slick lawyers of their prejudices)

If we return to the book's conceptual system. The demonstration of synthetic thinking in the book takes a few very, very simple cases, and seeks to demonstrate the way in which it is possible to rationally move from data to conclusions, which are, while uncertain, but probable. But this description lacks a dramatic element in synthetic judgment: proportionality and estimation . Since this is not absolute evidence, a constant assessment of their weight is required (if Shimon failed in literature and Reuven succeeded, this gives a certain prediction about their success in the essay test, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on it). Estimation is a central component of the synthetic process. Such an estimate accompanies almost every human hesitation – between different values, between different possibilities in reality, etc. But how is the estimate created? What is the correct weight for different evidence? Which consideration should be given more validity? This is a critical question in the course of the thinking you proposed, and you only provide an answer to it in very simple cases. According to postmodernism, this will be precisely the point where cultural and personal biases will come in and tip the scales.

From another angle:
Logicians usually use simple examples to demonstrate, and thus also to prove, that inference is independent of culture. The assumption is that, as in the natural sciences, complex reality can be decomposed into simple rules, and the complex is nothing more than those simple rules when they act together. However, it is precisely the synthetic option that can clarify why this is not a correct description of human thinking. As mentioned, already at the basic stages there is an element of judgment that is necessary to decide on the proportionality of different intuitions. The weight of this element increases as we move to increasingly complex systems, until it becomes the central element of the decision. The argument can be formulated as follows: in complex systems, the degree of "disturbance" of proportional judgment is so broad that the unstable dimension determines the stable dimension.
When we talk about the operation of laws in nature, we are talking about a "dead" action – the law works because it is such. Therefore, even if it is very complex, it will work because each part of the system does its job. However, when it comes to human consciousness, there is great weight in forgetting the details in the transition to generalizations. That is, when the system becomes complex, it undergoes simplification and abstraction by thought, in order to create something that can be mastered. In this process, the initial insights of the details disappear from consideration, and are integrated into a generalization that is never within the realm of possibility. The foundation stones are no longer active. In scientific thinking, the assumption is that there is no need for the foundation stones, just as after the formulation of the law of gravity, there is no need for the individual cases of falling apples, but since we have already agreed that the first generalization is "true and unstable" – not a certain generalization but a probable generalization, then in connecting different generalizations the weight of the details can change, and therefore their forgetting plays a critical role.

This is significant, because it leaves an increasing amount of room for "intuition" not only as an assessment that a straight line passes between two lines, but also for judgment of human situations, value assessment, and so on. While in the limited logical system there may be components that "impose themselves" on psychology, in the complex systems they almost disappear, and psychology/sociology celebrates.

In this sense, I would not attribute your discussion of the expectation of truth to certainty to postmodernism, but rather to modern philosophy. It can be presented as an extensive confrontation with Descartes' first logic in "Syllogisms," which demands an absolute category of truth: "I must carefully avoid giving credence to things that are not certain and beyond all doubt." In my understanding, the novelty of postmodernism's skepticism is that it does not stem from any assertion whatsoever about the philosophical meaning of "truth" (truth is certain or not, possible or not), but from an empirical assertion (originating in the social sciences) that the glasses through which we look are so thick and so smeared with certain colors that talking about what lies behind them is worthless and, above all, unconscious.

Thank you very much again.
Regards