Question

I just finished reading your book Truth and Unstable. It is the first book of yours that I’ve read, and in fact the first book I’ve ever read that deals directly with logic. Throughout reading it I felt that I learned a great deal, was enriched, and enjoyed it very much. As they say: “You awakened me from my dogmatic slumber.” Toward the end of the book, a few thoughts came up for me, and I would appreciate your response to them if you can:
 

1.  I’m turning to you because of the critique you wrote against postmodernism: reading the book up through the final section was extremely enjoyable, but from that section on I began to feel personally attacked, as someone who sees postmodernism as the only alternative to fundamentalism, and actually understands postmodernism as something similar to what you call syntheticity: postmodernists hold that there is no certain truth. At the same time, one must balance between ideas, values, and opinions regarding all of these. Since there is no truth, we allow multiculturalism and everyone has the possibility of living his life in the spirit of Mill’s harm principle, that is, maximum freedom for each person so long as it does not harm others. Science in the postmodern world strives for truth, only it will never arrive at it, and all that can be done is to refute theories. A theory that does not meet Popper’s principle of falsifiability is not scientific, and science should ignore it or not find much value in it. I think this is how most people understand postmodernism, and not as an endless argument in which nobody is right.
2. You demonstrated the principle of syntheticity using belief in God. You explained that from your perspective the existence of God is a fact similar to the existence of gravity. You are a physicist, so I’m worried about falling into a gravity trap, but let’s say we compare the existence of God to the fact that the earth is round. You claim that your knowledge is identical in both cases, since it is based on intuition. Yet the fact that the earth is round has a great deal of empirical support, including photographs taken from space that literally show the shape of the earth. By contrast, the existence of God does not really have any convincing proof, aside from the fact that it says in the Torah that there is a God, and there is much evidence that there is no God (even though the idea does not really stand up to the principle of falsifiability, unlike the earth’s shape). You use intuition, at least as I understood it, in a way that can also come off as a caricature: I grasp something in my consciousness, and therefore it is true for me. There is no difference between such a truth and the shape of the earth. Maybe one could say that intuition is “intellectual laziness” rather than analyticity (you didn’t write this, but I intuitively felt there was a certain accusation against the Left and liberalism. Maybe it’s only in my head, but on the other hand, intuitively that’s how I understood your words, and therefore they are true!).
3. In order to make postmodernism look absurd, you supplied the axiom that “murder is abhorrent,” and if one cannot produce real agreement even about that, then postmodernism collapses into a caricature of itself. However, in my opinion you ignored the fact that the term “murder” itself already contains a value judgment: not every killing is murder. Some will define a given killing as murder, and some will not. If we have defined a killing as murder, that means we have already applied a judgment to the act and classified it as morally invalid. The case of Elor Azaria, for example, falls under every definition in the Penal Code as outright murder, yet he was tried for manslaughter and served half a year in prison. Beyond that, many saw him as a hero, not as a despicable murderer. I think it was murder as I perceive it in my consciousness, but others have a different consciousness and a different understanding of the act. There is no way to prove to them with signs and wonders that they are wrong, and therefore in a certain sense they are not wrong.

 
I hope you don’t feel that I don’t know enough to be worthy of this conversation. I know I am not as educated as you, but I still read your book very carefully and understood it as much as my mind allowed me to. Hope you’ll answer. Have a good rest of the week.
Best regards,