Rex Kerr
1 min readApr 26, 2024

--

This is largely because the postmodern ideas of human condition are badly out of date and were never particularly well-validated.

Also, most of the contemporary insight into the human condition has, in fact, come with a substantial input from psychology and very little from any of the other fields that you mention.

For instance, it is largely psychology and related fields like cognitive science that have moved from pointless evidence-free arguments about human rationality and irrationality to demonstration of different modes of cognition (Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman provides a good introduction). Endless philosophical puzzles about morality have finally gotten some constraints thanks to experiments about the nature of morality (e.g. as described in The Righteous Mind by Haidt).

If the humanities, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy are still stuck on postmodernism while psychology is moving on and actually discovering things (and admitting that, yeah, actually, discovering things is kind of the point, and being lost in incommensurate language games was never a good model of how things work and certainly isn't a place we want to be in), that's hardly to psychology's detriment.

In many ways, psychology is growing up and leaving behind its childhood of just-so stories and untestable postulates. That means it's slow going, because unconstrained fantasy is way faster than carefully documented evidence. But it also means that it is situated to make cumulative progress and actually advance instead of rearranging the deck chairs for the umpteenth time. (Albeit with the hazard of being pressed into service to sell ads or products in ever more insidious ways.)

--

--

Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

No responses yet