This argument assumes that people are most drawn to social epistemologies/theories/thinking that mirrors/corresponds to their own experience. For example, if I grow up in a fragmented world without one main center, belong to many different communities, etc. I will be more likely to adopt postmodernism as my world view than, say, modernism. In our reading group on Friday we wondered how plausible this argument is. Certainly, there is a correlation of a person’s life experience and their epistemology. However, is it not also possible that children growing up in a postmodern fragmented world [as Deibert rightly emphasizes, epistemological changes are intergenerational processes] will abandon postmodernism because it offers them no answers? Because it just mirrors their own experience? Is it not often in times of chaos and fragmentation (post-WW I Germany, for example, or the former Sowjet Union right now) that we tend to yearn for concrete answers and strong leaders (strong centers of power)? And is there not a group of thinkers (I don’t remember their names) who have criticized postmodernist thought for its potential for tyranny?

The consensus in the reading group was that something is too simple in Deibert’s argument, or that something bothers us, but we could not quite figure it out.

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