What is the ongoing philosophical debate...?

Question

...between those in the positivist camp and those in the post-modernist camp regarding the nature of truth and reality?

Answer 1

Positivists are realists about the physical world who believe that all knowledge comes from perception, so they don't have much respect for intuition, mysticism, contextualism, etc. Basically they think that the world is independent of the mind and that a thing just is what it is independent of any context it might happen to be in. Overall, positivism is not very popular in current philosophy; it pretty much died out a couple of decades ago, although many scientists and members of the general public are probably still positivists, whether they realize it or not. Modern day analytic philosophers still tend to be realists, and they still avoid mysticism, but most are willing to grant that context might play an important role in the essence of some things, and they are not always dead-set against intuition as a source of knowledge (although most are still skeptical of its value). A big problem with positivism is that it got mixed up with verificationism, and thus a lot of philosophers were claiming that a lot of metaphysical puzzles were not valid questions – they saw them as simply meaningless. Most people today think this is too extreme. Many people do, however, still think of perception in terms of subjects who form representations of the world in their minds – so what we immediately experience is our representation of the world rather than the world itself. Thus the mind/body problem and skepticism of the external world are on-going problems for analytic philosophy.

The post-modernists take more of a phenomenological approach. They think the notion of a mind-independent reality is deeply confused, and they generally look for ways to overcome the standard subject/object duality inherent in most metaphysics and analytic philosophy. They don't see perception in terms of a subject who experiences a representation of the world, rather, they see human beings as the sort of beings who experience the WORLD (not representations of the world), and the world is fundamentally a web of meaningful relationships, and context is fundamental to every meaning, so what a thing actually is depends on its context. They tend to see meaning as intrinsic to the world/reality, so there is no "hard problem of consciousness" (a phrase recently made popular by David Chalmers) – the problem of trying to explain how mental phenomena can be rooted in mind-independent reality.

Positivists (and their modern-day descendents) would wonder how you can coherently explain direct experience of the world (given what we know about the influence of sensory information on brain states, etc.), and the post-modernists wonder how anyone can rationally defend the idea that humans have some sort of epistemological access to non-contextual "mind-independent" reality – to them this seems fundamentally confused and contradictory.

Answer 2

I do not realize why from the factor of view of the winner on your instance the 'accident' is so great. You appear to be making use of the equal argument that Home Office pathologist Roy Meadows used to the jury (and used to be allowed to escape with) in a couple of cot-demise circumstances. His argument used to be practically that the hazard of 2 cot-deaths within the equal loved ones used to be not up to the hazard of successful the National Lottery. For a few rationale the defence did not name a statistician to give an explanation for that humans DO win the National Lottery, and tragedy can strike with the equal likelihood as well fortune. That prompted a couple of blameless, grieving mom and dad to be gaoled, and no less than two suicides. If I have overlooked your factor, please inform me.

Answer 3

The debate is definitely ongoing.