(Re)cognizing Postmodernity: Helps for Historians – of Science Especially

Abstract

Postmodernity, a historical era demarcated from modernity by a broad reversal in cultural presuppositions, is distinguished from postmodernism, an intellectual posture adopted by self-identified postmodernists early in postmodernity. Two principal features of postmodernity are addressed: first, the downgrading of science and the upgrading of technology in cultural rank--on which postmodernity and postmodernism are in accord; second, the displacement of the methodical, disinterested scientist, modernity's beau ideal, not by a fragmented subject as postmodernism claims, but by the single-minded entrepreneur, resourcefully pursuing his self-interest in disregard of all rules. The reversal in rank and role as between science and technology, setting in circa 1980, is a marker of the transition from modernity to postmodernity. That reversal is to be cognized primarily as rejection of rule-following, of proceeding methodically--'methodism' being the cultural perspective that uniquely distinguished modernity--but also as rejection of disinterestedness, the quality of mind especially highly esteemed in modernity. Postmodernity is constituted by this transvaluation of values, whose well-spring is the egocentric, transgressive (hence 'risk taking'), postmodern personality and its anti-social presumptions regarding personhood. Within the history of science itself there has been since circa 1980 a corresponding turn of scholarly attention away from science to technology, and a growing distaste for social perspectives, reflected, i.a., in the rejection of causalist 'influence' explanations in favor of voluntarist 'resource' explanations.