Scientific “Fact-Fictions”

Abstract

The death of many important ideas has been proclaimed in our century — the death of God, Man, the Self, the Imagination, and the Author. More recently, a new proclamation has been issued: Jean-Francois Lyotard has come to fell the “grand narratives.” According to Lyotard, a French philosopher and social thinker, postmodernism is to be defined as “incredulity towards metanarratives.”1 In Lyotard’s influential book, The Post-Modern Condition (1979), the death knell of grand narratives was still largely confined to the grand narratives of the Enlightenment already called in question by Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1942), narratives of reason, progress, and the liberty of humankind.