I always liked the word enlightenment as it brings to mind images of heroic figures from the history of science who firmly believed that science progressed through individual discoveries that would contribute to an accumulating body of knowledge that gets closer and closer to the way the world really works.

This fundamental faith in science has been under attack by a group of people (e.g., social scientists, philosophers) who are commonly referred as postmodernists. Perhaps Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) has been the most influential cornerstone of the postmodern skepticism about scientific truth. Kuhn argued that ideas that seemed to derive from scientific minds were actually shaped by, and dependent on, paradigms of knowledge that were socially constructed and enforced through a group consensus. Kuhn insisted that without the focusing effect of agreed-upon constructs, investigators would not be able to engage in research. A fully “open” mind would not be able to focus on details necessary to engage in “normal” science, that is, testing specific propositions derived from theory or scientific paradigm. He further asserted (and showed with natural science examples) that communities of scientists, like ideological or religious communities, were organized by certain traditions that periodically came under strain when new problems arose that could not be explained by old ideas. According to Kuhn, these competing explanations or ideas were not always discarded or revised (sometimes sweepingly) by mere intellectual endeavors; the leaders of scientific communities wielded power in support of their positions just as political leaders do.

Postmodernist discourse is precisely the discourse that denies the scientific inquiry and its methods in the attainment of truth. This is a direct assault to modernism’s faith in science, which assumes that knowledge increases over time and that such accumulation constitutes continuous progress toward deeper and deeper truths. Postmodernists argue that because there is not a truth that exists apart from the ideological interests of humans, discontinuity of knowledge is the norm, and a permanent pluralism of cultures is the only real truth that humans must continually face.

In fact, postmodernist discourse rejects the notion of “objective reality” and claims that no world view is uniquely determined by empirical or sense data. All of our understandings are contextually embedded, interpersonally forged, and necessarily limited. Any notion of “truth” then becomes a matter of consensus among informed and sophisticated constructors, not a correspondence with an objective reality.

Of course, Kuhn’s analysis and other postmodernist views are heavily critiqued and ridiculed on the basis that they took seriously the existence of things, events, structures, people, meanings, and so forth in the environment as independent in some way from their experience with them. And they regarded society, institutions, feelings, intelligence, poverty, disability and so on as being just as “real” as your eyes reading this text and the chair you sit on.

The debates between modernist and postmodernists are of concern to scientists who are busy with their daily endeavors. Yet these deliberations require a good understanding not only for those who plan a career in scientific writing but also for individuals who wish to make a strong case against a postmodernist attack that scoffs at the scientific enterprise.

Reference:
Patton, M. Q. (2002). Variety in qualitative inquiry. In Qualitative research and evaluation methods. (pp. 75–142). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Reprinted by Permission of Sage Publications, Inc.