Objectivism next to
Objectivism vs Postmodernism: the fight over whether truth is available
This one is usually argued by people who have not read it against people who will not state it. Here is the serious version, which is not the claim that nothing is true.
Starts atEpistemology. And it is the same break as Kant, relocated. He put the barrier inside the individual mind; this puts it in language, culture and power. Everything about ethics and politics downstream of it follows from that one relocation.
What it actually says
Knowledge is not a mirror. What a society counts as true is produced inside institutions that have interests, and those interests shape what gets asked, what gets funded, what gets published and what gets called reasonable. Claims to objectivity are therefore suspect: they present a position as the view from nowhere while it is in fact the view from somewhere, and the somewhere is wherever the power sits.
Foucault is the sharpest version. Knowledge and power are not separable; every regime of truth has an apparatus behind it deciding who is qualified to speak. Lyotard gives the slogan: an incredulity toward grand narratives, the big stories that claim to explain history and to be heading somewhere. Derrida supplies the technique, reading a text against itself until the oppositions it depends on come apart.
Critical theory in its current form applies this to categories people live inside. Race, gender, sexuality, disability and class are treated as socially constructed rather than found, and the work is to show how a construction that looks natural was assembled and whom it serves.
It is not, in its serious form, the claim that nothing is true. It is the claim that our access to truth runs through language, categories and institutions we did not choose, and that pretending otherwise is itself a move in a game.
Where it is right
It is right that inquiry happens inside institutions and that institutions have interests. Which questions get money is a political fact, and it affects what is known. Anyone who has watched a field defend a consensus knows this is not paranoia.
Categories carry assumptions. A great many categories that were called natural turned out to be arrangements, and the people arguing they were natural were the people doing well out of them, in case after case.
Language is not transparent either. Framing changes what a sentence does, and the choice of framing is rarely innocent.
And its founding suspicion has a specific historical cause worth respecting: the twentieth century produced systems that murdered people at scale while claiming the authority of reason and history. Wanting to know what went wrong with those claims is not frivolous.
Where it collides: the critique needs the thing it denies
To say that a claim to objectivity is in fact an exercise of power is to make a claim about what is the case — and to expect it to be accepted because it is true, rather than because of who is saying it. If there is no objective standard, there is no ground to object from either, and the whole enterprise loses the right to be believed by anyone not already inside it. This is not a debating trick. It is the reason the position cannot state itself without making an exception of itself.
The relocation
Two centuries apart, one move. What changes is only where the barrier is said to sit.
That is the deeper problem: where the position comes from. Kant said the mind's own structure conditions everything we can know, so the world as it is stays out of reach. Two centuries later the structure has been relocated from the individual mind to language, culture and power — but the move is the same one. Our means of knowing is treated as the barrier to knowing. Postmodernism is not a fresh start; it is that step carried out fully.
And the practical result is worth naming. If every claim is a power move, then the only question left about an argument is who is making it, and that is a licence rather than a liberation. Whoever ends up strongest gets to say what counts. The position was built to protect people from arbitrary authority, and it removes the one tool that has ever worked against it.
The suspicion that started it is legitimate and the history behind it is real. Nobody should answer this by pretending institutions are neutral.
The answer is that the cure for a biased claim is a better-grounded one, and you cannot reach for that after arguing there is no ground.
Chapter 4, and it is in the app
The answer runs to one line, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
You have had the whole comparison: what it says, where it is right, and where it breaks. The fourth chapter is the resolution and the journal prompt that follows from it, and it lives inside Confront alongside eighteen more — Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, utilitarianism, existentialism, effective altruism, the wellness industry — each written under the same rule: state the other side well enough that somebody who holds it would nod.
The Stoicism comparison is free, in the app and on this site, if you want to read a whole one first.
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