Postmodernism is innovative

The argument

Postmodernists focus on challenging social constructs. In their attempt to do away with mainstream theories and conclusions and by focusing on the less trodden path, the postmodernists can produce ground-breaking results. The connection between the method and the results is direct: established theories have already been applied to the obvious material, so a researcher working within them is largely refining what is known, while one who declines them is looking where the answers have not yet been settled. Postmodernists argue that nothing is objective and that our perception is always in the way of seeing the objective truth. When it comes to humanities research, the postmodernists focus on the "fringe" that may bring to public attention voices and behaviors that have been previously marginalized or not given enough attention. By doing so, they allow for differing perspectives and ideas. This is where the scepticism about objectivity earns its keep as a research strategy: if what counts as the central case has been decided by particular people in particular circumstances, then the material excluded from it is not marginal in itself, merely marginal to that decision. Postmodernists emphasize the importance of power relations and attempt to deconstruct them. By implementing postmodernist ideas into research, one can more easily find the biases and beliefs that could be impacting the information, history, or the author. Asking who was in a position to produce a source, and what that position allowed or prevented them from recording, turns the provenance of evidence into evidence in its own right. It allows one to refocus and challenge what others point to as objective truth. Because postmodernism opens material and questions that other philosophies leave untouched, it is an innovative research philosophy.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics of postmodernism point to some of these premises as a weakness of this philosophy. If nothing is objective, then we are only left with subjective ideas. It leaves one in a sort of void, with no endpoint and no objective truth. Some see postmodernism as synonymous with nihilism, in that, life is meaningless. There is no point or logic behind life or history. Critics also say that if deconstruction is the point of postmodernism, then there is nothing to do but deconstruct, again leaving one without a conclusion or definitive answer. It becomes very cyclical: if there is nothing than subjective opinions in history and academia, what you produce is also subjective opinion and not “truth.”

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Attending to marginalised voices and questioning received accounts is not distinctive of postmodernism: social history, feminist scholarship, oral history and subaltern studies all do it, several on explicitly realist premises. "Ground-breaking results" is also asserted without a single example of a result. [Rejecting P2] The two halves of this premise pull apart. If nothing is objective, the claim that a bias has been correctly identified is itself only a perspective, and the deconstruction has no more standing than what it deconstructs — the counter-argument's point, and one the argument does not answer. The conclusion also misses the question, which asks for the best research philosophy: showing that an approach is innovative says nothing about whether it produces reliable knowledge, which is the ground the sibling positions are competing on.

Further reading

https://www.intgrty.co.za/2016/09/20/research-paradigms-postmodernism/