elanya

I'd have to say that I've put a great deal of thought into it. My experiences were heavily conditioned by the authoritarian postmodernism present at my undergraduate institution, where we were all subject to brainwashing in advanced theory courses where agreement with the postmodern worldview was mandatory. I don't think I need to point out the irony in that.

Fundamentally, I am and always have been an empiricist. I *like* observables, and I find the internalist, anti-evidentiary approach of many pomos and postprocessualists (Shanks and Tilley, anyone?) to be very wrongheaded. I also hold that the only well-supported hypothesis for how humans came to be what they are is biological evolution. If biological evolution is true, then to some extent, our perceptual mechanisms must reflect reality. The question of *where* they go wrong, how and why - ranging from simple ones like perceptual illusions to complex ones like ideology - is very interesting! But it too has to be studied empirically - this is the entire basis of Foucault's research into early modern power structures, or Latour's on the nature of the modern scientific enterprise.