ABSTRACT
Postmodernism has been around for some decades now, but it was not until the 1980s that social scientists started paying this intellectual current close attention. Reasons for such a tardy response are several, starting with the fact that postmodernists do not look kindly at the social sciences and question the very possibility of theoretical knowledge. The continuity between postmodern and pragmatist epistemologies breaks, however, at a point where postmodernists mount their attack on human agency. Pragmatists are known to cross-reference scientific and democratic procedures, and they do so because they see in the operations of scientific community a model for "detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural". Postmodernists paint modernity in gloomy colors, discerning in it the totalitarian desire to control bodies and minds. The Age of Reason is a particularly dark chapter in human history that unleashed the unprecedented reign of terror.
