ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some epistemological aspects of the issue between modernism and postmodernism, that is, questions having to do with the scope and limits of attainable knowledge in various fields of enquiry. In postmodern ethics — in the work of thinkers like Zygmunt Bauman — it is the idea that other people, cultures, traditions, or historical periods are so different from ours, that the readers can never be justified in presuming to interpret their beliefs according to their own criteria of truth or justice. As applied to philosophy of science it quickly leads on, via milder varieties of cultural-linguistic relativism, to arguments of the full-fledged Feyerabend type where truth justis whatever counts as such according to this or that belief-system. Deconstruction is often viewed, by its Anglophone critics especially, as the sort of thing that postmodernists typically get up to when they acquire a smattering of philosophy and don't wish to be put down as mere cultural or literary theorists.
