If you do not find an important issue or controversy you would like explained, email us and our research specialists will get right on it. The following explanations and definitions are integrated. So, if you have difficulty understanding a particular concept, you might want to scroll up and read some of the preceding paragraphs. As its name implies, postmodernism is a philosophical response to modernity. Much of late twentieth century philosophy has responded to the overwhelming influence of scientific rationalism and logical positivism on contemporary thinking.
Scientific rationalism gives intellectual preference to scientific language.
In other words, logical positivists assumed that scientific language most accurately represented reality and thus offered the only means to make meaningful statements about reality. They asserted that statements that cannot be scientifically verified are meaningless. Along with value statements, any non-literal statement, such as analogies, metaphors, similes, etc. is not meaningful. To make a meaningful argument, one must make direct statements representing empirically verifiable claims concerning some observable phenomenon. To create true arguments, these statements should be placed into syllogistic form.