What if it’s not a baby? I suspect it is more a case of “even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn.”

@GaryWitt

I don't know...Look, early on the intellectuals were chasing about after the fact that empiricism and reason were making traditional worldviews impossible to maintain. We're studying languages trying to find ways to learn more about ancient history, and realizing that any meaning we might make of old texts are really flowed full with our own perspectives, rendering much ancient wisdom that might be gleaned impossible to discover; we have only the text, and not the author's intended meaning. That fucking Foucault, his brilliant analyses of how cultural norms and views on degeneracy move, shift, flow as views about reality evolve within societies...well, there's some there, there. Structuralism, received wisdom, the questionability of "self-made" individualism, the idea that we exist within--and are product of--cultural and social structures that evolved within and are adapted to historical periods that are now long passed...post-structuralism, the irony of Being within a social reality no longer fit to function...post-modernism, even the narratives of science are not to be trusted as knowably true...beings of the world who experience it ONLY subjectively, making up fables about objectivity....

There's some big T "truth" in the garbled mess of late 19th and 20th century "theory" and philosophy. I can't nail it to a cross and tell of its redemptive potency, but there's some there, there.

@govols Yes. Agreed. But is any of that really all that profound or is it just a pedestrian conclusion wrapped in a pretty rhetorical ribbon? And if it is profound, is it all that useful—meaning, again, is it truly profound?

@GaryWitt

It's for damned sure useful--unquestionably so. The whole of the "culture war" is underpinned with it. At the very least it can be used to root into the communal perceptions of reality and truth toward an effort to shatter collective confidence. I'm not suggesting that's a good thing, but it's a real thing. It really needs to be taken seriously, studied, understood, and integrated into overall comprehension. It will not do to allow it remain exclusively a bludgeon upon perception and reality. There are valid criticisms all down in there, and we really need to incorporate the critical analyses into the "methods" under critique.

Or so I think...