Ah, thanks to a very wise virtual friend, I now have at least one link to offer you on definitions of postmodernism.
As for Rorty, read the book, read the book, read the book. You're still getting less than a fourth of the picture.
Here's the link and the text. It's apparently from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
xrefer.com
post-modernism
In its broad usage, this is a 'family resemblance' term deployed in a variety of contexts (architecture, painting, music, poetry, fiction, etc.) for things which seem to be related - if at all - by a laid-back pluralism of styles and a vague desire to have done with the pretensions of high-modernist culture. In philosophical terms post-modernism shares something with the critique of Enlightenment values and truth-claims mounted by thinkers of a liberal-communitarian persuasion; also with neo-pragmatists like Richard Rorty who welcome the end of philosophy's presumptive role as a privileged, truth-telling discourse. There is another point of contact with post-modern fiction and art in the current preoccupation, among some philosophers, with themes of 'self-reflexivity', or the puzzles induced by allowing language to become the object of its own scrutiny in a kind of dizzying rhetorical regress. To this extent post-modernism might be seen as a ludic development of the so-called 'linguistic turn' that has characterized much philosophical thinking of late. |
