[ThomPete]

Philosophical realizations are only destructive if you don't actually manage to look them in the eye.

You seem to be confusing what the purpose of philosophy is. It's not to establish truth but rather to inquire about truth.

Postmodernism shows us how fragile any truth proposition is and that's a useful way to think about things (especially when you are trying to break someone elses argument down)

I am no fan of the current usage of postmodernism in gender and identity politics but postmodernism as a philosophical perspective isn't going anywhere in fact eve Jordan Peterson one of the most popular critics of postmodernism uses it to make many of his arguments (i.e. to deconstruct the gender and identity politics)

You can't escape postmodernist realization.

[AnimalMuppet]

But I wonder if what the article is complaining about isn't actually that people have become truly postmodern, rather than "pseudo-modern".

What I mean is this: If people truly believe "how fragile any truth proposition is", then why bother to put a lot of effort into making your truth propositions as solid as possible? Why try to make your writing as clear as possible, when people are going to misunderstand it anyway? I suspect that the shallowness that the article complains about may be because people are now functionally postmodern, not just intellectually so.

In contrast, Derrida and Foucault were intellectually postmodernists, but still wrote in a modernist way. That is, they wrote as if they could genuinely communicate truth propositions and be understood.

[ThomPete]

You might have a point about what the author is saying but that doesn't kill postmodernism.

You don't need objective truth to establish useful and constructive assumptions. It's perfectly fine to reduce reality into something more narrow and confined.

As an example. You can use classical physics to get to Mars with a spaceship. But you can't use it to travel faster than light to Alpa Centauri (but maybe quantum physics). Both classical physics and quantum physics are proven to the extent we can prove anything but they are in contradiction to each other and tells us something different about reality (one says it's local another says it fundamentally non-local)

Or you can believe the world is flat which is good enough for you to get from village A to B but not good enough to navigate the entire planet.

Postmodernism is not a critique of what is useful but claims about what is true and objective.

Derrida and Foucault were caught in the same semantic mesh as the rest of us they just showed through that how elusive it is. Derrida especially showed through his writing.