How Postmodernism Uses Fiction to Defeat Empiricism

Stephen Hicks identifies a recurring rhetorical strategy in postmodern epistemology: the substitution of fictional narrative for empirical investigation as grounds for sweeping claims about knowledge. Foucault's famous opening of *The Order of Things* exemplifies this — the primary exhibit is not an anthropological study of actual divergent classification systems but a Borges fiction, an invented Chinese encyclopedia with deliberately absurd categories. The argumentative structure runs: if a fictional taxonomy can appear internally coherent, then coherence alone cannot distinguish scientific categories from literary invention; therefore, all taxonomies are conventional impositions rather than discoveries about reality. The sleight of hand lies in the generalization — moving from the observation that arbitrary categories can be imagined to the conclusion that all categories are arbitrary.

Brendan Graham Dempsey presses a subtler point against Hicks's critique. Recognizing cultural variation in customs and concepts is not the same as recognizing that entire epistemic structures — Foucault's epistemes — determine what counts as a legitimate question, not merely a legitimate answer. Hicks argues that the modern tradition already contains this sensitivity, but Dempsey counters that it required historical distance before modernity's own episteme could be perceived as an episteme rather than as transparent rationality itself. This is a genuinely important philosophical development, even if Foucault's method of establishing it is suspect.

The metamodern synthesis attempts to thread the needle: drawing on Habermasian communicative rationality and developmental psychology, it seeks a meta-framework that can situate different epistemic structures in developmental relation to one another. Plurality of frameworks is acknowledged as real and philosophically significant, but plurality is not taken to entail equivalence. The project is to build a model capacious enough to honor genuine difference without collapsing into the relativism that the postmodern fictional shortcut was designed to justify.