There is, perhaps, a natural appeal of epistemologies which deny authority to any established discipline or apparently privileged institution or organisation.   The understandable human wish to escape domination and control appears to provide considerable impetus to post-modern thought, while the notion of exploration and practice of open discourse is very attractive, especially to those suspicious or sceptical of the motives and behaviours of those in conventional authority.

From what I understand of this approach, it appears very similar to the Sophist school of ancient Greece.
Richard Tarnas: 1991, The Passion of the Western Mind, Pimlico, Random House, p 27ff :
Sophistry - have we been here before?

ìAccording to the Sophists, man was the measure of all things, and his own individual judgements concerning everyday human life should form the basis of his personal beliefs and conduct - not naive conformity to traditional religion nor indulgence in far-flung abstract speculation.  Truth was relative, not absolute, and differed from culture to culture, from person to person, and from situation to situation. ..  The ultimate value of any belief or opinion could be judged only by its practical utility in serving an individual's needs in life.  This decisive shift in the character of Greek thought, encouraged by the contemporary social and political situation, owed as much to the problematic condition of natural philosophy at that time as to the decline in traditional religious belief ..  a chaos of conflicting ideas, with no basis upon which to certify one above the rest.  ...  Since religious beliefs, political structures, and rules of moral conduct were now seen to be humanly created conventions, these were all open to fundamental questioning and change. ..  Since it was futile to seek absolute truth, the Sophists recommended that young men learn from them the practical arts of rhetorical persuasion and logical dexterity, as well as a broad spectrum of other subjects ranging from social history and ethics to mathematics and music. .. Through such a programme .. both the individual and society could better themselves.  Thus the Sophists mediated the transition from an age of myth to an age of practical reason.  Man and society were to be studied, methodologically and empirically, without theoretical preconceptions.

Despite the positive effects of their intellectual training and establishment of a liberal education as the basis for character formation, a radical scepticism towards all values led some to advocate an explicitly amoral opportunism.  Students were instructed how to devise ostensibly plausible arguments supporting virtually any claim.  More concretely disturbing was the concurrent deterioration of the political and ethical situation in Athens to the point of crisis - the democracy turning fickle and corrupt, the consequent takeover by a ruthless oligarchy, the Athenean leadership of Greece becoming tyrannical, wars begun in arrogance ending in disaster. ..  All these developments had their own origins and motives, and could hardly be laid at the feet of the Sophists.  Yet in such critical circumstances, the philosophical denial of absolute values and sophistical commendation of stark opportunism seemed both to reflect and to exacerbate the problematic spirit of the times.  The Sophistsí relativistic humanism, for all its progressive and liberal character, was not proving wholly benign.  The larger world opened by Athensí earlier triumphs had destabilised its ancient certainties and now seemed to require a larger order - universal, yet conceptual - within which events could be comprehended.  The Sophistsí provided no such order, but rather a method of success. ... Indeed, the whole development of reason now seemed to have undercut its own basis, with the human mind denying itself the capacity for genuine knowledge of the world.î

Richard Tarnas, op cit. (p 413), seems to agree, and describes the post-modern era as follows,  assisted by * Jung, Carl G., The Undiscovered Self, in Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, vol. 10, translated by R.F.C. Hull, edited by H. Read et al., Princeton University Press, 1970, § 585/6.

ìThe postmodern era is an era without consensus on the nature of reality, but it is blessed with an unprecedented wealth of perspectives with which to engage the great issues that confront it. ...  Despite frequent congruence of purpose, there is little effective cohesion, no apparent means by which a shared cultural vision could emerge, no unifying perspective cogent or comprehensive enough to satisfy the burgeoning diversity of intellectual needs and aspirations. ... A chaos of valuable but seemingly incompatible interpretations prevails, with no resolution in sight. ... In the absence of any viable, but embracing cultural vision, old assumptions remain blunderingly in force, providing an increasingly unworkable and dangerous blueprint for human thought and activity. ... The dialectical challenge felt by many is to evolve a cultural vision possessed of a certain intrinsic profundity or universality that, while not imposing any a priori limits on the possible range of legitimate interpretations, would yet somehow bring an authentic and fruitful coherence out of the present fragmentation, and also provide a sustaining fertile ground for the generation of new perspectives and possibilities in the future.î (p 409)

And, quoting Jung*: ì[A] mood of universal destruction and renewal ... has set its mark on our age.  This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically.  We are living in what the Greeks called kairos - the right moment - for a ëmetamorphosis of the godsí, of fundamental principles and symbols.  This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.  Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. ... So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. ... Does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales?î

ìThough the opinions Nagel tackles head on are those of leading analytical philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, William Quine and Bernard Williams, the background to his defence of reason is provided by what he describes as ëa growth in the already extreme intellectual laziness of contemporary culture and the collapse of serious argument throughout the lower reaches of the humanities and the social sciences, together with a refusal to take seriously, as anything other than first person avowals, the objective arguments of othersí.

Some years ago, I would have regarded such remarks as indicative of the narrow-mindedness that stifled analytical philosophy, making it the boring, overly technical and justly ignored discipline it seemed hell-bent on becoming.  Recently, however, I have had a change of heart, and perhaps it would not be totally irrelevant here if I indulged in a little autobiography, so as to show why, essentially, I regard Nagel as being on the side of the angels, despite not sharing his Platonic conception of the truths of reason.

Five years ago, before I became an academic, when I was earning a living as a freelance writer, I wrote a piece for The Independent ridiculing the attitude of the Cambridge philosophers towards the honorary degree awarded to Jaques Derrida by the English faculty.  It seemed to me then that the academic philosophers at our ancient universities were closing their minds, simply out of blind prejudice, to new and fresh ideas from the continent and from other disciplines.  There still seems to me some truth in this, and I look forward to the creation of a ìpost analyticî philosophy that will preserve the virtues of analytic philosophy - rigour, precision and intellectual honesty - while extending its range of discussible topics and gleaning whatever it can from the continental traditions it has for so long ignored.

However, since being in academic life I have been appalled at the sheer awfulness of some of the arguments inspired by these ìnew and freshî ideas that are routinely presented in supposedly ìtheoreticalî discussions in the humanities and social sciences.  I had no idea that things had got so bad.  Time and time again I have been astonished at the facile forms of subjectivism that I have heard expressed with the confident air of platitudes. I have heard one lecturer with a distinguished record of publications announce that we now know, thanks to advances in science and philosophy, that there is, in fact, no difference between truth and fiction (in fact, if you please!).  I have also heard an eminent social scientist declare that there is no such thing as a false belief.  Among the arguments I have heard repeatedly used are these:

• Facts can only be expressed in language, language is a social construct, therefore facts are social constructs.
• A statement cannot be true or false unless it has a meaning;
• meanings are dependent on forms of life, therefore whether something is true or false is dependent, not on the way the world is, but only on the form of life in which it is uttered.

When I have said that one only has to state these arguments to realise how bad they are, I have been met with the responseî ìBut I thought you were a Wittgensteinian - these are Wittgensteinís argumentsî.

Against such a background, I am inclined to applaud any attempt to stem the tide of institutionalised nonsense and intellectual nihilism that has already engulfed large areas of academic life and threatens to drown us all, and to anyone whose temperature has been raised by such irritating encounters, I recommend Nagelís book as the intellectual equivalent of a cold shower.  ... The claim that ìEverything is subjectiveî is vacuous, since, if it were true, it would apply to itself and would thus be consistent with any objective claim, including the view that, objectively, it was false.

...  In the end, I find myself persuaded by Nagel that all  attempts to subjectivise or relativise logic must enmesh themselves in contradictions, but unpersuaded by the metaphysics he feels compelled to adopt to make sense of the fact. Indeed, it seems to me that, in one important respect, Nagel shares the outlook of the facile subjectivists he attacks.  That is to say, like them, he accepts the dichotomy that either metaphysical realism is true or it is impossible to reason objectively.  It is this dichotomy which I feel ought to be attacked.  I am inclined to say that reason is ìthe last wordî in argument just because it is the only word.  An argument that does not appeal to reason does not count as an argument - except of course in the ìlower reaches of the humanities and social sciences.î
 

To anticipate the argument outlined in the main notes, I suggest that the truths we seek and live by are neither solely a result or consequence of reason, nor solely a result of faith and belief (if only of self and individual identity and subjectivity).  Our (provisional and evolving) truths are emergent phenomena, the consequence of the dynamic interplay between faith, rules and reason, where the rules come from the responses of our neighbours, traders, lovers, slaves, and governors to our own expressions and actions.

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