When someone (any one) starts talking about pseudo-science you immediately know that they have not really done their homework, and are pushing an ideological barrow in the culture wars shouting matches.

Why not check out the thoroughly postmodern understanding of scientism, its limitations, and the anti-"culture" created in its image via these related references.

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-science.aspx

http://www.aboutadidam.org/lesser_alternatives/scientific_materialism/reductionism.html

This essay re scientism and the "culture" of death

http://www.aboutadidam.org/newsletters/toc-february2004.html

Plus a set of essays which give a unique understanding of both modernism and postmodernism

http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html

And of course on the REAL politics of survival--a very sobering assessment of the "culture" created in the image of scientism

http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/reality-humanity.html

Plus another understanding of modernism/postmodernism and art via this reference by a professor of surgery.

http://www.artandphysics.com

The easy way to prove a point (if any point exists) is to start by defining whatever it is that you wish to destroy in a way that best suits your weapons of mass destruction.
My understanding of the meaning of post modernism (coming from an architectural background) is 'what came after Modernism, (International Style)' That is what 'post' means in this context.
The Modernist movement was Communist in essence. It breed the ridiculous Architectural theory that if everywhere in the world was the same there would be no need for envy and wars would cease. Hence the alternative name of 'The International Style.'
On this basis Postmodernism was a movement against the leftist modernist movement that wanted to reduce everything to drab sameness.
Whilst Post modernism means many things to many people it remains everything that came after the modernist movement. Postmodernism is beyond definition other than it came after modernism.
Pseudoscience, which I think means in this context masquerading as science, existed long before the end of modernism and will go on long after the current fashion of symbolism that replaced postmodernism long ago.
I resisted the temptation of adding my own definition of Pseudo Intelectutral to this post

Daviy, you should not have resisted.

Daniel, you asked the question << Is there any relationship between postmodernism and pseudoscience? >>, then you did a pretty good job on answering it yourself.

The only room you left for a response was from postmodernism, was that deliberate? Not only are you a heretic, you’re such a tease, tish tish.

In my view, any link is consequential rather than being direct. I like the use of a continuum; it suits my rather mechanical thinking.

The “science to pseudo-science” continuum you describe is one of the targets of postmodernism because it has no answer to that continuum. Postmodernist deconstruction attempts to bend or distort that continuum to change the perception. It also attempts to cut the continuum into smaller segments in order that each remaining segment can be viewed as an entity in itself, thus each segment can be “re-presented” in isolation.

I was struggling to provide and example of this process until I saw Ho Hum’s post. This is a perfect example of this thought process at work. Change the playing field by distortion and then proceed to chop it into as many pieces as possible. I counted six “cuts” with each segment attacked separately.

You can post any topic you like as a continuum and I guarantee you it will be subjected to the same process by postmodernism.

Postmodernisms great weakness of course, is its predictability and repetition.

It should be interesting to watch this thread develop.

Good one, thank

Daviy,
you ought to throw out your reference books, as you don't appear to have the faintist idea of Modernism or its post.
Indeed "postmodernism" is a very broad brush, just as the article tries indiscriminately to comprehend a diverse field and intelligentsia. Surely every discipline is infiltrated by a few frauds and incompetents, but that does not render the whole field nonsense. Having read a bit of Lacan myself, I would testify that apart from the prose being wilfully dense, his ideas at least compel consideration. Lacan's critique of the "symbolic order", for instance, as a way of modelling Kristeva's (not "Kristova") "intertext", makes a lot of sense.
It's interesting that the author here is an economist. I'm not familiar with his ideas, but might he belong to the same liberal rationalist camp Ditchkins belong to? I agree with Ho Hum.
Indeed the most risible inference in this defence of the Enlightenment is the notion that liberal rationalism is leading us "progressively" to a better future. In fact rampant, undirected and ethically untrammelled scientism is leading us and the planet to unreality and destruction. To note this "reality" is not to "abandon rationality", it's to impose reason upon rationalism.
One thing I do agree with is that postmodernism has led to the "enervation of the political left"--they have deconstructed even their own agency in the world, but does this author imply that liberal-rationalism has the least affiliation with the left? The left is traditionally a materialism and has nothing to do with postmodernism (a pathology rather than a politics) or pseudo-science, which are distractions from the here and now, just as the technological paradigm we occupy is a fantastic diversion from the real human condition that. I'm an atheist and sceptic in all things, including scientistic triumphalism.
I wish I had time for a more comprehensive retort. Maybe later.

Perhaps not just a continuum from left to right, but a vertical continuum from past- to future-oriented ? Thus, the anti-Enlightenment Romantics and Post-moderns, and much of the 'Left', could be categorised as part of that retreat back to the past, where all was better than now ? The problem then is to ascertain whether they are on the Left of this Past Quadrant, or on its Right ?

In my view, a genuine Left must be future-oriented, and not some tarted-up yearning for the supposed innocence and simplicities of the past, even of hunter-gatherer society. Strange, call me naive but I always think of science and the search for the truth and for the most comprehensive understanding of reality, incredibly hard-fought battles, as both Left and Future-oriented, with some strange bedfellows of course.

So much of what passes for Left these days seems to represent a retreat from the present, from modernity, from modernism,and yes, something of a cult of death. Perhaps this is just the usual schadenfreude about the perennially imminent collapse of capitalism (that whore, whose new tricks never fail to amaze) but on the other hand, perhaps past- and death-oriented individuals are attracted to the pseudo-left and to post-modernism ? Do Goths vote 'Left' these days ? Is euthanasia developing into a 'Left' issue ?

Marx would spin in his grave.