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At the origin of all science, as Kant (1787/1929) pointed out in his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, there is a revolution that consists of what we might call interrogating the object rather than being directed by it. This is a revolution in method and it begins when the evidence of the senses and the primary truths of consciousness, what seems to be obvious and self-evident or “empirical data,” are no longer trusted; at this point science deliberately constructs or produces its object. This revolution in method is known as an epistemological break, a term borrowed from the philosopher Bachelard. An example of it is seen in the mathematization of nature produced by Galileo, which led to the foundation of modern physics. All of what was previously thought to be “empiricism,” with which each new science breaks, is hereafter known as superstition or, in the term of Althusser, ideology. For Althusser, ideology is a pejorative denotation, implying a false theoretical construction. Postmodernism confronts us with another such epistemological break, consequently threatening to label traditional psychoanalysis as interpersonal suggestion or “ideology.”
The purpose of this article is to explicate certain concepts of so-called postmodern thought that help to deepen one's understanding of both of human mentation and of the kinds of problems individually and socially that we are all up against at the beginning of the 21st century. Shwedder (1994) suggests four functions that ought to constitute our intellectual court in any quest for understanding: the king or queen, the loyal opposition, the jester, and the secret society. In the metaphorical court of his imagination, these roles balance one another. Applied to our