I’m sure most people here are familiar with the post modern essay generator. I was reading this article, and at first confused it with the post modern essay generator, until I realized they were two separate things. Is the article real? What does it mean?
I rather doubt that most people here are familiar with it. I’ve edited the title to try to tell what the thread is about.
It’s not about the post modern essay generator, it’s about the article.
And now, hopefully, posters will open this thread, as opposed to what would have happened when they saw "“Does this mean anything?” as a title.
Yes, I think the article is real. It is just on a technical subject and is going over your head. You may be one of those people who find it hard to take theological issues seriously (as am I), but they are taken very seriously by a very large proportion of the human race, and a very complex and sophisticated discourse about them has grown up over thousands of years. The fact that it is not easy for the novice to “get” does not make it nonsensical. It certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with postmodernism.
OK, but the OP has a point. You (samclem) have apparently changed the title from something meaningless to something actively misleading (although the real fault is with the OP for bringing up the “postmodern generator” at all).
The article looks just like something that I would read on the post modern essay generator, which made me question if it was real.
If you do not know anything about computer science, you probably will not easily be able to tell the difference between real computer science papers, and papers generated by the Automatic CS Paper Generator, either.
I know nothing about computer sci, but the randomly generated papers seem to be obvious gibberish.
“The development of lambda calculus has visualized cache coherence, and current trends suggest that the development of I/O automata will soon emerge. To put this in perspective, consider the fact that much-touted hackers worldwide often use DNS to answer this issue. To put this in perspective, consider the fact that well-known analysts rarely use architecture to address this challenge.”
While I don’t know what “lambda calculus” or “cache coherence” are, I do know that this entire paragraph never actually says what “this issue” or “this challenge” are. It’s total gibberish.
Would you care to link to an actual computer sci paper that contains something that you think is equivalent to this. Because to me, anyone who understands English syntax would spot that paper as gibberish.
The article simple says that to construct a theological argument, one must:
[ul]
[li]Choose motivating questions you wish to answer (the “central idea” you wish to explore)[/li][li]Specify the methodology you will you to answer the questions[/li][li]Choose a thesis that you wish to prove or disprove[/li][li]Organize your evidence, from the bible and other compatible sources to answer the question.[/li][/ul]
The first three points are placed in the “Prolegomena”, which is simply the introductory section of the theological work. The last point constitutes the body of the work.
Unlike an essay generator, it actually makes a cogent point and has a discernible structure, although is written in an obtuse and rambling manner. This “Theopedia” website appears to be a wiki, and this article was more likely the product of several individuals attempting to cram quite a bit of information in a scholarly sounding manner.
Well, as I noted in another thread, over 120 papers generated by that web page actually got published in the academic Computer Science literature (supposedly peer reviewed, but presumably not really).
I do not know enough about the range of your ignorance to be able to show you a real paper (in any field) that would look like gibberish to you. (And of course, for me to find such such a paper, it would also have to be in a field I know pretty well.) Very likely such papers exist, though.
Anyway, unless you are unable to detect that the theological essay linked by the OP is not machine generated gibberish, or that the products of the post modern essay generator mentioned in the OP are gibberish, rather than real postmodernist essays, this is a bit beside the point. What is more to the point is that I suspect you would be tell the difference between the products of the postmodern generator and a real essay in postmodernism quite as well as you are able to tell the difference between a real CS article and a product of the generator, even though you might truly understand neither subject. Although I know next to nothing about theology, I can tell the essay linked in the OP is not machine generated gibberish (as runningdude makes clear), and, really, the OP ought to be able to tell too. If he really can’t manage it for that, though, (and if he is not an actual computer scientist) the CS paper generator (or, perhaps even better, the math one), should confuse him just as much as the postmodernism one does. Opaque jargon and complex syntax are not unique to postmodernist studies.
Can someone dumb the article down for me? What is prolegmena?
There are such things a dictionaries, you know: prolegmena.
But why do you care?
See my above post. It really doesn’t say much of anything, but uses a lot of words to say it.
I can’t see anything wrong with the linked article - at least in terms of it making cogent sense from end to end. It is pretty typical of the sort of prose one often sees in this arena. But critically, there is a single idea, and the sentences are consistent with its development. The prose generators are little more than algorithms that create syntactically correct sentences from a set of tables of words. Pick your subject area, populate the tables with jargon, and let it rip. Possibly more fun is a dissociated press generator.
The first sentence of the article defines prolegmena for you: “Prolegomena simply means prefatory remarks.”
The article makes perfect sense to me. Basically it says: “Systematic theology is a particular approach to analyzing the Bible. But before we get started we should say a few words about why and how we’re analyzing the Bible. What are we hoping to get out of the process? What is the general way that we’ll go about it? And why is theology important?”
It’s a bit jargon-y, but it’s not really postmodern. In fact, most postmodernists would find the approach to exegesis they’re proposing deeply flawed.