isomorphismes

Some people think of postmodernism as the rejection of the existence of objective facts. Another take is that po-mo comprises broader methods of getting one’s point across than didaction. For example: joking, insinuating, or ending sentences with question marks.

For example this sarcastic remark:

A theory is something which nobody literally believes except the person who invented it. An experiment is something which everybody literally believes except the person who invented it.

pokes fun at what a different conversational mode might wax about in general terms such as “human frailty” or “fallibility”—or sound like a stronger attack on the scientific method than it intends to be.

It’s natural to express scepticism when an expert or supposed expert disagrees with something that makes complete sense to you. (I owe ya a post called “The rigid rod of modus tollens & modus ponens”.) ”Says who?” is a sentence anyone can utter. You could view “the scientific method” as one way to respond to that criticism. But is it the only way?

Some (postmodern?) anthropologists and ethnographers begin their essays on people who are foreign to them by discussing their biases and where generally they’re coming from. Which may be a more appropriate response to scepticism with non-experimental data—a different way of addressing the same problem that repeatable double-blind experiments are supposed to, namely errors in judgment by the observer/researcher.

Economists have field-specific ways of addressing problems inherent to what they study. These include models, stylised facts, stating own biases, statistics, and rebuttals against the statistical analysis. But also self-questioning sarcasm. For example

The questions in economics never change. Only the answers do.

or 

When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, [reason’s] conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and ‘tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain’d with difficulty.

or

The Economics Nobel confers upon the laureate an appearance of expertise which in economics no one ought to possess.

I don’t think “a postmodern economics” needs to be “post-autistic” or revolutionary or hip in the ways I’ve seen suggested by heterodoxists. It could simply be the recognition that informal speech like sarcasm can be on the same level of importance as speeches, lectures, claims, statements, and pontifications.