These key features overlap, criss-cross, and reoccur in discussions about postmodernism: plurality of perspectives, antiessentialism, antifoundationalism, antiscientism, and end of metaphysics and ideology. Other characterizations focus on the discrediting of modernism's grand narrative, the positivist assumption that objectivity is the only truth, and that all questions could be answered by a hierarchy of sciences, principles, and beliefs. Discussing the nature of knowledge in adult learning, Kilgore (2001), on the other hand, characterizes postmodernism and critical theory, an overlapping paradigm, in terms of the interplay between knowledge, power, and learning. The merits of postmodernist thought are hotly debated. Some find a self-defeating paradox in the key features of postmodernism. Some disagree with postmodernist views on objective reality and on our ability to know that reality accurately. Others question the quality of some postmodern writing and thought. At the same time that proponents and critics disagree vehemently over epistemology, many agree that postmodernism brings a valuable spotlight on human nature and its role in constructing knowledge. For Kilgore (2001), the most significant contribution of the postmodern worldview is the recognition and theoretical inclusion of the diversity of learners and their individual and collective voices. (Contains 14 references.) (YLB)