Lyotard introduced the term 'postmodernism', which was previously only used by art critics, into philosophy and social sciences, with the following observation: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives".

[1][2][3] Originally written as a report on the influence of technology in exact sciences, commissioned by the Conseil des universités du Québec, the book was influential.

[4][5] Lyotard criticizes metanarratives such as reductionism and teleological notions of human history such as those of the Enlightenment and Marxism, arguing that they have become untenable because of technological progress in the areas of communication, mass media and computer science.

Techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine translation show a shift to linguistic and symbolic production as central elements of the postindustrial economy and the related postmodern culture, which had risen at the end of the 1950s after the reconstruction of western Europe.

[4] However, Lyotard later admitted that he had a "less than limited" knowledge of the science he wrote about, and to compensate for this ignorance, he "made stories up" and referred to a number of books that he had not actually read.