February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website
The strong Postmodernist? Right, like they don't live in and interact with others in the real world just like all the rest of us. There are clearly experiences and reasons and narratives that do in fact entirely overlap with that which very few of us would suggest is not objective reality.To the Postmodernist, classical accounts of truth–like that of Plato’s–which use language via propositional logic, or other bodies of knowledge which rely on the experiential, reason, or narrative cannot tell us anything about the world, due to their use of language. The strong Postmodernist must therefore reject science, history, and philosophy, as they attempt to rationalize the world using language.
This is synonymous with the Postmodern rejection of “totalizing” narratives, also abbreviated as meta-narratives.
Plato and his ilk on the other hand tried to make this "philosophical distinction" between reality in the cave and a super-reality in a world of words that -- through God? -- transcended the at times grubby, grimy, problematic reality of the "human-all-too-human Condition" down here.
It's not that through language we attempt to rationalize the world around us so much as the extent to which one is able to demonstrate how his or her own words are or are not in sync with the world as it really is. Something that scientists generally do better than most others. And why, by and large, science generally steers clear of the is/ought world or the realm of God and religion and spirituality.
As for meta-narratives, science is stymied here more in regard to the "big questions" -- why something and not nothing? why this something and not something else? The age old debates about the very, very big and the very, very small...about determinism, about time. About the nature of such things as dark matter and dark energy
This of course gets closer to my own set of assumptions. Historical, cultural and personal realities that shift and change over time and across the globe. Endless squabbles over the way things are and the way they ought to be instead.If language cannot tell us anything about reality, then how can we understand the world?
The answer is that social construction is the prime shaper of reality. This means that, in a Postmodern paradigm, it is impossible to separate reality from the experience of a subject rooted in social-cultural circumstances. Instead, reality is something which is interpreted and must be represented, so it cannot possibly be understood objectively. The world is therefore quite literally constructed out of how it is represented by a culture through language. Language and culture are seen to shape our notion of reality to such a degree that it is impossible to understand reality outside of them.
Then, from my own perspective, back always to how close we can come to demonstrating through language what we think and feel is "the best of all possible worlds". Or, for the moral and political objectivists, the only truly rational world that there is. Their own.
But that has always been the case. With the postmodernists the arguments have just shifted to the role of language itself.
https://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175006