back to the beginning: the limitations of language

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Can language express truth? Can language give us a clear picture of reality?

Here of course what everyone will expect me to note is this: “given what particular context?”

Yes, that’s my main “thing” when it comes to philosophy. And why wouldn’t it be since, above all else, I come back to connecting the dots existentially in regard to this question: “how ought one to live in a world awash both in conflicting moral and political value judgments and in contingency, chance and change?”

Truth and clarity there.

Discussing Postmodernism has become almost prosaic given the intellectual climate of the 2010s. However, it has posed questions which directly challenge the most classical assertions of how we understand the world around us. For that alone it is worth responding to.

Postmodernism also remains relevant because much of current thinking is rooted in Postmodern ideas. This goes beyond just academic circles: it is easy to catch Postmodern ideas in everyday discourse. Nothing is unusual about hearing someone retort in an argument “Well, that’s subjective,” or if they are more well versed and a little bolder “That’s just interpretation, there’s never really any one meaning.”

Here, of course, it depends on how far you go with this. After all, think about your day to day interactions with others. Think about all of the countless times you don’t stop to insist, “that’s just interpretation – subjective – there’s never really any one meaning.”

Nothing much “postmodern” about the laws of nature, mathematics, the empirical world around is, human biology, the rules of logic.

These ideas originate from Postmodern language theory in particular. What is referred to as “Postmodernism” refers to a specific idea of language and how it functions. These ideas were shaped by numerous thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s: most popularly through French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who took the core ideas on language and related them to concepts of power, oppression, and freedom.

On the other hand, the language that postmodernists use to deconstruct meaning and purpose in our lives necessarily includes their own arguments. For me, it still comes down to connecting the dots existentially between this or that “core idea” and this or that set of circumstances. Power, oppression and freedom out in what particular world understood in what particular way? That laborious, often futile task of separating what through language we claim to believe is true and what we are in fact able to demonstrate is true for all rational human beings. Postmodernism changed none of that.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

A critique of language of all things may appear benign and simply technical at first, but the challenge undermines confidence in our ability to have knowledge and the possibility of truth.

That’s always been the thrust of my own argument…that in many crucial respects language seems to be profoundly embedded in our subjective experiences. Resulting in countless “failures to communicate”. And what if these failures revolve around the fact that in regard to “conflicting goods” – moral and political value judgments at odds – human language is, perhaps, simply not capable of resolving these historical and cultural conflagrations?

There are some things languages can be very, very precise regarding in connecting the dots between words and worlds. But with other things, well, as they say, “the rest is history”.

Let us explore both, but first I will need to explain the Postmodern understanding of language which I have been alluding to. I do warn that in discussing “Postmodernism” that there is a risk in generalization. The term remains elusive and the various thinkers who are characterized as Postmodern are not totally unified in their views. I will stick to explaining the broadly agreed upon problems Postmodern thinkers find in language and dabble with some responses.

Right from the start then…

Using language, to what extent are we able to “explain the Postmodern understanding of language” the author or anyone else refers to? After all, why do you suppose that once we leave discussions that pertain largely to “generalizations” imparted about postmodernism, and bring them “out into the world” of actual human interactions, we come to the at times heated debates regarding what postmodernism is? What if human language itself [even here] is not capable of bridging those subjective interpretive gaps and coming up with a more objective, “unified” consensus?

Especially given that, in regard to moral and political dissension, all language going back to the pre-Socratics, have utterly failed to bring about that vital unification that would make the “failures to communicate” go away. Here, in many crucial respects, postmodernism is just the next “school of thought” in line.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Postmodern theories of language challenge the belief that language provides a stable way of understanding the world. When you use language, you are partaking in the act of representing things in the world through concepts.

Come on, we all know that in the course of living our lives and interacting with others from day to day, language is there to provide us with the sort of communication that is, over and over and over again, extremely stable. The concepts overlap with the world with the sort of precision that allows us to sustain social interactions we scarcely have to think about at all. Language and the either/or world are truly made for each other.

Where does postmodernism fit in there? Theoretically or otherwise.

This does not have to be simply through speech, when you are thinking or simply identifying an object you are representing the world through language.

Yes, but identifying what object in what set of circumstances? Are you or are you not able to communicate the object effectively to others through language such that all of us “of sound mind” are able to discuss it at length with no real conflicts?

But, as is almost always the case when it comes to “illustrating the text” here, the example is invariably something like this…

If you are for instance looking at a red apple, you will have the corresponding thought “That is a red apple,” which frames the experience and allows you to understand it. In that case, language is being used to formulate a claim which represents something out there in the world, namely that the apple is there and that it has the characteristic of “redness”. “There” is used to represent a concept of space–namely where the object is–and “red” is used to represent a concept of colour. Real things are therefore represented with concepts in language.

Yes, and how is any of this different for the postmodernists? Instead, as with most truly controversial discussions and debates, “attitudes of skepticism toward what it considers as the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism, as well as opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning” revolve far more around value judgments in the is/ought world?

But there, in my view, postmodernists are no less the embodiment of “I” at the existential juncture of “identity, conflicting goods and political economy”.

Just note a “situation” that generates moral and political conflagrations, and we can discuss our own use of language – limitations in particular – in conveying “the objective truth”.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Postmodern language theories argue that this sort of linear connection between language and objects in the world is fallacious and that, in fact, these kinds of representations are unstable. Instead of language being an accurate link to understanding reality, it is a product of culture and social circumstances. Therefore, representations and language are more indicative of culture rather than an objective reality.

Tell that to physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists, mathematicians and those in other disciplines who would never think of the language they use to communicate back and forth as anything but entirely linear. Even among anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists and others in the “soft disciplines”, they are able to agree on any number facts embedded in human interactions.

Ever and always [to me] the bottom line: that all we can do here is to note the extent to which anyone using language to communicate something that they believe is true are able, if pressed, to demonstrate to the best of their ability that in fact it is true. Or is true in one set of circumstances but not necessarily in another.

Postmodernists are no less included here.

The argument is that all human thought is done through language and that language has an intrinsic “messiness” to it. It relies on words and signs which Postmodernists claim can have countless meanings and interpretation. Without unified meanings Postmodernists argue that it becomes impossible to have singular representations of things in the world, meaning there is a large degree of interpretation to what is deemed reality–therefore, reality is never separated from a subject.

Sure, I may be misunderstanding the point being made by particular postmodernists, but the fact is that in any number of contexts there exist a reality that is clearly separate from the “interpretations” of the “subject”.

This computer technology for example. What, it can’t be encompassed and communicated in language without the discussion breaking down into heated disagreements about what the actual components of it are or how they work together to make it possible to function as they do.

It’s like those who yank nihilism out of the is/ought world and attempt to make it applicable to, say, the laws of nature, mathematics, the rules of logic?

Yes, if you go far enough out on the metaphysical limb and start factoring in solipsism and sim worlds and dream worlds and determinism and Matrix realities – “the gap”, “Rummy’s Rule” – who the hell really knows what Reality itself is.

I’m always willing to concede that in regard to human language.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Language having a cultural dimension also poses a challenge. Since, in this view, meaning is framed by the culture which creates it, what language can express about reality is structured by the types of discourses and meaning which is possible with the ideas of that culture. What Postmodernists are arguing is that the ideas of a culture limit what language can say about reality.

Right, like if different cultures set about creating a space program, there won’t be any number of instances in which the language used to build the rocket ships won’t be entirely interchangeable around the globe. On the other hand, the language used to convey differences of opinion regarding whether funding a space program is or is not more reasonable than spending the money on healthcare or infrastructure down here on planet Earth?

If true, this has significant implications, because every human body of knowledge (“epistemology”) has relied on the intuition that language can at least roughly represent reality. Without that foundational assumption, it is impossible to make any claims about the world or have any form of understanding—consequently defeating the possibility of having knowledge entirely.

Exactly. So, I’ve never really been entirely clear as to what the fuss is all about in regard to postmodernism, deconstruction, semiotics, etc.

To me, they all eventually became just another way of noting that in regard to “I” in the is/ought world, communication often breaks down precisely because language in regard to value judgments doesn’t work the way it does in regard to material interactions in the either/or world.

Postmodernism then becomes just another way of encompassing the points I raise in with respect to dasein.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

This is why history is deemed an impossible pursuit in a Postmodern context. The argument is that the cultures and, therefore, the languages of the past and present are so different that they become alien to each other. The modern historian is detached from the framework with which people of the past understood the world–i.e.: their meanings and language. Because of this, it becomes impossible for a modern historian to truly understand the past.

On the other hand, to the extent that actual facts can be ascertained and then demonstrated to in fact be the fact of the matter – historically or otherwise – postmodernists become like all the rest of us. One can argue over the meaning and the rationale and the morality of slavery in America, but who is going to argue that the actual existence of slavery itself is just a matter of the language you use. Just a matter of one’s “personal opinion”.

Ideas such as truth, value, and justice are also seen as meanings which are constructed through language and projected onto reality. In a Postmodern context, this means that these ideas must be seen as derived from human beings–not the world nor nature.

Yes, given the manner in which I have come existentially to understand human identity in the is/ought world – “I” as the embodiment of dasein – I would then consider myself to be a postmodernist as well.

But what can this be conveyed to mean other than in and through a discussion of a situation involving human interaction in which some things are attempted to be encompassed as true objectively for all of us while other things seem clearly to be just matters of personal opinion.

Let’s discuss Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As either a postmodernist or as someone who rejects postmodernism.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

What this all alludes to is the fact that subjectivity becomes important if language, ideas, and knowledge are not rooted in reality, but instead construct it.

Of course the beauty of language, ideas and knowledge encompassed in a “world of words” is this: that all that’s being constructed is the “world of words” itself. And here the “subjects” do battle only with what the words are said to mean given one or another definition.

Postmodernists merely have their own rendition of it.

What still ultimately matters is your capacity to take this “world of words” reality constructed out of language, ideas and knowledge down out of the intellectual clouds and, in the battles between conflicting moral and political value judgments, demonstrate why your own conclusions are more applicable.

For example, with respect to the war in Ukraine.

Subjects and the culture which frames their thinking create particular discourses, which in turn contextualizes how people understand reality. Reality, when paired with the belief that people are always determined by their culture, becomes rather atomistic, since there are series of interpretations of what reality is, but no singular, true “objective” reality.

In our postmodern world, however, with the internet and a zillion news outlets and social media, there exists many, many, many more “discourses” available. As opposed to back in the day when none of that was around. Going all the way back to our premodern ancestors when, in regard to having a “discourse”, everyone had a place and everyone was expected to be in their place. What makes the postmodern world different is that the sheer complexity of human interactions now unfold in what for many is a No God world. It’s less a philosophy of life that guides us and more a way of viewing things given a particular “lifestyle”.

And given this “brave new world” reality what on earth are we to make of intellectual contraptions like this:

Taking this position entails that cultures and subjects are insular from the world or that their representations are not shaped by things in the world which they are referring to. This seems rather unintuitive because when people use language they do seem to be referencing things in the world around them.

Given, say, a particular context?

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

This account of language also does not take into account that some concepts are much more stable than others, and that such concepts limit the possibility of mixed meanings and interpretation. For example, if you take the concept of “tree” to signify tall wooded objects, that meaning is relatively stable across the languages of different cultures and time periods. You could take the French word for tree “arbre” and the old English world for tree “Treo” and they would signify the same concept–a tall wooded object. Though, it should be acknowledged that interpretive differences can arise if the trees have different symbolic or metaphorical meanings across the different cultures.

Exactly my point! In the either/or world language communicates what everyone can agree that words mean. Words are invented to indicate things that are the same for all of us. Here the problem [for postmodernists and nihilists and all the rest of us] revolves around translation. If you don’t speak French and you hear the word “arbre” the speaker has to point to an actual tree [or a picture of one] to communicate intelligibly.

Up to a point, it’s the same thing in the is/ought world. If you are among English speaking people and say “my daughter had an abortion this morning”, are postmodernists not going to understand what your daughter chose to do? Only if they never heard of an abortion. If postmodernism revolves around the rejection of the “grand narratives and ideologies of modernism” that’s only really applicable to discussions relating to the morality of abortion, not abortion as a medical procedure.

And, from my frame of mind, moral relativism here has nothing to do with premodern, modern and postmodern human interactions. It’s a manifestation of dasein.

Accordingly, another important concept of Postmodern thought comes from the Discourse theory of the Poststructuralists. Discourse theory states that the signs and symbols which language uses to represent the world fundamentally alters the psyche of people using language. This shapes their very ability to perceive the world around them. Postmodern discussions of politics tend to revolve around this idea of language.

Yes, of politics. But not when the discussions revolve around, say, Putin invading Ukraine. Here the facts are the facts are the facts for all of us. At least to the extent that the facts can be demonstrated. But when discussions of politics here revolve around right and wrong, good and bad behaviors…

What is “in fact” true then?

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Power…becomes closely linked with language in Postmodern thought as a consequence of language’s ability to shape psyche. Thinkers like Foucault focus especially on power because they view language as a subtle, insidious form of power. It is seen as something which dominates people not through coercion or force of arms, but by shaping how they are even allowed to understand the world.

Power because whenever moral and political values come into conflict whoever has the power to enforce his or her own understanding of the really important words will often prevail. Just think of all the back and forth now going on regarding the language used by the powers that be to shape and mold public thinking about the war in Ukraine. In Russia it is reported that Putin’s public approval rating is approaching George Bush’s after 9/11. Whereas here in America he is the Devil himself. Their words or our words.

In the view of Foucault and many Postmodern thinkers, power is not necessarily held by the rich elite or politician, but instead those that shape the discourses and ideas which everyone–from the rich elite, to the politician, to the layman–use to understand the world.

Yes, it always depends on the context. After all, all of us are indoctrinated as children to describe the world around us as others describe it themselves. Starting with a particular family in a particular community in a particular nation at a particular time in history. Power – might makes right, right makes might – can become of fundamental importance in shaping and molding our understanding of the world around us. Think of the media industrial complex. It revolves around the corporations that own them in sync with the corporations that advertise in them. Think about that the next you read their own accounts of, well, almost everything. And postmodernists have barely put a dent in that dynamic.

Thus, even though…

Because of this, strong Postmodernists have a certain skepticism of bodies of knowledge like history, science, and religion or what they call “metanarratives,” since they are viewed as means of dominating our conceptions of the world.

…has the media industrial complex really been exposed by them? And then back to what specific “metanarrative” pertaining to what specific set of circumstances. What can in fact be differentiated as true for all of us as opposed to just sheer propaganda. And then back again to, well, I have my word for it.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Power…becomes closely linked with language in Postmodern thought as a consequence of language’s ability to shape psyche. Thinkers like Foucault focus especially on power because they view language as a subtle, insidious form of power. It is seen as something which dominates people not through coercion or force of arms, but by shaping how they are even allowed to understand the world.

Power because whenever moral and political values come into conflict whoever has the power to enforce his or her own understanding of the really important words will often prevail. Just think of all the back and forth now going on regarding the language used by the powers that be to shape and mold public thinking about the war in Ukraine. In Russia it is reported that Putin’s public approval rating is approaching George Bush’s after 9/11. Whereas here in America he is the Devil himself. Their words or our words.

In the view of Foucault and many Postmodern thinkers, power is not necessarily held by the rich elite or politician, but instead those that shape the discourses and ideas which everyone–from the rich elite, to the politician, to the layman–use to understand the world.

Yes, it always depends on the context. After all, all of us are indoctrinated as children to describe the world around us as others describe it themselves. Starting with a particular family in a particular community in a particular nation at a particular time in history. Power – might makes right, right makes might – can become of fundamental importance in shaping and molding our understanding of the world around us. Think of the media industrial complex. It revolves around the corporations that own them in sync with the corporations that advertise in them. Think about that the next you read their own accounts of, well, almost everything. And postmodernists have barely put a dent in that dynamic.

Thus, even though…

Because of this, strong Postmodernists have a certain skepticism of bodies of knowledge like history, science, and religion or what they call “metanarratives,” since they are viewed as means of dominating our conceptions of the world.

…has the media industrial complex really been exposed by them? And then back to what specific “metanarrative” pertaining to what specific set of circumstances. What can in fact be differentiated as true for all of us as opposed to just sheer propaganda. And then back again to, well, I have my word for it.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Foucault in his discussion of power talks about how language is selective. Here he takes inspiration from French poet Raymond Roussel who expresses the idea that language does not designate a word for every concept for which designation is possible. This implies that there is a poverty to language since it cannot express all that can be expressed. This is a recurring objection in philosophy preceding the Postmodernists; Ludwig Wittgenstein famously makes a similar critique of language amongst others.

All that can be expressed? Yet isn’t language superb when it comes to describing actual physical objects and the relationships between them out in the world all around us? And with the increasing sophistication of science more and more “things” and their interactions can be described in extraordinary detail and sophistication. Last night the Science Channel took us on a voyage to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune. Through the mindboggling technological devices attached to the Voyager spacecrafts. Where’s the “poverty of language” there? Nope, we don’t reach that point until astrophysicists begin to explore things like dark matter and dark energy and “before the Big Bang”. Where is the mathematical language needed to encompass existence itself?

Where the Postmodern critique differs (though much of it is inspired by Wittgenstein) is the implication brought about when this idea is tied to power. Foucault posits that because language only selects certain parts of reality, it only provides a partial glimpse of reality. Those selections, to Foucault in particular, are tools of domination and power: reality is shaped in accordance with what those who have power want to be believed. Language is therefore restrictive in how it shapes reality and the fact that it only allows certain discourses, in accordance with those in power.

Then all of this gets connected [for some] to the language those like Marx and Engles chose to describe the capitalist political economy creating the class struggle that eventually leads to socialism and then Communism. Only [so far] that has not actually become the language of choice for most these days. Why? Because the language used to encompass the “human condition” in Manifestos meets the far more complex and convoluted language derived from the far more problematic reality of the “real world” itself.

And then the language I choose to muddy the waters all the more.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Freedom then becomes a prime goal for Postmodern philosophy. Understanding how to achieve it is a contentious point for Postmodern thought.

On the other hand, to the extent you emphasize that words like freedom become entangled in language itself…language out in particular worlds historically and culturally understood by individuals experientially/existentially in particular [often conflicting] ways…what does it then mean to speak of any “goal” at all, let alone a prime goal.

Here as well I insist that these world-of-words “language contraptions” be taken down out of the clouds such that in discussing how to “achieve” freedom [or justice] we make the whole point revolve around a context we are all likely to be familiar with. A controversial situation “ripped from the headlines” in which what some insist we ought to freely pursue others insist we ought to freely eschew.

Derrida’s understanding may be the most popular, which is that representation and language are inescapable–therefore making the achievement of freedom impossible. Most Postmodern thought stems from this initial position of Derrida’s, so the question then becomes: “If one cannot be free from the domination of language, how does one best find freedom?” The end is that each individual must find a relative truth for themselves; that is the best one can do to prevent themselves from being dominated through language and oppressive discourses.

Here, however, my own frame of mind is most controversial given the assumption “I” make that in attempting to “achieve” freedom and to find a “relative truth” myself all I succeeded in doing was fracturing and fragmenting my “self” given the arguments I make on these threads:

ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=176529
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=194382
ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 5&t=185296

Then the reactions of many here to that. Hostile to say the least. Why? Because I suggest that to the extent they are not fractured and fragmented themselves in regard to their value judgments they are likely to be objectivists. And in terms of my own existential rendition of “authenticity”, that’s a sham. That’s a frame of mind they cling to in order to sustain the comfort and the consolation it brings them. What they believe is nowhere near as important here, in my view, as that they believe it. Left or right, liberal or conservative.

At least in regard to the most hotly debated issues.

Only I have no way in which to determine if I might myself be failing to grasp that my own conclusions here are just another example of someone [me] allowing himself to be dominated through his own language such that his own discourse is no less oppressive.

And wrong.

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

There is a problem with this Postmodern emphasis on Freedom, that makes it impossible to function within a Postmodern framework. To make this point more poignant, I will use a Postmodern argument to refute it.

Postmodern Freedom? How is that not a contradiction in terms? Isn’t the whole point of postmodernism to deconstruct words like freedom by reconstructing them into existential contraptions that mean different things to different people out in different worlds understood from different points of view?

Not sure what this means?

Okay, note a context and we’ll discuss it.

Here though the closest we come to that is this:

Let us start with Derrida’s idea of dichotomies. Derrida argues language in the West is flawed because it is limited to various dichotomies: Good vs Evil, Presence vs Absence, Male vs Female, Speech vs Writing. Discourse tends to privilege one part of the dichotomy over the other: Good rather than Evil, Presence rather than Absence, Male rather than Female, and Speech over Writing. The argument is that the choice of what to privilege has no basis in objectivity or goodness, and that in reality neither choice within these dichotomies is inherently better than the other.

Of course that’s basically my argument too. Only when I seek to explore this or that gender narrative and Evil, this rather than that God and Good, I want to examine it in regard to actual human interactions resulting in conflicts that revolve around things like abortion or gun laws or the role of government.

Freedom then.

In a Postmodern framework, this has to be the case because if language does not refer to anything than truth does not exist. This introduces the problem that all discourses must become equal, meaning that you must believe that all ideas are equally privileged or equally worthless–a truly daunting proposition. The majority of Postmodernists choose to believe in the former: that all meanings, even within dichotomies should be treated as equal.

On the contrary, in regard to the overwhelming preponderance of language that we use in going about the business of living from day to day our words refer precisely to things that are not privileged to any individuals such that what any particular one of them believes is equal to what anyone else believes.

Really, how many here actually believe that?

So, what am I not understanding about the postmodernism debate here?

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Postmodern Understandings of Language and Power – Explanations and Refutations
February 1, 2019 Otto King
from The Postil Magazine website

Conclusion:

Then the question becomes how can the Postmodernist value Freedom over Oppression? How do they discern that Freedom is indeed privileged to oppression? Why are Postmodern thinkers also quick to value the individual over the collective? Even while disparaging the ideas of the Enlightenment and the West, Postmodern thought seems rather happy to take some of it as baseline assumption.

As always: Freedom and Oppression given what set of circumstances? And how is Freedom different from freedom? How is Oppression different from oppression?

Soon, we may well have a headline churning issue to focus on:

From the NYT:

[b]'Leaked Supreme Court Draft Would Overturn Roe v. Wade

‘A majority of the court privately voted to strike down the landmark abortion rights decision, according to the document, obtained by Politico.’[/b]

Okay, how would those who construe themselves to be postmodernists make a distinction here between Freedom and Oppression and freedom and oppression in regard to the language that they use in reacting to Roe v. Wade being struck down?

Does such a distinction even exist “for all practical purposes”?

The individual fetus or fetuses as a whole? Individual women with an unwanted pregnancy or all of these women as a whole?

What’s more vital…the Freedom/freedom of the fetus to live or the Freedom/freedom of the women to choose?

If the Postmodernist seeks to answer these questions, they will fall guilty to using value judgments rooted in language or needing to accept metanarrative.

And there it is. Narratives – the objective communication of sexual and biological facts – are there to be shared if you are a doctor who performs abortions. But if you are an ethicist weighing in on the morality of abortion? Where is the objective narrative then?

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The limitations of language
Catherine Hyman at The Patriot

By definition, languages are limiting. We cannot speak about things if the words don’t exist to allow us to do so. Sometimes, this makes us unaware of concepts others are able to discuss, other times, this limitation renders us incapable of speaking about things of which we are aware.

By definition. Good point?

In other words, might there be limitations imposed on language in regard to things that cannot be defined…objectively. In particular when words are combined not to describe things themselves but our reaction to the complex relationship between things. Even when you can look up all the words in a dictionary and get their definitions, when you combine all of those definitions you can still have many conflicting reactions.

And, existentially, the more factors and variables you combine [the past and the present and the projected future] into the description the more things that we attempt to denote become things that we merely connote instead. Given our individual reaction to all of these things combined [as we understand them] the more likely it is that disagreements will arise.

One limitation of the English language is a lack of a genderless pronoun. We have “he” for boys and men and “she” for girls and women but no good pronoun that does not identify gender. English has the word “it,” but this is not used to refer to people because it has been used to dehumanize others.

And of course in today’s gender bender world what particular gender does someone wish to be referred to as? Even pronouns become politicized and plunged into the ambiguities of “I” in the is/ought world. Only the objectivists among us “solve” the problem by insisting that all words can be brought into alignment with the one true reality. We are merely obligated to define the meaning of all words wholly in sync with the authoritarian dogmatists themselves.

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website

Language is the center of postmodern epistemology. Moderns and postmoderns differ not only about content when arguing particular issues in philosophy, literature, and law; they also differ in the methods by which they employ language. Epistemology drives those differences.

“Epistemology: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.”

And isn’t that basically the distinction I make here? In the course of living our lives from day to day, there are any number of situations in which human beings interact and no one questions what true or not true. It’s what we call the either/or world. What can we know about it such that neither modernists nor postmodernists get into squabbles over whether our language is actually closer to the objective truth than the language of others.

Here things get problematic only in regard to discussions that revolve around free will or solipsism or sim worlds or the red pill/blue pill sequence in The Matrix.

Postmodern epistemology? How can that not only really be in reference to the same epistemological limitations modernists confront in regard to “I” when conflicting opposing value judgments. We’re all in the same boat here given my own assumptions above and elsewhere.

Epistemology asks two questions about language: What is language’s connection to reality, and what is its connection to action?

Indeed. And now all we need is a context.

Epistemological questions about language are a subset of epistemological questions about consciousness in general: What is consciousness’s connection to reality, and what is its connection to action? Moderns and postmoderns have radically different answers to those questions.

Only here of course we are confronted with that age old conundrum that revolves around human consciousness and autonomy and human consciousness as but one more inherent manifestation of the only possible world. Only here, as well, in my view, moderns and postmoderns are still in the same boat. Neither of them are able to establish definitively how exactly matter itself became conscious of itself as conscious matter once it became living matter.

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website

To the modernist, the “mask” metaphor is a recognition of the fact that words are not always to be taken literally or as directly stating a fact—that people can use language elliptically, metaphorically, or to state falsehoods, that language can be textured with layers of meaning, and that it can be used to cover hypocrisies or to rationalize. Accordingly, unmasking means interpreting or investigating to get to a literal meaning or fact of the matter. The process of unmasking is cognitive, guided by objective standards, with the purpose of coming to an awareness of reality.

And, once again, this part gets particularly problematic when the discussions shift from the either/or world of things that are in fact true for all of us, to the is/ought world where, what might be believed as true by some, is not believed to be true by others. Then the way words can be used to dissemble, dissimulate, misdirect, posture, pose. Language spoken in codes.

For example, the debate over the Great Replacement Theory here in America. While some who support it are flat-out white-nationalists…unapologetic racists…others are racist but the language they use to defend it revolves instead around politics. The Big Brother liberal “establishment” – Jews by and large – are bringing in foreigners to keep them in power. Race, they assure us, has nothing to do with it.

For the postmodernist, by contrast, interpretation and investigation never terminate with reality. Language connects only with more language, never with a non-linguistic reality.

Now, my argument is that there is no objective reality in regard to conflicting goods. That the existence of God [or His No God equivalent] is necessary to establish an objective language. And that the whole point of of embracing “the Word of God” on this side of the grave is to attain immortality and salvation on the other side of it.

But: this is the case for both modernists and postmodernists.

Unless, of course, there is the existence of an objective language to resolve conflicting goods. And, if there is, link me to it.

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How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website

In Jacques Derrida’s words, “[t]he fact of language is probably the only fact ultimately to resist all parenthization.” That is to say, we cannot get outside of language. Language is an “internal,” self-referential system, and there is no way to get “external” to it—although even to speak of “internal” and “external” is also meaningless on postmodern grounds.

Or, sure, note how you yourself “resist all parenthization” given the language you use with or around others from day to day.

Typical “general description intellectual contraption” approach to language. Either that or just plain old pedantry. Obscure didactic jargon expressed in order to sound like some expect a “serious philosopher” to sound. Or to impress others with how “deep” they are.

Come on, be absolutely honest: we use language all the time in our interactions with others in which there is almost never much of a gap between “internal” and “external” meaning. And it’s hardly a meaningless distinction. Describing to others our daily experiences is not likely to to elicit puzzled reactions. “You took your children to the zoo, and later celebrated your son’s birthday at McDonalds? Well, I don’t see it that way at all.”

Just how “intellectually dense” can it get?

There is no non-linguistic standard to which to relate language, so there can be no standard by which to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical, the true and the false. Deconstruction is therefore in principle an unending process. Unmasking does not even terminate in “subjective” beliefs and interests, for “subjective” contrasts to “objective,” and that too is a distinction that postmodernism denies. A “subject’s beliefs and interests” are themselves socio-linguistic constructions, so unmasking one piece of language to reveal an underlying subjective interest is only to reveal more language. And that language in turn can be unmasked to reveal more language, and so on. Language is masks all the way down.

Okay, by all means, let him note a particular set of circumstances that he experienced today, and illustrate this text.

Or why don’t you attempt it.

Nope, from my frame of mind, the only time deconstruction becomes particularly applicable is when the discussion shifts from the either/or to the is/ought world.

Not that you took your kids to the zoo, but whether locking animals in cages or enclosures in a zoo is reasonable or unreasonable, moral or immoral.

Not that you celebrated a birthday at McDonalds, but whether fast food restaurants contribute to health problems and obesity in children.

And language is clearly not just a “socio-linguistic construct”…a mask all the way down in our exchanges with others.

Who here actually believes that?

[iambiguous]

How Postmodernists Use Language as a Weapon
Stephen Hicks
From the Church and State website

For the modernist, the functionality of language is complementary to its being cognitive. An individual observes reality perceptually, forms conceptual beliefs about reality on the basis of those perceptions, and then acts in reality on the basis of those perceptual and conceptual cognitive states.

Technically, of course, that basically sums it up. And, in general, it is applicable to all of us. We all come into this world with the innate capacity to think, to reason, to remember…to “acquire knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”.

That’s the biological scaffolding. But what unfolds inside that can vary considerably for each of us. Knowledge of the world around us given what in particular we are taught as children to make of our perceptions, our experiences, our interactions with others. The historical and cultural parameters. Thus the “concept of reality” that we acquire will often come into conflict with the “concepts” of others.

Fortunately, some then note, we have philosophers able to sift through all that “existential” stuff and provide us with the sound arguments we need in order to embody truly rational and virtuous behaviors.

On the other hand, of course, the rest is history.

For the postmodernist, language cannot be cognitive because it does not connect to reality, whether to an external nature or an underlying self. Language is not about being aware of the world, or about distinguishing the true from the false, or even about argument in the traditional sense of validity, soundness, and probability. Accordingly, postmodernism recasts the nature of rhetoric: Rhetoric is persuasion in the absence of cognition.

Okay, I may well be completely misunderstanding what is being conveyed here about the “philosophical” relationship between postmodernism and language and cognition and reality, but there is not a postmodernist out there who does not live in the same either/or world as all the rest of us. And there language definitely connects to reality over and over and over and over again.

And in any number of biological, demographic, circumstantial and experiential contexts there is definitely an existential Self able to be communicated objectively to all other rational human beings. Reality abounds here. Language here is everything about being aware of the world as it, in fact, is…and of easily distinguishing between true and false.

So, sure, enlighten me as to what I am misconstruing here about a postmodern reality.