Optimistic attempt to explain postmodernism

[davewitley]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "caliburncy" <caliburncy at y...> wrote:

> When you get 
> bored, you can just stop--the most relevant stuff for our 
discussion 
> here is toward the beginning, I think:
> 
> http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/papers/jsalt.htm
> 
> 
OK I did get bored, but I read a fair bit.  The bit I don't get is 
this.  If I look at my carpet, I see a green carpet.  If somebody 
else looks at it, I can never know what they really see, inside their 
head.  Fair enough.  And they can call it red, or fuzzwurble, if they 
want to.

But if I get something else green, I can look at it and see that it's 
more or less the same colour as my carpet.  And I can be fairly 
confident that the other guy will agree that what he sees is the same 
colour as the carpet.  Which gives us the basis for agreeing that 
there is something called 'green'.

As I understand it, we have just 'constructed' greenness, in 
postmodernspeak.  And, yes, it was a social and linguistic activity.  
I feel that postmodernism wants to go one further, though, and say 
that because it was constructed by me and my friend, it has no 
validity for anybody else.  If my friend had looked at the carpet 
with *his* friend, they would have come up with something completely 
different.  I think the PMs' argument is that, say, if they come up 
with 'thickness of pile' instead of 'colour', then that's just as 
valid and I shouldn't impose my colourism on their carpetview.  But 
it seems to me to end up saying that we can't communicate - we have 
our colourist culture and they have their pileist one and all we can 
do is live in accepting mutual incomprehension.

The desire to learn from others is thus IMO undermined in the 
laudable attempt to free us from tyrannical teachers.

It's late and I'm rambling.

David