To be charitable to the postmodernists, they are overextending a perfectly legitimate defense against the Mind Projection Fallacy. If you take a joke, and tell it to two different audiences, in many cases one audience laughs at the joke and the other doesn’t. Postmodernists correctly say that different audiences have different truths to “this joke is funny” and this state of affairs if perfectly normal. Unfortunately, they proceed to run away with this, and extend it to statements where the “audience” would be reality. Or very charitably, to cases of people comparing quoted statements, where it is again normal to remind the arguers that different people can have different maps. Of course, it would be far more helpful to tell them to compare the maps against reality, if indeed there is anything the maps claim to be maps of.
To be charitable to the postmodernists, they are overextending a perfectly legitimate defense against the Mind Projection Fallacy. If you take a joke, and tell it to two different audiences, in many cases one audience laughs at the joke and the other doesn’t. Postmodernists correctly say that different audiences have different truths to “this joke is funny” and this state of affairs if perfectly normal. Unfortunately, they proceed to run away with this, and extend it to statements where the “audience” would be reality. Or very charitably, to cases of people comparing quoted statements, where it is again normal to remind the arguers that different people can have different maps. Of course, it would be far more helpful to tell them to compare the maps against reality, if indeed there is anything the maps claim to be maps of.