First, you wrote “Every question of major concern contains some element of evaluation, and therefore cannot be settled as a matter of objective fact”—if this does not mean to say “there are no facts”, I am not sure what it is trying to say.
It starts “Every question of major concern” so,straight off, it allows facts of minor concern. But concern to whom? Postmodernists do not, I contend, deny the existence of basic physical facts as regard them as rather uninteresting. When Derrida is sitting in a rive gauche cafe stirring his coffee, he does not dispute the existence of the coffee, the cafe or the spoon, but he is not going to write a book about them either.
Postmodernists are, I think, more interested in questions of wide societal and political concern.
(perhaps you are, if your comment “everything else pertains to politics, and is kind of pointless if not;” i anything to go by). And those complex questions have evaluative components (in the sense of the fact/value divide). Which is compatible with the existence of factual components as well, whcih is another wayin which I am not denying the existence of facts.
But what I am proposing is a kind of on drop rule by which a question that is partly evaluative cannot be solved
on a straightforward factual basis. For instance, there are facts to the efect that a fetus that is so many weeks old is capable of independent existence, but they don’t tetll you whether abortion is right or wrong by themselves.
It starts “Every question of major concern” so,straight off, it allows facts of minor concern. But concern to whom? Postmodernists do not, I contend, deny the existence of basic physical facts as regard them as rather uninteresting. When Derrida is sitting in a rive gauche cafe stirring his coffee, he does not dispute the existence of the coffee, the cafe or the spoon, but he is not going to write a book about them either.
Postmodernists are, I think, more interested in questions of wide societal and political concern. (perhaps you are, if your comment “everything else pertains to politics, and is kind of pointless if not;” i anything to go by). And those complex questions have evaluative components (in the sense of the fact/value divide). Which is compatible with the existence of factual components as well, whcih is another wayin which I am not denying the existence of facts.
But what I am proposing is a kind of on drop rule by which a question that is partly evaluative cannot be solved on a straightforward factual basis. For instance, there are facts to the efect that a fetus that is so many weeks old is capable of independent existence, but they don’t tetll you whether abortion is right or wrong by themselves.