That they make some sensible points, but they’re wrong when they push them to far (and that they are mixing factual truths with preferences a lot). Christians do have their own “truths”, if we interpret these truths as values, which is what they generally are. “It is a sin to engage in sex before marriage” vs “(some) sex can lead to pregnancy”. If we call both of these “truths”, then we have a confusion.
Right, both of these views on truth, traditional rationality and postmodernism, result in theories of truth that don’t quite line up with what we see in the world but in different ways. The traditional rationality view fails to account for the fact that humans judge truth and we have no access to the view from nowhere, so it’s right that traditional rationality is “wrong” in the sense that it incorrectly assumes it can gain privileged access to the truth of claims to know which ones are facts and which ones are falsehoods. The postmodernist view makes an opposite and only slightly less equal mistake by correctly noticing that humans judge truth but then failing to adequately account for the ways those judgements are entangled with a shared reality. The way through is to see that both there is something shared out there that there can in theory be a fact of the matter of and also realizing that we can’t directly ascertain those facts because we must do so across the gap of (subjective) experience.
As always, I say it comes back to the problem of the criterion and our failure to adequately accept that it demands we make a leap of faith, small though we may manage to make it.
What’s your answer to the postmodernist?
That they make some sensible points, but they’re wrong when they push them to far (and that they are mixing factual truths with preferences a lot). Christians do have their own “truths”, if we interpret these truths as values, which is what they generally are. “It is a sin to engage in sex before marriage” vs “(some) sex can lead to pregnancy”. If we call both of these “truths”, then we have a confusion.
Right, both of these views on truth, traditional rationality and postmodernism, result in theories of truth that don’t quite line up with what we see in the world but in different ways. The traditional rationality view fails to account for the fact that humans judge truth and we have no access to the view from nowhere, so it’s right that traditional rationality is “wrong” in the sense that it incorrectly assumes it can gain privileged access to the truth of claims to know which ones are facts and which ones are falsehoods. The postmodernist view makes an opposite and only slightly less equal mistake by correctly noticing that humans judge truth but then failing to adequately account for the ways those judgements are entangled with a shared reality. The way through is to see that both there is something shared out there that there can in theory be a fact of the matter of and also realizing that we can’t directly ascertain those facts because we must do so across the gap of (subjective) experience.
As always, I say it comes back to the problem of the criterion and our failure to adequately accept that it demands we make a leap of faith, small though we may manage to make it.