Too Big to Know

"Over the years I have struggled with the works of this generation of thinkers. Postmodernist writings tend to be remarkably dense, either—depending on who you talk with—because they are attempting to undo deep, basic assumptions embedded in language itself or because they are using a fog of language to hide the emptiness of their ideas. Obviously, no brief introduction can claim to be adequate, especially since there are so many differences among them. Fortunately, we need only a few crucial ideas from them to help us understand the world of difference the Net exposes to its very visitor.

All knowledge and experience is an interpretation. The World is one and not others—the stone you stubbed your toe on is really there, and polio vaccine works quite reliably—but our experience of the world is always from a point of view, looking at some features and not others.

Interpretations are social. Interpretation always occur within a culture, a language, a history, a human project we care about. The tree is lumber to the woodcutter, a place to climb to the child, and an object of worship to the Druid. This inevitably adds human elements of uncertainty and incompleteness.

There is no privileged position. There are always many ways to interpret anything, and none can claim to be the single best way out of its context. Some postmodernists talk about this in terms of denying that there are "privileged" positions, invoking not only the Einsteinian sense (all motion is relative) but also, pointedly, the socioeconomic sense (the elite should not get to marginalize the ideas of the rest).

Interpretations occur in discourses. You can't make sense of something outside of a context. even something as simple as a car's turn signal can only be understood within a context that include cars, the basics of physics, the unpredictable intentions of other drivers, the restrictions of law, and the way left and right travels with your body. Ludwig Wittgenstein talked about this in terms of "language games", by which he meant not something you do for fun, rather the way our words and actions are guided by implicit rules and expectations. postmodernists have many different words for these contexts, but we'll use the term "dicourses".

Within a discourse, some interpretations are privileged. If you are within the discourse of science, fact-based evidence carries special weight, and emotions do not. On the other hand, if you propose marriage by compiling tables of data as if you were within a scientific discourse, you eiter are making a bad joke or are seriously disturbed. Discourses are themselves social constructions—they are ways people within a culture put ideas together. They are themselves part of nature, and they change through history.

To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data, the Atlantic, 2012-01-03