Norm gets it:
[L]et me repeat what I often say to students who come braying to me with postmodernist ideas: Suppose that I return a term paper to you with a failing grade and a note that reads, "I should give you a much better grade, but I hate your guts, so there." You will scream bloody murder, go to the dean, possibly sue me. What is the assumption behind your outrage? Obviously, you expect me to grade your paper fairly - that is, objectively - regardless of my feelings about you. But why do you demand this of me as a teacher while denying my ability to do it as a researcher?I've found, from my own experience, that when this kind of objection is put to them people of postmodernist outlook are not in fact lost for an answer. They will say something like this: 'Of course, there is an existing language game here, with its own rules, conventions and understandings, and within that language game we too know how to grade papers fairly and objectively.'
Hooray, they know how to do it. They only fail to note how damaging this answer is for their opposition to the possibility of there being objective criteria. If everything is relative to one or another perspective, or cultural or intellectual framework, ruling out that there could be right and wrong (albeit always provisionally) about historical events, explanations of illness, ditto of the origin of species, and what have you, how does it suddenly happen that there's this thing called a language game which can be referred to just like that, as though what it is is clear to the vision, its rules are uncontroversial, its inner meanings and deployment of criteria supply a definitive way of resolving disagreement? If the pomo answer to this is to say that there is no such solid ground, because the language game itself is subject to the same relativizing effects that multiple different perspectives produce upon historical events, illness, and so forth, then the language game-type response to Berger's question is merely a delaying tactic. Once you fall through this particular floor, the relativist drop is bottomless. (See also this earlier post.)
Indeed, the drop is the fall into the abyss, and is not safe for children, or for anyone who cannot handle the metaphysical depths.
