Yeah, I mean I have nothing against rationalism (mostly because I haven't read much rationalist writings), so if these are concepts that have made it into ratio

Yeah, I mean I have nothing against rationalism (mostly because I haven't read much rationalist writings), so if these are concepts that have made it into rationalism then there's really not much to add. >Throwing hands up in the air and saying "it always depends" isn't a solution. Admittedly, postmodernism isn't really inclined towards engineering problems. It does provide frameworks and lines of criticism, but I also didn't see many new ideas being deployed in that sense. This was also a point that I struggled w/ in the OP. >I know those examples, precisely because of the probability-wielding rationalists, who point at such cases as curiosities, and show how to put numbers on them correctly. I'd argue there's no useful way to put numbers on, say, borders. Even in cases where the geographic location of a border was definite, if I were to stand across, say, the California-Oregon border, it's not as if 50% of my body would be subject to California's laws and 50% Oregon's. Thinking of everything numerically and engineering features to support that framework seems like a Macnamara fallacy. I would also agree that some models are useful, but the emphasis on utility would in turn be problematic in a vacuum. You could reasonably predict, say, housing prices by racial makeup of a neighborhood (recalling the Boston housing data set controversy), but to do so would invite structurally racist applications. There are probably rationalist ways of de-emphasizing utility and accuracy, but again that's less my point and more to just illustrate that the biases of a model do not inherently remove from its usefulness to some end, and that critical frameworks can allow us to articulate problems. A map could just as easily center the world on Great Britain, Jerusalem, Rome, or China - to a certain extent they're equally useful and justifiable - but even with this arbitrary decision you affect how the viewer will see what the map represents. >I still can't imagine to whom this distinction seems "obvious in aggregate". I never found it obvious. Probably the word obvious wasn't the right term, but "definable at all" would be closer to what I intended. There _is_ an idea of what is left and what is right, but the words themselves are deployed arbitrarily. Perhaps a better example of where postmodern thought would be deployed would be something like exploring/critiquing the American right's notion of "postmodern neo-Marxism". This would be where concepts of floating signifiers and performance might be useful to explore how speech informs identity (not just vice versa).