Stephen Downes comments on critique of post-modernism with reference to whether or not it is a “fact” that tennis balls don’t fit into wine bottles.
Despite the failure of a particular bit of language to unambiguously cover all aspects of a situation, It seems likely to me that there are nonetheless real facts about tennis balls and wine bottles. The “proof” of this is in the fact that we would be at least as surprised (though perhaps less entertained) to see a tennis ball in a bottle as a model ship – and so would immediately look for the illusion or trick that needs to be excluded in order to “save” the statement. (This process is a large part of what Imre Lakatos is on about in his book ‘Proofs and Refutations’ which deals with the same phenomenon in Mathematics.) Yes, language is an inadequate tool for expressing the full content of human understanding, and human understanding may be an inadequate tool for capturing the true nature of reality, but I think it is a mistake to infer from those sad facts that no such reality exists.