The app for independent voices
Some "interesting" comments from "some smart, thoughtful people in [your] network" ...
Though I think one might reasonably suggest that much of them is a case of the blind leading the blind. You might consider some more in-depth and solid analysis from sources like Britannica and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Wikipedia: "Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the 'grand narratives' of modernism; rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses ..."
And:
Wikipedia: "In philosophy of perception and epistemology, naïve realism (also known as direct realism, perceptual realism, or common sense realism) is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are ..."
The last bit having some venerable provenance, being, as it is, more or less identical to Plato's analogy with the cave: what we perceive, and how we interpret that is very much contingent on our biases, misperceptions, feelings, and fears:
No doubt there's a great deal of antiscientific claptrap and outright woo-woo wrapped up in the "practice" of postmodernism. Although one might say the same thing about many "models" of reality -- from feminism to quantum mechanics.
But largely the point of the more or less durable principles of postmodernism is that, as per Plato, "the true forms of objects [are those] that we can only perceive through reason". However and in notable contradistinction to which, the woomeisters of postmodernism insist that it's "models all the way down", that there is NO "reality" whatsoever at the bottom, that one model is as good as any other one -- rank insanity.
You might try reading about "model-dependent realism", a term that "was coined by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book, The Grand Design."
Likewise an oldish NY Times article about Bruno Latour, "the Post-Truth Philosopher, [who] Mounts a Defense of Science":
Think you kind of have to make some effort to differentiate between those who know what they're talking about and those who don't, between those who know how to properly use tools and those who don't.
