Balls, Strikes, and Worldviews

After a game of baseball, three umpires were having a beer.

One says, "There's balls and there's strikes and I call 'em the way they are."

Another says, "There's balls and there's strikes and I call 'em the way I see 'em."

A third says, "There's balls and there's strikes, and they ain't nothin' until I call 'em."

Let's look a bit closer at these three different responses for a moment.

One might be referred to as a naive realist. The World Is The Way It Is and he's just trying to match unproblematic words to the things he's seeing out there happening before his eyes.

The second guy might be called a critical realist in that The World Is the Way It Is, but he understands that his seeing the world is perspectival.

The third guy might be called a postmodernist insofar as he understands that the world of things is meaningless until he invests it with significance by naming "strikes" and "balls" and telling a story about who "won" and "lost."

While guys one and two differ by degree, guy three differs in kind from one and two. The difference hinges on epistemology. Words don't simply correspond to things out there in the world, they invest the world with meaning and symbolism.