Why we should not be postmodernists

I wish to defend two claims in this paper. My first claim has two parts. First, I argue that there is a physical and social world out there which exists in a way that is independent of how we, as observers, represent it. In this sense, there is an objective reality. Following John Searle, I call this the claim of external realism. Note that this is an ontological claim. It says nothing about whether we know anything about this objective reality, or how we might get to know it, or whether there can be multiple accounts of this reality. It just states that there is a way that the world is, which is independent of our representations of it.