The Insidious notion that there is no such thing as truth.

[jokerman]

    Postmodernists believe that there is no such thing as Truth, which is different from the notion that there is no such thing as truth. I am not sure that any serious philosopher would argue against the existence of empirical truth.

Can you dumb that down a little.

They don't deny that there is a material world beyond their senses. They deny that the mere fact they can sense it gives them any sort of privileged vantage-point to interpret the meaning of that world.

Essentially yes.  In fact the system holds a dichotomy between "fact" and "truth."  A fact is something that happens.  It can be described no other way; it is reality (of course some postmodernists I'm sure even deconstruct the notion of phenomenon as discrete, observable facts [that is to say, they deny even empirical truth]).

Truth on the other hand, as they have it, is based off of facts but can only essentially approximate it.  A truth can be a normative category or a scientific law (religion and science are more dependent upon each other than we might think).  

The basis of Western truth, for example, is causality, and the attempt to understand nature through it.  Of course we could have never proceeded with this without the innate faith in causality born in the Catholic tradition around the year 1000.  God's exists in all "forces" of the universe and thus the universe acts in accord to causality.  Simultaneously thus we see the roots for both Calvinist predestination and Darwin's natural selection.

Alas, no system is perfect, and that is why we have to introduce complete alien metaphysics into our science, such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, neither of which are in any way related to causality.

[jokerman]

     Postmodernists believe that there is no such thing as Truth, which is different from the notion that there is no such thing as truth. I am not sure that any serious philosopher would argue against the existence of empirical truth.

Can you dumb that down a little.

Perhaps I can also help with an example. As a graduate student in physics in the early eighties I had a roommate who was a graduate student in the humanities. We often got into lengthy debate about varius matters of politics and life, and rarely could we come to closure. At one point we tried to pin down what we took as fixed versus that which was debatable (I'll try for this example to avoid using the word truth.)

It became clear that as a scientist I saw facts as fixed due to their ability to be measured and opinion to be debatable based on the facts. My friend with a postmodern bent took quite the opposite approach. He saw opinions as personal and fixed by that person, but the facts were often in doubt and therefore debatable.

We each could show clear examples from our own fields as evidence of our worldview, but the very nature of our disciplines put us at odds when we tried to match up our conclusions. Our logical progressions were so fundamentally different that if our conclusions failed to match, we had little basis for a meaningful discussion.

Personally, I'm a pragmatist.  As long as your realm of the natural sciences continues to produce and advance civilization, you win the debate.  That is truth.