Uncertainty Principle
The argument over to what extent we can interpret our world with certainty has been festering for centuries. I first caught wind of it in 10th grade history class, when our teacher, a young monk named Brother Luke, talked about Hume.
A fiery classroom debate followed. At issue: next time you throw a dinner plate out the window, can you be sure it will drop to the ground? There might be anomalous factors that cause it, just this once, to rise up into the sky. The world might, at the precise moment you do the plate-toss, come to an end, causing plate and ground and observer to instantly vaporize, leaving the question forever unsettled -- although in that case, the question will also become meaningless.
Despite being unable to rule out these possibilities, we manage to go on behaving as if the world were predictable. We assume Newtonian physics applies in everyday situations and don't make a habit of throwing plates, unless it's New Year's and we're Greeks. Terms require parameters, which can usually be picked at until the term itself is defused, but they remain handy items to have around.
Post-modernists sometimes give the impression of having been the first to discover that unresolvable ambiguities and uncertainties haunt language, thought and existence. But aren't most people aware of this? Humans have the odd capacity to go through the daily grind while suspecting that our lives are, at some level of inquiry, incomprehensible and that our assumptions, if too rigorously examined, tend to dissolve in contradiction -- or, as Thomas Nagel suggests in his essay on the absurd, require infinite travel down chains of justification. Even the Bill O'Reillys of the world get this; hence the shouting. A fierce need to enforce boundaries/definitions combined with apprehension of slip and dissolve: well-tested recipe for violent rage.
Most of us use other strategems. Stand-up comedy's a good one. Camus recommended a posture of scorn. Nagel finds that a bit over-the-top; he suggests cultivating irony. Religious faith's another option: it constructs a kind of "ultimate justification" that we can refer all the other ones to, allowing us to escape-key the infinite loop and get back to weeding the garden.
Much of the time, some combo of the above tactics will work. When they all seem to fail, it's sleepless nights, pal -- pacing from bedroom to living room to kitchen. Short breaths, pain in the chest, a weirdly audible heartbeat.
8:33:42 PM 
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