Polo shirts(language, democracy and the death of the signified)

[Brad De Long]

>  >I suspect Derrida's stuff on communication effectively denies a lot of
>>this, and, in so doing, denies us the potential to engage with him in such
>>democratic validation (communicative action).
>
>My (ill-informed) understanding is that Derrida's stuff is more akin to
>Hume's inductive skepticism, in that he's not trying to deny that we can
>*do* this, he's just trying to point out that we shouldn't be so b****y
>sure of ourselves, because we can't actually prove that we mean what we say
>up to the standard which we claim we can.  Just like Hume picks up his
>backgammon board, but with the intellectual humility to recognise that
>there is a sense in which he can't be certain that the dice won't
>spontaneously turn into canaries, and that sense is an important one,

Nicely put...

But if all Derrida is trying to do is stuff that Hume did 250 years 
ago, why the excitement?

Brad DeLong