> Ian waxes Rortyian. Fortunately, as Rorty admits, the position is
self-undermining, since the claim that scientific and all other claims are
mere rhetoric is itself, on its own terms, mere rhetoric, and can be
reasonably rejected by them of us as distinguish between rationally based
belief and rhetorical appeals. That doesn't bother Rorty; he things we
rationalists will get bored or bore others with our tedoous talk of
nonrhetorical rationality. But I am surprised to see Ian take up the
relativist torch. jks
>
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Ah, a quick rhetorical rejoinder that clings to rationality without so much as a definition except for the putting of a *not* operator to prefix the term's constructed opposite in order to set the former free from the Heraclitean flux of history.
Still waiting for the rationalist's non-defeasible definition of the metalinguistic absolute, until then the relativist/absolutist binary just looks like another recursion produced by syntax-grammar dynamics peculiar to human beings...........
Undermining is metaphorical,
Ian