Ahhhhh, a crushing refustion of realism. That's the signifier of the Phallus! Veddy bad. Now you really do sound like Brian S's caricature.
Me, I am manly man, a hard boiled realist -- a scientific realist at that! I got tired of the realsim debate in grad school -- it was sort of a standoff, though I have played with it on and off, occasionally over the years. But your particular move, that you can't say anything without using words, therefore the world is nothing but a text, is a fallacy as old as Bishop Berkeley. Only he used "ideas" instead of "words" and concluded that the world is nothing but perceptions and ideas thereof. This is a fallacy because of course the things that words denote or the objects of those ideas are not thereby words or ideas merely because we talk or think in ideas.
The debate gets very sophisticated, and smart relativism is very hard to beat. Ultimately I do not think it can be beaten with the a priori equipment that the relativists tend to want to say delimits the discussion. You can't dig yourself out of Cartesian skepticism or Berkeleyean idealism with nothing but a philosophers' armchair. The real question is, why should we allow relativists and skeptics to thus defined the terms of the debate?
However, straight-baiting is not a productive form of discussion. It's a big pomo yawn, the sort of foolishness that leads people with the sort of philosophical training that I have to want to dismiss all pomism as basically stupid and worthless. But perhaps you don't care to engage with analytical philosophers. They are all in thrall to Phallic logocentrism anyway.
jks
> CLS
>
>
>
>
> At 08:23 PM 10/8/03, you wrote:
> >Quoting Cliff Staples
> <clifford_staples at und.nodak.edu>:
> >
> > > No, no, NO!!! Those names for those.....
> things... are always already (as
> > > we are too fond of saying) a part of culture.
> >
> >I'm not talking about names, I'm talking about the
> reality they signify.
> >
> >Postmodernism, in its hegemonic form as a species
> of consumer ideology, was
> >basically high-end global branding: the speculative
> name was supposed to be
> >realer than reality itself. It isn't.
> >
> >-- DRR
> >___________________________________
>
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>
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