> 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
==================
Now now, a little Sheila Dow, along with Samuel Wheeler's "Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy" help navigate the phallicies all around. Sometimes serotonin is better than testosterone...........
Ian