>This doesn't depend on any fancy thing like "discourses." Or perhaps it
>depends on the assumption that we are both using the kind of discourse in
>which one ordinarily talks about chairs.
:)
My first day as a teaching assistant, the prof for whom I was working, initiated the "What is a chair?" discussion -- or so I thought. I expected it to be the discussion usually held in philosophy classes and it proceeded much like that as students discussed what made a chair essentially a chair, if a milk crate was a chair, etc. etc.
But then the prof moved into the way sociologists might look at the question by telling all the students that they weren't allowed to sit in their chairs, so please get up. They did. Then he asked, "So, where are we?"
Where are we?
:)
k
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling