> And then she goes on to explain the supposed impossibility of defining
> or bounding a thing without effectively constructing it. Of course
> this is untrue. No human being constructed the rings of Saturn seen
> through a telescope or the pistil of a honesuckle flower seen through
> magnifying glass. We observe them
But every observation or cognition involves acts of subjective construction: transforming sense-data (say, a blurry image of Saturn) into a theoretical construct ("hey, that's a planet"). Butler's point is well-taken - basically, it's Hegel's insight, that to think a limit is already to transcend it. Otherwise, we literally couldn't think anything new or different.
-- DRR