>
> Reduction of the world to our knowledge of it, or to the extent to which in
> principle it supposedly could become known, to "the world as knowable," is
> in fact the form of idealism that curiously lies coiled, unware of itself,
> at the heart of materialism.
>
>
This is the classic overwrought anti-constructionist position. I didn't
"reduce" the world to our knowledge of it at all. I simply don't have any
use for the metaphysical, supernatural, foundational (you choose)
supposition that there is a real world behind the material one since I don't
see that I gain anything from it and that I lose by ending up in a Platonist
world as a result. I don't know a great deal about the material world I
experience but I don't need to assume that there is more genuinely,
authentically, just true, essentially more real stuff out there to know that
the stuff I know, and don't know, about is and is going to be material
semiotic in character.