no, but their actions and words often play out these very debates. They take sides on these matters, they sometimes take both sides, only slightly aware of the contradiction. I see it everyday at my workplace. A coder understands the very heart of a poststructuralist claim that there is no foundaton or center, there is only layers of code upon code upon code and its all fragile, shifting.
A group of UI developer must sit in another room with a bunch of other s and realize: there is no God that says, "here are the W3c standards," and sees, to his or her chagrin, that standards are created by people, they are political, and there is great power to be had if you can get people to belive God created those standards. This is especially true when, as a group, we must make decisions about semantics and we must name or class and IDs in ways that people, ten years from now will understand, or that can be used in another application, performing same function, but with entirely different appearance and/or goal.
I always get a chuckle, every fucking day, about claims on this list that these debates are not something the hoi polloi understand or care about. Oh but they do! They engage in them every day, at my job!
I'd also point out that, in the civic groups with which I'm involved, these questions constantly arise: how do we make decision, what's fair, what do we "owe" people who give us donations or membership dues? do want to sully ourselves with filthy lucre? why must we sully ourselves with it anyway?
we just had a long and fascinating discussion a couple of months ago: what is art? among members of a group that had gotten together after a zombie survival game had been a huge underground hit in the city. We're not talking philosophy majors, but SAHMs, sailors, Frecnh teachers, secretaries, etc. Discussed the same damn ideas we discussed here!
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)