I did want to make one other point about language. I was going to make it in
my own words, but then in class yesterday I found myself reading this
passage from Andrew Sayer's _Realism and Social Science_. Sayer makes my
point exactly and much more eloquently than I can:
The "linguistic turn" in philosophy has been a mixed blessing.
While it has
alerted us to the constitutive role of language and textuality in
understanding
it is strikingly ignorant of our ability to do things without
language.
Thus
deaf-mute people who have never learned a language, whether verbal or
signed, can
still know a lot. It is therefore a mistake to restrict
epistemology to the
relationship between language and objects (Dews, 1984). Practice is
conspicuously
absent from postmodernist critiques of reference and
representation, such
as those
of Strohmayer and Hannah (1992) or Hutcheon (1988). Knowledge is only
discussed in
terms of speaking and writing, never doing.
I've often felt that much of the linguistic turn is due to the fact that it
originated with academics trained in the humanities. How anyone who's ever
struggled through a chemistry course involving experiments could ever equate
knowledge with language is beyond me. When I took courses like this, I --
along with many classmates -- failed more than one assignment because I
couldn't get the test tubes clean enough, because I measured reagents too
imprecisely, or because I held the test tube too close to the flame and
overcooked the stuff I was working with.
Marsh Feldman
--- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---