Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this you know

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So in keeping with the theme from last episode

There's an attitude about the meaning of words and statements what's extremely common in the 1700s

It's still persists in some people's thinking to this day that would seem to a post-structuralist or postmodernist pretty naive and outdated

The attitude is something like

Look, I am extremely careful and cautious with my words and I do this because I want to deliver clear

distinct statements that carry very specific pointed meanings to people

Well, it's not always easy for me to do

Admittedly sometimes I I have to pause and think for a bit about how exactly I want a word something but because of how careful I am

Basically any rational person that's listening to the words. I'm saying we'll come away with the meaning I'm intending

Look for you to misunderstand me you'd have to be either

enept or insane or in the business of deliberately trying to misunderstand me

To put this point in other way there are stable authentic meanings towards and statements out there somewhere

The same way an enlightenment thinker may think there is a stable authentic reality out there that we're all accessing or a

Stable authentic self-identity that can be accessed and that if only we reason about the meanings of things in the Athenian agra long enough

And are careful and precise enough with our word usage

We can arrive at the stable authentic meaning of these words that we can then use to communicate in a more objective way

To a thinker like Jacques Derrida this way of thinking would be naive

outdated and it's based on some pretty fundamental misconceptions about how language works and what words are when you look at them under a microscope

...