He investigates how societies create and perpetuate structures of reality (sociology of knowledge). The sociology of knowledge investigates human actions, habits, institutions, social roles and controls, legitimizations and reifications (dehumanization of the human products) (Berger and Luckmann 1967:89). General Semantics teaches us that language is not reality (Map is not territory) (Chase 1938:10). .
Building upon the legacies of the previous scholars, the deconstruction postmodern pragmatist Richard Rorty asserts that human languages are made rather than found, and truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences (1989:6-7). We can not determine the truthfulness of the language, only its usefulness. There is no objective knowledge, no truth of correspondence. Instead, there are stories that give the storytellers power when they are believed. Linguistics suddenly becomes hot on campus. Stanley Fish, a professor of English at Johns Hopkins, espouses a "reader response theory- that gives the reader the "joint responsibility for the .
production of a meaning that was itself redefined as an event rather than an entity."" (Fish 1980:3) Later on he develops another "affective community theory- to asserts that the writer, the critics, and the readers are all parts of a dynamic social process of ever-changing creation of values, understandings and norms. These believes are not idiosyncratic or arbitrary but communal and conventional (They are not solipsists.) (Fish 1980: 10-11). Jacques Derrida, a professor of the history of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, goes a further step to the extreme of deconstructing classical philosophy, structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Deconstruction is about the impossibility for language to accurately represent meaning (thus against logocentrism). The British critic Terry Eagleton summarizes it very well that the Western philosophy has always been logocentric, and thus objectivistic-.
For a while now I've been going through a long thought process wondering not "What is man? " but "What am I?- and where I belong in the garden maze known as life. My philosophy on all the topics that we've had in this course and those that I've experienced in my life are rather optimistic, hypocritical, and skeptical. I believe that human life is valued less than it should be, that it does have a meaning. ...
