ABSTRACT
What if our language does not simply mirror or picture the world but instead profoundly shapes our view of it in the first place? This question lies at the heart of controversies in contemporary social science between phenomenologists and behaviorists, objectivists and relativists, and symbolic interactionists and institutionalists.1 This question also animates major debates in epistemology and social philosophy; witness such major figures as Wittgenstein, Austin, Gadamer, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida, and a new, if hardly illuminating, vocabulary of labels: postmodern, postempiricist, poststructuralist, postpositivist, and so on.2
