ABSTRACT
For modernists, the world simply is (or is assumed to be) rationally ordered. Within the texts of postmodernism, however, there are no grounds for such commitment. There is no means of declaring that the world is either ordered or capricious in itself. To speak of “the world” at all, requires language. The terms “ordered” and “capricious” are essentially constituents of language systems. To speak, then, of the “material world” and “causal relations” is not to describe accurately what there is, but to participate in a textual genre-to draw from the immense repository of sayings that constitute a particular cultural tradition. Or, to amplify my earlier remarks, the view of human beings as constituted by universal mechanisms (cognitive, emotional, etc.), causally related to environmental antecedents and behavioral consequences, is not derived from “what is the case.” Rather, this conception of the person is an outgrowth of a particular tradition of writing. It is an image that cannot be verified or falsified through observation; rather it is a language that precedes, directs, and orders observation.
