Abstract

A large number of philosophers, critics, and rhetoricians continue to attack idea of foundationalism,* notion that our perceptions, our language, our very knowledge are grounded in an external reality. For example, Jacques Derrida has argued that there is no necessary connection between signifiers of our language and signifieds of an external reality, that signs must always be determined by a trace of what they be, what they signify (10-14, 70-73). And Richard Rorty has asserted that our understanding of language is based on an inappropriate metaphor of a mirror reflecting reality. Without that mirror reflection, Rorty argues, we must rely on how whole of a culture, practice, or language works before we understand its parts, that understanding is more like getting acquainted with a person than like following a demonstration (319). The major problem facing these theorists is need to account for our shared experience-how we seem to perceive in similar ways, how we learn and use a common language, and how we build a common culture. Without an external world as a common point of reference, they have often substituted idea of an interpretive community (Fish), social convention (Bruffee), or conversation about alternative standards of justification rather than the relation between human beings and object of their inquiry (Rorty 389-90) as basis for how we perceive, how we learn and use language, and how we know. But now conventionalism itself is under attack. Gerald Graff has pointed out that idea of an interpretive community does not sufficiently distinguish among kinds of strategies or conventions that individual members of a community may use in reading or in any act of understanding (112). And Kathleen McCormick has noted that notion of an interpretive community cannot explain how these strategies are acquired in first place, how a reader decides to join a particular community, or how she decides that time is right to develop a new (71). Thus concept of an interpretive community, idea of a group that shares a set of conventions, seems too broad to account for individual acts of interpretation and understanding. The philosopher Donald Davidson goes one step farther and argues that convention account for language use because there is no regularity in way we understand whether sentences are assertions or not, to say nothing about whether they are true or false; there is no regularity in way we understand