The Integral Text - A textual mechanism responsible for the analytic/continental divide, and divides in general.

A textual mechanism underpinning the analytic/continental divide, and academic divides in general. My thesis presents arguments in support of the idea that the source of the analytic-continental divide is organizational and is not grounded in conceptual differences or partisanship. It is a problem that is a consequence of the structure of the University "text" itself. This text I refer to as the integral text. It is a tangible, self-referring, non-subjective structure through which the University stores knowledge and retains influence.


Those who wish to grasp the main conjecture quickly can move straight to the description of the integral text, about half-way through this essay.

I develop the model of the integral text to describe both the structure through which an interpretive community fixes knowledge within its institutional repository and the way in which this structure restricts and promotes communication and academic influence. It must be noted here, though I will expand on it later, that the integral text is not itself a body of knowledge, but a single, indivisible structure that encodes knowledge, and embodies power as its dissemination.

This model offers a perspective from which to assess and tackle problems encountered in the dissemination of knowledge. If we want knowledge and the academic institutional repository to be secure against the onslaught of time then we must retain the form in which that knowledge is kept - the integral text; we must also accept, as best we can in the furtherance of debate, the restrictions to academic discourse that this form necessarily brings. The analytic-continental divide arises as a natural consequence and evolution of this structure.

Stanley Fish relates (1) an incident in which one of his old students asked a new tutor ‘Is there a text in this class?’. The tutor’s response was to give the name of a set text, but the student corrected ‘...in this class do we believe in poems and things or is it just us?’

The student’s question was an inquiry into the beliefs and practices of the classroom, even of the institution; for as Fish suggests, belief, practice, text and institution together form a system of constraints, or a ‘diacritical package’ of rules and regulations, governing the dissemination of knowledge. (2) It is not that the ubiquity of interpretation allows a chaos of free-play, displacing meaning from a centre of rationality, but that interpretation finds itself at the centre, uniting text and reader. The text sets down what is to be read, and the expectations of the reader determine what counts as a fact. To put the matter in a more formal vein, Fish eliminates the subject/object, reader/text dichotomy in discourse by viewing the activity of the interpretive community as ‘not objective because as a bundle of interests … its perspective is interested rather than neutral’; whose texts and meanings are not subjective because ‘they do not proceed from an isolated individual but from a public and conventional point of view’. (3)

The disciplines weave their interpretive strategies into the artefacts of the institution. Their interpretive intentions can be found in substantive form in books, papers, faculty and buildings, where they manifest as systematic cross-referencing, notes, prefaces, teaching and assessment criteria, even in the historical ambience of the college grounds.

This synthesis of form and strategy, knowledge and power, I term the integral text.

That knowledge and power share a structural form bears comparison with Foucault’s concept of an economy of discourse in which power is disseminated through channels of dialogue. (4) Fish also emphasises the strength and unity of a discipline and suggests that even if this is ’underwritten by rhetoric’ rather than by nature or logic, the ‘force of its operation in the moments of its existence’ is not diminished. (5)

To these sentiments, with which I am in general accord, I might add that while Fish underscored the unity and endurance of a discipline he was yet in need of that model which could properly support them, a model which the integral text effectually provides. As a substantial and integrated structure the integral text would give us reason to challenge, with Fish, claims that a discipline is ‘always a transitory thing’; (6) we might find a greater degree of resistance against evolutionary change among those interpretive communities whose knowledge is encoded in a well-developed integral text than among those that encode their knowledge and interpretive strategies in less structured ways, as might be found, for example, in local tradition and industrial practice.

Interdisciplinary techniques that involve the partial or complete merger of disciplines must also merge their integral texts, a considerable undertaking that requires the creation of a new integral text or a laborious re-wiring of the old. Until its development reaches maturity a discipline may be seen by those that have matured to be lacking in rigour or ideological motivation. A matured discipline is even less likely to show sympathy toward information that is disseminated by those communities in the public domain whose primary interpretive strategies are not encoded within an integral text. Knowledge or facts (I term them nomad facts) taken from these sources is often disclaimed as anecdote.

The status of anecdote appears uncertain. For Fish, there is no arena of discourse that is not conducted within an interpretative community. Anecdote in that case could not be a stray, a fallen fact without an interpretive community to house it. Rather, I suggest that it is an expression of a certain working practice, a name given to a protective manoeuvre preventing the break-up of the integral text and the compromising of the intellectual strategies of its interpretive community. I will return to this theme in the context of a divide.

The integral text, then, is a code, not a repository of knowledge, that guides our reading and writing. Texts arise by decrypting or translating the code where, for each individual act of reading, both integral text and reader create the text. Fish does not describe a structure comparable to the integral text but alludes to the creation of literature— ‘[literature]… is the product of a way of reading, of a community agreement about what will count as literature, which leads the members of a community to pay a certain kind of attention and thereby to create literature.‘ (7)

I now consider the rift that distinguishes the 'two traditions' or analytic-continental split, divide or stalemate, as it has variously been called. These latter terms indicate communicative difficulties and conceptual contentions between two groups of schools in the discipline of philosophy. I will subsume these contentions and difficulties under the term ‘rift’. The analytic schools employ methodological and formal approaches while the continental schools typically embrace phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction.

Rift

A ‘rift’ refers to communicative influences that are, or are perceived to be, injurious to the maintenance and evolution of the institutional repository of knowledge serving the analytic and continental common intellectual, philosophical endeavour.

I propose that dispute or conceptual contention does not offer necessary or sufficient conditions for the establishment of a rift. Accordingly, I use the phrase perceived rift to describe a rift that presents disputatious elements, and actual rift (or simply ’rift’) to describe the single necessary and sufficient condition that marks restrictions to communication. This condition I term a divide. (8) Unlike dispute, a divide is characterised by a refusal or reluctance to communicate, or communication through bias or distortion, or simply an intentional failure to read. Before I turn to the nature of a divide I must first give reasons why I consider dispute not to be constitutive of a rift.

Dispute

The term 'rift' in its generic formulation is often called upon to shoulder otherwise perfectly acceptable instances of communication, specifically when it annexes dispute. Fish describes why an interpretive community can accommodate disagreement: it is not, he says, because of the absence of conceptual contentions but rather because of the expectations of its members which confer stability on the interpretive community and its ability to absorb dispute (9). During periods of academic quietude, as Russell notes, (10) 'the historian of philosophy is less concerned with the professors than with the unprofessional heretics'. My claim, then, is that dispute, unlike a divide, is not a destructive communicative act when it is made in the context of philosophical discourse. I give three arguments in support of this claim.

i) Productivity

A debate is productive if it promotes the values and/or goals of its participants and of the communities over which the participants exercise stewardship. Productivity of debate is directly proportional to polarity of position in that a proportionally greater benefit accrues from the working through and extinction of opposed debating positions the greater the difference between those respective positions. Dummett, attempting to minimise the perceived lack of mutual comprehension between the two traditions argues that the Heiddeger-Carnap exchange should not be characterized as one of ‘deeply opposed thinkers’, but as ‘remarkably close in orientation’. (11) Either way, there would be no evidence of a divide or actual rift here, but rather two interpretations of healthy dispute, with the more contentious scenario offering the greatest release or productivity. I also suggest that a combative dispute may (or may not) catalyse the formation of an actual rift, but that it is not characteristic of one.

ii) Attachment

Debate displays the attachments of its protagonists. 'Attachment', as a cleaving to cultural tradition and individual habit of thought cannot be dismissed or censured as irrational, for the need to re-assess attachments of any kind may instigate discourse and inform its rationale. If it is unwise to censure attachment and also impossible to remove it, it may yet suit protagonists to limit its manifestations such as they might arise as polemic or invective by admitting ceremony to the protocol of discourse, and to denounce not attachment but that failing of spirit that denounces it. This perspective of attachment may not be the common view. Habermas's 'consensus theory of truth' seeks to free argument from the 'neuroses' and ideologies of 'strategic action'. While psychoanalysis may be less influential than it had been in Habermas's day, nevertheless, his point can still be grounded in a modern clinical practice that references symptoms to pseudo-physical dysfunctional states, which in turn are offered as causal explanation confirming the symptomatic status. I need not employ this popular example of circular thinking by citing neurosis or its modern bedfellows as justification for purging attachment from debate. (12)

In the Searle/Derrida debate (Searle, of course, representing the ‘analytic’ philosopher, and Derrida, while we must acknowledge his dislike for such categories, represents for our purposes the continentalist), Dascal, asking 'how rational can a polemic across the analytic-continental “divide” be?' intimates that the force of attachments need not prevent illumination elsewhere: ‘[...] in spite of the sarcastic tone employed by both contenders, there is enough common ground and serious argumentation to consider this debate more than just an irrational dispute.’ (13) Searle, it appears, failed to understand his opponents position. If this failure was a consequence of knowingly taking a traditional dogmatic line, then it would typify a divide, and not a dispute.

iii) Evolution

The evolutionary nexus of discourse is marked by dispute and resolution, these being a single gestalt embodying the natural resistance raised against the severing of conceptual and cultural attachments before the assimilation of knowledge. Prior to resolution we might expect a sharp but healthy rise in dispute, as fever before a recovery. By abandoning dispute, we also necessarily abandon the prospect or actuality of resolution and hence stifle productive discourse. Evolution of discourse can, of course, appear frozen in a stalemate. This also, I argue, is not indicative of a rift. In a local debate stalemate can arise in response to a failed challenge to an assertion, reflecting a lack of intellectual resources. If Searle did not have the resources to tackle Derrida’s arguments and had, despite himself, followed the lines of traditional dogma, then I might conclude that the debate was indicative of a stalemated dispute and not a divide or rift.

Concluding, by the arguments of polarity, attachment, and evolution I make dispute agreeably synonymous with positive communication in force, intention, and productivity respectively if, of course, the reader may consider these latter elements descriptive of communication generally. This leaves what I term a divide as the foundation of a rift.

Divide

Before describing the theoretical mechanism of a divide I must give appropriate definitions and supporting descriptions. To begin, I propose that a communicative rift is initially characterised by a refusal or reluctance to communicate effectively, and that in a divide this is re-cast by the interpretive community as a claimed inability to communicate. A divide is the necessary and sufficient condition of a rift, and is constitutive of an actual rift. I define a divide as: an action undertaken by the stewards of the institutional repository upon its texts that manifests as an inability of at least one of two or more knowledge-based communities engaged in pursuit of a common interest derivable from their knowledge-bases, to communicate on behalf of that interest. That is, a divide is not a set of conceptual contentions or a dispute, but an act whose consequence is to make texts inaccessible to debate.

A discipline may seek to claim an inability to communicate rather than display a reluctance to do so if, for example, it is faced with intractable philosophical problems and needs to justify its institutional role. As Norris suggests (14), the flight from Kantian a priori truths following the revelation of a Riemannian geometry leaves the analytic tradition bereft of the resources and inclination to tackle issues of the 'genesis and structure' of veridical propositions. However, the rise of anti-realism and other post-empiricist programmes would not be indicative of a divide if they arose simply from a redirection of effort, prompted by a flight from stalemate.

This was not always the case, however. McDowell working in the analytic tradition advocates a limited return to Kant; yet in a move typifying a divide fails to acknowledge authors in the continental tradition writing in a similar vein. Norris draws attention to the works of Bachelard and Canguilhem against whom this divide seems to be implemented. These authors enjoy restricted recognition among analytic philosophers, yet, in Bachelard's programme of 'applied rationalism' there is also a move away from dualism by informing an a priori derived Cartesian precept of supposedly 'clear and distinct ideas' with a firm critique informed by scientific method and progress. One reason for Bachelard's unpopularity suggests itself, '[...] Bachelard also insists on the process of "rectification and critique" whereby [...] metaphors are progressively refined, developed, and rendered fit for the construction of adequate scientific theories'. (15)

Enough, we must presume, to raise unfounded suspicions in the analytic community that Bachelard might be toying with a Nietzschean view of science in which veridical truths are portrayed as selections of rhetorical curio's and extant sublimated metaphors. The divide is manifested here as a refusal or reluctance to adequately consider or even read relevant texts if they are perceived to come from that ‘other’ tradition.

Elsewhere, a failure to read is found in Rorty’s response to Norris in defence of Searle. While the practical demands of an economy of reading can restrict responses and result in thwarted debate (indicating dispute and not a divide), we would not expect an elaboration or second rebuttal to repeat the failing. Rorty's hasty alignment with Searle's position is not so much a demonstration of his support for authorial privilege as he claims but rather the pretext by which he can promote the sufficiency of adopting a dogmatically pragmatic posture. Rorty’s Derrida ‘has no interest in bringing his [Derrida's] philosophy into accord with common sense.’ (16) As a careful reading of the text in question (Signature, Event, Context) shows otherwise, it appears that an act contributing to a divide has been initiated by a doctrinally instigated failure of reading.

The Integral Text

I begin with a summary of the key points

1) The integral text is not a body of knowledge, but a body of power.

2) A fact in an integral text is not an item of knowledge but a nexus of unrelated facts that serve the institution. These include history, personage, idea, and style, among other qualifiers, deployed through references, journals, etc.

3) Communication within a discipline is through its integral texts. Groups that have no integral text, such as the public, communicate through anecdote. Anecdote is a technical term here that describes facts and ideas that have not been incorporated within an integral text.

4) Different disciplines have different integral texts.

5) The logical status of integral texts is their incommensurability. There is no relationship or communicative discourse facilitated between integral texts. Two integral texts that must be merged must be disassembled into their respective nexus into an amorphous list of anecdotal facts, from which a new integral text can be constructed. This may take decades as the necessary historical, institutional and academic connections need to be interwoven together with anecdotal facts.

Before I can discuss the proposed mechanism for the implementation of a divide I will continue with a more detailed description of the integral text. I begin by offering a brief analogy. The typewriters of the 1970's held a metal golf-ball-like structure bearing type-cast characters. The golf-ball spun to the appropriate character when a similar character on the keyboard was struck, leaving the remaining characters on the golf-ball turned away. My analogy to the integral text is the typewriter golf-ball.

In a lecture the academic 'swivels' the integral text to present a particular integral fact, or cluster of them, while unselected yet still connected integral facts remain in the vast body of the integral text. Integral facts are encoded gestalt's or packages of information—of concepts, personages, analysis, etc., that, for the maintenance and survival of the institution, cannot be disassembled except under supervision. In teaching and writing academics need to have a close familiarity with the integral text to swivel it appropriately without distortion or breaks if their work is adequately to reflect the relevant themes and needs laid down by the institution and its greater interpretive community.

The integral facts that make up the body of the integral text are organized by themes. An integral text may have more than one theme. The complete group of themes I call a schema. Themes are often found in the way references to texts are organised, or else they may be found elsewhere in the interpretive community. For example, the typical schema of a continental discipline might arrange and reference its integral facts through its themes of named philosopher, history, and idea, and will emphasise these groupings in its texts, teaching practices and institutional historical ambience.

Here we might imagine history as a linear trunk, ideas as branches, and named philosopher which in most instances bear no genealogy, mapped to the branches and the trunk. The integral facts of ideas and philosophers are integrated in that they are referenced historically, while history and ideas in their turn are informed by named philosophers. The connections that are made constitute a completely inter-connected web whose nodes comprise a melding of themes.

A minority of philosophers, notably Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, appear to step outside this web by failing to supply adequate references in their works. This would, by my model, place their works as anecdote, that is, outside the integral text, the philosophical interpretive community, and the light of academic day. And indeed, if it was not for the fact that, for example, Wittgenstein had not been incorporated into the integral text by Russell and Moore as an integral fact under the theme of named philosopher/academic, his works would not have been ratified for inclusion into the integral text and promoted to the academic institutional repository.

While Fish offers a grounding for the concept of the integral text as I discussed earlier, a number of other models of limited relevance present themselves. A distinction between institutional and public facts is also made by Parsons in The Social Structure of Action, where he describes facts that fall within a system (cf. interpretive community) as an 'illuminated spot' (cf. integral text) and outside a system as 'residual categories' as 'scattered and un-integrated bits of knowledge (my nomad facts and anecdote circulating in the public domain). Against Fish, Parson's model appears to support a non-interpretive zone; further, 'residual categories' makes only a nebulous distinction between facts as they are held in the public domain and in the institutional repositories of disciplines.

Gadamer argues that the recognition of authority and its distinction from authoritativeness is dependent on being able to make a hermeneutic assessment. Text A, then, is authoritative when it conveys information and can render itself to a hermeneutic assessment. However, I propose that this assessment must at least reveal, or suggest the presence of, the integral text within which text A is placed as an integral fact, if text A is to display the authority that statements require in being made in the context of an institutional interpretive community. It must, to use Fish’s terminology, display a ‘diacritical package’ of some substance. However, outside the institution, where the integral text is displaced by other encryptions, such as tradition, then Gadamer’s assessment of authority may acquire greater relevancy.

Formation of the Divide

We are now in a position to begin to describe the mechanics of a divide. Critchley hints briefly at the organizational process underpinning it. (18)

"Both continental and analytic philosophies are, to a great extent, sectarian self-descriptions that are the consequence of the professional-isation of the discipline, a process that has led to the weakening of philosophy's critical function and its emancipatory intent."

A divide is implemented not by the philosopher but by the academic. Although the roles of academic and philosopher are rolled into one job position in a discipline their roles are distinct. The academics role is in the main concerned with the survival needs of the interpretive community which are met by presenting and promoting the discipline and its integral text through activities such as teaching, etc. The philosopher’s role is to meet the evolutionary needs of the interpretive community, which are met by invention. Unlike the academic the role of philosopher is transient because the evolutionary needs of the community are occasional. I do not wholly set a precedent in this role assignment for the philosopher: Derrida presents a persuasive argument, I feel, in finding 'invention' - whether as tekhne or episteme, or more generally 'production' inaugurated within a 'social consensus' or pedagogical tradition.19 Likewise, I suggest that the inventive productions of the philosopher are inaugurated within the pedagogy of the integral texts, and not to be found otherwise outside it.

The academic guides the philosopher to a pertinent group of integral facts for development. Integral facts can be used for argument, but not as argument, so the philosopher must first release them from the schema that binds them to the fixed interpretational strategies or diacritical package of the interpretive community. For example, if the schema organises its integral facts by the themes of named philosopher, or by historical events, the philosopher must not take these themes as premises in argument—which he would have to do if he worked with integral facts in teaching practice. Upon completion the work is ratified by the academic who organises it according to the themes of the schema, thereby encoding the work back into the integral text; only then is the text recognised as authoritative. In step with Fish’s model of the interpretive community, knowledge, then, is created from the integral text by the ‘reader’ who releases integral facts from their schema, while the schema points to which integral facts should be considered.

The transition from an academic to a philosopher role and the concomitant changes to the operation of the integral text can be illustrated in this simple example: a visiting speaker begins his lecture by adopting the academic role and offering scholastic displays of the integral text of his school to best advantage for himself and his interpretive community. The schema guides what he is to say, but does not allow him to work inventively. At a suitable point, generally when the display or lecture is over, the academic role is dissolved and the philosopher role activated by ceremonial announcement—’opening the debate’, whereupon the schema is suspended and invention, that is, debate, can begin.

Now to the mechanics of a divide. The inherent tension between evolution, and security and maintenance of the institutions integral text may come to the fore in intellectual crises such as those precipitating a divide. In a divide, destructive evolutionary pressures are contained by suspending debate and dissolving the role of philosopher for its academics, whose role becomes limited to the maintenance of the integral text.

A divide is then initiated by the conceptual, rather than organizational, deployment of the schema in discourse.

That is, in a divide, the integral text is itself offered as concept or argument. As there are no concepts, arguments or ideas in the integral text per se, "debate" is replaced by dogma. Dogma, for our purposes here, entails a presentation to interpretive communities that falls outside the institution and its integral text, for example, to the public or other schools. As the purpose of a divide is to argue with a structure that cannot support argument (the integral text), argument is reduced to the power of repetition, sermonizing, or derision, while its scholastic impulse is a failure to read alien integral texts.

A divide, then, is a destructive communicative act perpetrated against other disciplines. A divide is the one necessary and sufficient condition constitutive of an actual rift. Its formation mandates a theme of the schema of the integral text to a conceptual, rather than organizational status.

An example is called for; in a divide a continental camp might demand that one of the organizational themes in its schema - historical genesis, for example, is henceforth also to be considered as a necessary conceptual consideration for argument; while elsewhere an analytic camp might insist on the necessity of a formal presentation, if formalism is one of the themes in its schema. A divide may not be noticeable unless and until sufficient schools with similar schema’s come together as schools of allegiance to form a recognisable body, marking a traditional divide.

This, then, is the mechanism I propose is responsible for the development of the rift between the two traditions.

Anecdote

One exception to the "destructive" nature of a divide (which does not compromise the definition) is its positive employment against intrusion of anecdote or unregulated discourse between distinct interpretive communities—between those institutions that do not share an integral text. For example, in a divide the schema theme of 'named academic' can be mandated as argument, though it is not argument. This prevents any fact from entering the integral text unless it is either presented or endorsed by a ratified academic or school of academics. Unsecured attempts are often referred to as 'anecdotal', 'unscholarly', or 'inadequately referenced', etc. This effectively presents dissolution of the integral text from evolutionary pressures arising in the greater community.

Allison, in rebutting Amerik’s claim that Kant had privately entertained an ontological interpretation of his (Kant’s) transcendental distinction, remarked that what Kant ‘may or may not have believed in (as a matter of private opinion) is not really germane’ (!) Indeed, what Kant thought privately had no bearing on what he thought as an academic. This is a divide instigated not against other traditions but protectively against interpretive communities (Kant's personal ideas promoted outside the integral text) that have no integral text.

The above example demonstrates the perhaps instinctual awareness that academics have of what I have termed the integral text and its opposition to anecdote. Here, even Kant's own private thoughts can be dismissed because they have not been referenced and ratified within the integral text of a (philosophy) discipline.

Another popular theme of the schema often used by some branches of the analytic community to instigate a divide is illustrated by Bar-Hillel who, in this case, veils it as a friendly suggestion; we suspect an ultimatum, nonetheless: "Those speculative philosophers who are interested in having analytic philosophers discuss their theses couched in metaphysical language must use a scientific metalanguage as their rational tool of persuasion." (20)

Bar-Hillel assumes that metaphysical theses are better presented by being skewered as objects (signs) on a logico-semantic abacus. However, unless the formal presentation he seeks is merely a trivial request for semantic shorthand, we would not expect the metaphysics associated with the movements of objects on the abacus to mirror the metaphysics associated with the movements or character of the objects represented; nor in that case, would formal accuracy and clarity of delivery be of much relevance. Unargued for stipulations of Bar-Hillel’s sort can reduce any attempt at debate to a promotionally static scholastic display of schema's and integral texts.

In conclusion, both analytic and continental philosophies have common goals in the maintenance, promotion, and evolution of their distinctive integral texts. This distinction is not conceptual, or stylistic. And, I have argued, we do not engineer a corruption of these goals by engaging in dispute. It must be asked, of course, why a divide is sometimes preferable to debate, and I suggested reasons for this; notwithstanding the length of time it takes to develop different integral texts that alone can support a divide, a divide stops effectual debate and so minimises differences in excellence.

I hope that the models I have presented here might, at least as maps, offer a means of achieving a clarity of description for some aspects of the philosophical endeavour and for the problems of communication that can arise in respect of it, a problem that is a consequence of the way in which Universities, as interpretive communities, store their knowledge.

Notes and References

1. Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class, Harvard, London, 1980, p.303.

2. Ibid., p. 356.

3. Ibid., p. 14.

4. Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (1980).

5. Fish, Stanley, Professional Correctness, Harvard, London, 1995, p. 74.

6. Fish, Stanley, Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity (ed: Messer Davidow, Shumway, Sylvan, Charlotesville, Va., 1993, p.151.

7. Ibid., p. 97.

8. Norris also uses the term ‘perceived rift’ to describe the misperception of the continental epistemological position by the analytic community. In this case a misperception arises from a reluctance or refusal to study or debate and is I argue, indicative of a divide.

9. Ibid. p. 15

10. Russell, Bertrand, History of Western Philosophy, Routledge, 2004, p. 654.

11. Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Duckworth, London, 1993) in Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy. A very short Introduction, Oxford, 2001,p.126.

12. See McCarthy's introduction to Reading Guide to: Habermas, J (1976) Legitimation Crisis, London: Heinemann Educational Books (Trans. and intro. by Thomas McCarthy).

13. Dascal, M, How rational can a polemic across the analytic-Continental 'divide' be? International Journal of Philosophical Studies; 9 (3) Aug 2001, p.313 see also Alfino, Mark, Another Look at the Derrida-Searle Debate Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1991, pp. 143-152.

14. Norris, C., 'Minding the gap: Fog over channel, Continent isolated': new bearings in epistemology and philosophy of science, Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2000, p.4.

15. Ibid., p.7.

16. Rorty, R., Philosophy as a kind of writing: an essay on Derrida, from Consequences of Pragmatism, Harvester 1982, p.97.

18. Critchley, Simon, Continental philosophy : a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.54.

19. Derrida, Jacques, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, translated by Catherine Porter p28

20. Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua, A pre-requisite for rational philosophical discussion, p.308 in The Linguistic Turn: Recent essays in philosophical method University