BEATING THE POISONED DRUM

The naive perspective on language adheres to the specificity of the linguistic configuration as revealing truth. The rational perspective takes specificity as leading to the articulation of truth. But those much-maligned postmodernists might be credited with discovering that linguistic articulation itself induces the state it seeks to describe. This is the dawning of mystical insight, but it all too easily gets muddled by the return of the naive perspective.