Creating Reality

I am apparently not done with Ms. Penman yet. This next bit is just about as irritating as the claim I just posted.

Central to the new postmodern constellation of beliefs is the crucial role played by language and communication. In this world, language is not subservient to knowledge, as Locke would have it; rather it is the means whereby knowledge is created. Our knowledge of the world is created out of our communication about it. - Robyn Penman, “Making a Place for the Practice of Dissenting,” Dissent and the Failure of Leadership, p. 215

This idea, too, smacks strongly of relativistic thought – knowledge is certainly shaped by the language used to discuss and describe it, but the object of that knowledge does not change based on its linguistic construction. To borrow from Saussure, the tree remains the tree whether we call it a “tree” or a “rabbit.” The word/sign may describe and invoke the ding an sich (thing itself), but it does not alter the substance of that thing. Our knowledge – as a product of reality – is not created by language, although it may be manipulated and colored by it. While I will allow that ideologies are born out of language, discussion, communication, and - yes - dissent, objects are not. Objects are objects. We might connote those objects through language and communication, but we do not change their essence in the process. Similarly, we do not change knowledge through communication and language. We might alter the way in which we consider that knowledge, change the way in which that knowledge is related to other parts of the canon, manipulate the presentation of that knowledge, etc., but the knowledge itself - like Saussure's tree - does not alter based on the way we describe it, argue about it, or deny its existence. Yesterday, one of my students brought up the example of the creation museum in Kentucky. This museum frightens me on a fundamental level because it participates in this ideology of linguistic reification to which Penman also seems to subscribe. The idea that by denying evolutionary fact, we make creation "science" a reality is profoundly disturbing. This is not "dissent." This is "delusion." "Dissent" should be reserved for ideological conversations, not refusals of established fact. Similarly, we should never suggest that facts - knowledge - can be created out of our description and discussion of them. A fact is unalterable. Its meaning might be - and often should be - debatable, but there are things that are simply not up for discussion. They simply are.