Language and Praxis.

The central thesis articulated and defended throughout this article is "that language is not about objects and experience, it is constitutive of objects and experience," or "that the world of "things" has no meaningful structure except in connection with the standards employed to ascribe qualities to it." The positivist doctrine of meaning underlies the familiar fact-value dichotomy for "the radical separation between empirical inquiry and normative judgment "derives ultimately" both from the denial of meaning to value statements and the empiricist construal of the role of consciousness." Linguistic analysts relying on common or stock use of expressions, have tended to neglect the extent to which there is an "ownership of the means of enunciation" and the degree to which "the "rules" one locates constitute a choice of power constituencies." Discursive practices "delimit the range of objects that can be identified, define the perspectives that one can legitimately regard as knowledge and constitute certain kinds of persons as agents of knowledge."