"What are the questions that fascinate you?" "What do you want to know?"

It is a good while now—some five years—since I last published an article in Substance so I am grateful to the editors for this chance to reminisce and air a few bees in my bonnet. As it happens, that article was a piece on the realism versus anti-realism debate in philosophy of quantum mechanics, and must have struck them at the time as a bit far removed from the interests of most readers. Still, it included some lengthy passages about Derrida and a certain reading of Derrida that brought him out (wrongly, I argued) in agreement with the anti-realist position. Most likely this was why the piece went in, or perhaps just as a striking example of how erstwhile literary theorists—such as myself—were in the process of challenging orthodox ideas of disciplinary competence and scope. Anyway, it marked something of a turning-point in my own interests, which have since then focused increasingly on issues in epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophical semantics. I have also written about philosophy of logic and, in particular, those varieties of "deviant" (or non-bivalent) logic that have been proposed as—among other things—a means of accommodating quantum phenomena such as wave/particle dualism. So probably the best I can do here is offer some account of why my thinking has moved in this more "philosophical" direction, but also some attempt to explain why it doesn't, after all, feel like such a drastic change of interests.

One thing that has remained pretty constant since the mid-1980s is a commitment to defending realism in various forms against the range of anti-realist (or cultural-relativist) positions that have claimed the high ground in cultural theory, ethnography, the sociology of knowledge, "science studies," and other lately emergent fields of thought. Before that—in treating of deconstruction and Derrida's work especially—I had taken what strikes me now as a somewhat facile and overly "postmodernist" line, falling in with the then-fashionable textualist rhetoric about philosophy as just another "kind of writing," concepts as just a species of sublimated metaphor, truth as just a product of the epistemic will-to-power, and so forth. If anyone is interested in dating the change, it occurred between The Deconstructive Turn (1983), where I pushed this notion pretty hard in various contexts, and The Contest of Faculties (1985), where I entered some—at that stage—fairly mild caveats with regard to its philosophic shortcomings and its dubious ethico-political consequences. This sense of unease was considerably sharpened by the advent of a full-fledged postmodernist doxa—the term seems only appropriate—according to which it is the merest of delusions to display any lingering attachment to "Enlightenment" values such as truth and falsehood, or any realist idea that those values apply to a world that exists (or historically existed) quite apart from our beliefs, hypotheses, descriptions, language-games, or discourses concerning it. So I wrote several books that went on at great (perhaps tedious) length about the sources of this reactive counter-Enlightenment trend, its relationship to the so-called "linguistic turn" across various disciplines, and what I saw as the best—most philosophically compelling—arguments against it.

Then came the Gulf War and Baudrillard's notorious pair of articles claiming that the whole thing was such a pseudo-event—such a "hyperreal" spectacle or product of mass-induced media simulation—that the only dissident stance worth taking was one that adopted an outlook of wholesale postmodern skepticism and thereby called the bluff of those (the politicians, military strategists, media pundits, etc.) who would have us believe in the "reality" of war. This sparked a response—Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War (1992)—which I wrote at white heat over a couple of months and which was mostly received with frigid disdain by cultural theorists, not to mention a motley assortment of responses from outraged US citizens. All the same...