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Be well, and I hope you love the show today.
So, in keeping with the theme from last episode, there's an attitude about the meaning of words and statements,
what's extremely common in the 1700s that still persists in some people's thinking to this day,
that would seem to a post-structuralist or pretty naive and outdated.
The attitude is something like, look, I am extremely careful and cautious with my words,
and I do this because I want to deliver clear, distinct statements that carry very specific, pointed meanings to people.
Well, it's not always easy for me to do.
Admittedly, sometimes I have to pause and think for a bit about how exactly I want to word something,
but because of how careful I am,
basically any rational person that's listening to the words I'm saying will come away with the meaning I'm intending.
Look, for you to misunderstand me,
you'd have to be either inept or insane or in the business of deliberately trying to misunderstand me.
To put this point another way, there are stable, authentic meanings to words and statements out there somewhere,
the same way an Enlightenment thinker may think there is a stable,
authentic reality out there that we're all accessing, or a stable, authentic self-identity that can be accessed,
and that if only we reason about the meanings of things in the Athenian Agra long enough,
and are careful and precise enough with our word usage,
we can arrive at the stable,