After people who’ve wasted their time with him read this post, they’ll probably tell me the answer is “no,” but I can’t resist. J. L. Hinman, a.k.a. “Metacrock,” has responded to some criticism of his work I wrote a month ago. The thing is silly enough to make me think “even Derrida must have smarter defenders than this,” but I’m bored, so here it goes:

The first silly thing is that Hinman claims I “read the page I did explaining the background of the argument and takes it to be the argument itself” and later says I was dishonest for doing this. But the page I linked to had a little heading that read “Here’s the arguemnt:,” followed by what looked for all the world like an (admittedly poor) attempt at an argument, with the seven numbered steps I refered to in my criticism. What is dishonest about assuming that the thing labled “argument” was actually an argument?

The second silly thing is that it is a misreading to say he anywhere says his “Transcendental Signifier” is a “principle.” Never mind what those terms mean, whatever they mean, they are clearly implied by phrases like “TS’s function is mutually exclusive, no other principle…”

The third silly thing he does is reply to my criticism of the logic of the argument (which he claims the post didn’t present) by saying that, well, he was reversing Derrida’s argument. Now, reversing arguments can work if the original argument makes sense: for every argument of the form “If P then Q, P, therefore Q” there’s an argument “If P then Q, not-Q, therefore not-P.” But this approach only works if the argument you’re reversing originally made logical sense, and it there should be no difficulty in telling if the reversed form of the argument makes sense independent of knowing about the original argument. Hinman’s argument, as written, makes no sense. So if he’s being fair to Derrida, Derrida’s original argument made no sense, though we needn’t worry about Derrida to make a judgment about Hinman.

Postscript: JL, I don’t know if you remember this, but you once called my book, which you hadn’t read, “dishonest,” and I offered to get you a reviewer’s copy. The offer stands.