text for what is “real” is an old difficulty, though it is not easy to determine from whence the difficulty arose. One may suspect that the issue is as old as Plato versus the Sophists. In any conventional understanding, Plato is always “the good guy” who deals with “reality,” whereas the Sophists are charlatans who deal only with words—that is, who devise texts. The bias against rhetoric runs very deep in Western philosophy and Western thought generally, certainly given impetus by Aristotle.154