18. However, in the absence of any understanding of the relationship between ‘meanings’ and things meant—the issue at the heart of the epistemological problematic which Latour dismisses but which has preoccupied an entire philosophical tradition from Frege through Sellars and up to their contemporary heirs—the claim that nothing is metaphorical is ultimately indistinguishable from the claim that everything is metaphorical. The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality: ‘It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of “words” and those that will play the role of “things”’. In dismissing the epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things that are not meanings, Latour, like all postmodernists—his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—reduces everything to meaning, since the difference between‘words’ and ‘things’ turns out to be no more than a functional difference subsumed by the concept of ‘actant’—that is to say, it is a merely nominal difference encompassed by the metaphysical function now ascribed to the metaphor ‘actant’. Since for Latour the latter encompasses everything from hydroelectric powerplants to tooth fairies, it follows that every possible difference between powerplants and fairies—i.e. differences in the mechanisms through which they affect and are affected by other entities, whether those mechanisms are currently conceivable or not—is supposed to be unproblematically accounted for by this single conceptual metaphor. — Ray Brassier

Ray Brassier, from that collection of essays, The Speculative Turn, you posted in the other thread, calls for a relationship between the extremes that seeks to avoid the either/or between 'ontology' and 'epistemology.' It is interesting to see him included in the collection because he has a bone to pick with all the other views presented. The lovely rhetorical hit on 'post-modernism' aside, this chapter neatly captures one problem balancing the points of view: — Paine