There was the following passage in New York Times (April 13) article titled, “Philosophy returns to the real world”:
“It was in one of Fish’s seminars that I first read
arch-postmodernist, Richard Rorty, He convincingly defended himself
against the charge of relativism – I know, having spent hours in his
office, trying to make it stick — and yet he maintained that it was
useless to talk about the world, or truth. It was impossible, he
asserted, to try to describe reality outside of our linguistic
practices, to describe it as it would be if it were not being
described.”
What does “make it stick” mean here? Does it mean “correct,” “change one’s mind” or “fix the other’s mind rightly”? Is it a popular idiom?
I was unable to get an answer by Googling it.
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"make something stick" meaning
is one of the basic and good ways to find the meaning of a word. You don't seem to have used it, otherwise you'd have found
The narrator seems to have tried to make Rorty recognize that he (Rorty) was indeed a relativist, to make him accept the accusation/charge of relativism, to accept he was "guilty" of it.
Now, relativism is: