How To Debate A Post-Modernist
Lately, it seems that people believe modernism and post-modernism are either equally validated, or they are incompatible. It seems that no one dares to utter that modernism is better validated. I believe quite simply that any valid post-modernism is then modernism, while post-modernism can be considered false for only reasons other than lacking validity.
I've been trying (and failing) to build a structure that will allow me to demand proof of truth from postmodernists who will pander postmodernism as truth up until the very moment you require proof. What pains me, particularly, is that a postmodernist will frequently use sophism until it is no longer bearable. Only at this point, will they concede that their entire philosophy rests on the idea truth is subjective. They refute the necessity for objective truth. Because of this, they often make off like you are the unreasonable one for your demand of evidence. It's as if a truth that doesn't stand up to logos is somehow equal to one that doesn't, to them.
My question is: how do you reconcile the two, if they're in disagreement?
In my view, the modernist always win an argument based on truth. But I'd like to hear how this is argued out, by others.
I've been trying (and failing) to build a structure that will allow me to demand proof of truth from postmodernists who will pander postmodernism as truth up until the very moment you require proof. What pains me, particularly, is that a postmodernist will frequently use sophism until it is no longer bearable. Only at this point, will they concede that their entire philosophy rests on the idea truth is subjective. They refute the necessity for objective truth. Because of this, they often make off like you are the unreasonable one for your demand of evidence. It's as if a truth that doesn't stand up to logos is somehow equal to one that doesn't, to them.
My question is: how do you reconcile the two, if they're in disagreement?
In my view, the modernist always win an argument based on truth. But I'd like to hear how this is argued out, by others.
Comments (171)
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/whats-the-use-of-truth/9780231140140
I think I know the bit of sophistry you're referring to, it goes something like this:
P1: Absolute certainty is not achievable through empirical evidence.
Therefore,
C1: Evidence doesn't matter.
It's a pretty silly piece of reasoning, so my advice is to embrace it on behalf of your opponent in order to show them where it leads.
If evidence doesn't matter, then paying detectives to solve crimes would be a complete waste of time.
If evidence doesn't matter, then neither do the conclusions that evidence points to.
If evidence doesn't matter, then we have no way of evaluating the truthiness of any statement whatsoever. "Injecting heroine in the mornings is conducive to human health" is just as likely to correspond to reality as it's inverse, so far as we know...
When someone questions the very value of evidence itself during the course of a debate, it's probably because they have none of any quality. Point out why your evidence is stronger than theirs and you will have done your due diligence. If someone is resorting to the old"well you cannot be absolutely certain of anything" line, just tell them "we cannot be absolutely certain shit stinks, but we don't need to test that possibility with every single bowel movement".
Good luck finding that opponent outside of the junior leagues.
I have my own more advanced terms that I hold in reserve. The thing is, I'm looking for a deeper conception of the postmodern view of the problem. I, personally, find the argument superfluous. Post-modernism and modernism are a continuum. The post-modernism only flowers when it is expressed in reality, which then makes it modernism by every account. Postmodernism might still be logos, but it's not the expression of logos (like modernism.) The expression of logos is already in reality, whereas the logos itself isn't. The logos is the conception, and modernism will always require for the conception to have expression. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is an expression of the logos that can only exist in the logos. It is essentially the error of logos until it manifests itself in reality, and does (in reality) what it was predicted to do.
The greatest aspiration of postmodernism is to be modernism, basically. That's how lacking postmodernism is; which I think ought to be enough to prove it's inferiority to modernism. The postmodernist, then, of course, asks "is inferiority such a problem" .. his sad Nihilistic soul believes nothing. But in the same breath, you can't present any truth that a postmodernist won't shit on. Truth's only defense is being, and being is a fragile state.
If a postmodern idea comes into reality and does as it was not predicted to do, your postmodernism is basically in error. At which point, modernism takes over again to make a declaration of virtue. Modernism is still in error when it predicts results too, of course, but it's always right enough to express itself in reality (since that's required with a main axiom of truth -- it's evidence.)
Postmodernism ultimately has the least credibility for producing "good" results OR "true" results, in my view. I read "what's the use of truth" and found both of their arguments lacking, but the postmodern view was unsurprisingly more lacking. My problem is that I'm still not quite sure how to reshape the argument, but maybe I should just keep working on it. If that book can be interpreted as the pinnacle of debate on the issue, I guess it could be worthwhile.
In any case, I hope people keep arguing so I can sharpen my views on the topic.
One thing that inevitably works is sharpening your teeth. Heh.
This is quite a common view on this and the old pf forum. An odd thing is, the assertion is rarely backed up by an actual quote from an actual post-modernist, duly critiqued.
There are many analytic philosophers who have a 'deflationary' view of truth and the odd postmodernist who bangs on about it far too much; the more I've read, the less obvious does this supposed contrast seem to me.
Oddly enough, in the arts, my view has always been that modernism did the opposite to your claim; rather, it problematized 'truth'. If you take 'The waste land', Eliot presented a diverse range of voices with no clear overarching 'truth' at all (although later he became a Christian). If you take the novel, Woolf or Joyce or Dos Passos presented us with a plurality of subjective voices as against the Victorian era novel where you always knew what the author would think. If you take painting and sculpture, the Impressionists, Picasso and the Cubists inaugurated devastating assaults on old ways of truth-telling. Take 'The rites of Spring' and Schoenberg...where is the sanctuary of truth in all this?
The best representative of that side is Rorty. On the plus side he writes as clearly as any analytic philosopher. Other than the other book I mentioned, look at Bouveresse and Rorty's reply in
https://www.amazon.com/Rorty-His-Critics-Robert-Brandom/dp/0631209824
I'd say truth's sanctuary is an eternal compulsion to be.
Or more accurately, it's eternal compulsion to be. Truth can be reproduced. It has logos, prior to logos.
He looks at the role the curator plays in our museums. The following is from his “The Aesthetics of Singularity: Time and Event in Postmodernity”
What are you trying to argue?
If your trying to build an argument based on 'truth', I would be a little careful. We can construct 'truth' through mental constructions in our own mind but these 'truths' are only truth because we label them as such. When dealing with reality, our mental constructs can adequately represent the things we perceive some of the time; but not perfectly. This isn't a big deal unless you are dealing with issues such as ethics, certain philosophical questions involving non-trivial problems, etc.
While many sciences have 'truths' which are really just information on how to deal with such and such, 'truth' in philosophy can take on a grandiose meaning if you are not careful where you use it. I personally prefer the terms 'data' and 'information' than the term 'truth' when dealing subjects since those terms make it obvious they are only useful in certain contexts and subject to change.
Hopeful this advice helps you if your argument is being undermined by using the term 'truth' in ways that displeases others; otherwise I have poorly spent my time by writing this.
Not when the claim is supported by good reasons. But to say that no reason is better than another would be dogmatic, because without the possibility to distinguish the quality of a reason from another one would merely think what is good or true (or whatever some threat or power makes one think) without the support of good reason.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Someone like Rorty would leave science alone but take issue with the philosophy of science.
He hopes that we will eventually abandon the debates of the philosophy of science for the reasons that we have already done so for the consubstantiation/transubstantiation debate - not because we have settled the issue one way or another but because we have outgrown the question.
He would agree with Richard Feynman that a scientist needs philosophy as much as a bird needs ornithology.
But my earlier point is, people are often saying this sort of thing, but not citing the apparent purveyors of it. Who are these postmodern 'thinkers'? What is the detail of their claims? How do they get to be so influential? Why is it so hard to name or quote them? It would be good to get to grips with them.
In education in the UK, for instance, we are currently moving - well, have moved - from a child-centred vogue following the 60's to a highly centralised school curriculum with more and more narrow testing and centralisation. This is not the spread of postmodern thinking, it's the opposite. Where is all this perniciousness coming from, and what is it affecting?
The authors criticized in "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" for starters.
Oh please. You have access to the Internet and Google.
My point is that the op and others also have such access. In a philosophy forum I would like to see specific remarks quoted and debated. That's the intellectual pleasure of it. Exchanging waffley rhetoric I can do just as well down the pub after a couple of drinks.
Well, that was 20 years ago, and quite a lot of ink has been spilt over it. Of course the Sokal hoax was brilliant. Still, I thought there was nothing intrinscially wrong with Lacan, for instance, using maths as metaphor, but that what he did with such metaphor tended to degenerate into pretentiousness, ideas in love with themselves. Nevertheless there's stuff I've learnt from Lacan, even if I wouldn't remotely go down the psychoanalytic path. Two interesting ideas of his would be that Descartes opened a subjective can of worms via the cogito, a subjectivity which we have yet to come to terms with; and that the belief that we can arrive at a 'language of truth' or metalanguage is impossible. There is no metalanguage. A formal language is not language like our language and the one cannot be assimilated to the other.
All academic language can be made to sound ridiculous. I'm studying analytic philosophy now, at a ripe-ish old-ish age, and immersed in that Anglo-American enterprise, it doesn't seem to me that French intellectuals have any kind of monopoly on pretentious bollocks, though they can be amazingly good at it. Among the analytics, arcane writing about knowledge and justified true belief, for instance, runs Badiou pretty close.
I am, to say again, arguing for clarity. Let's not just come here and pompously declare our prejudices. Let's get down to the details of what we think and discuss and argue over them.
Science is not tied necessarily to any particular philosophy. One can be a Young Earth Creationist and still practice science as effectively as anyone else (although a YEC might not think as creatively in the fields of cosmology and palaeontology, for example, as some others might).
On the other hand every scientist enacts some kind philosophy, just as all other people do. Birds don't need, and in fact cannot have ornithology (or philosophy) because they are (presumably) not conceptually self-aware beings. Scientists are, as human beings generally are, conceptually self-aware; so the analogy is a pretty poor one, I think.
Philosophy only in the sense of what's left after you take out the formal and empirical parts of your area of inquiry. Or to borrow from another phrase, "discipline of the gaps".
Sure, but a scientist will necessarily have a self-understanding that determines, at least in part, the way they work as a scientist. There are no absolutely pure "formal and empirical' parts of the discipline, that is an absolutist fantasy.
Equations and experiments.
Equations must be interpreted, and experiments conducted, by homo philosophicus. There is no getting around that fact.
And by your use of the word pure, nothing is.
Then making coffee is also philosophy.
Quoting Frederick KOH
I acknowledge there is a difference between doing science in a self-consciously philosophical way and "shutting up and calculating". My point is only that all human activities are practiced philosophically insofar as human worldviews, involving ethical, aesthetic and metaphysical assumptions, however tacit they may be, are always involved.
Quoting Frederick KOH
and
Quoting John
The difference is that you cannot "take out the formal and empirical parts of your enquiry" except in abstracto. And it is the in concreto that really matters.
Yes, I quite agree. This is especially true when the "formal part" of the inquiry is being identified with some abstract and uninterpreted formalism, as the earlier mention to the "shut up and calculate" approach to empirical science suggested. In actual cases of scientific practice -- i.e. "in concreto" -- a specific interpretation always is either tacitly assumed or agreed upon (but always only partially rendered explicit) by scientists who work within a shared theoretical or technological paradigm. Such a background understanding is required if the formalism is to be brought to bear determinately to specific experimental setups or domains of empirical observation.
It is paradoxical that the "shut up and calculate" approach has come to be associated with the so called Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics while the actual intent of Bohr and Heisenberg was to stress the ineliminability of the background "classical" features of the experimental conditions (and thus also of the agency of the observers) in the definitions of quantum "observables". One thing that the formalism of QM (be it Heisenberg's, Schrödinger's, Dirac's or any other picture) can't achieve on its own is defining the nature of the observables. There is no self-sufficient and uninterpreted use of the formalism of quantum theory that can be of any use in making predictions of empirical observations. The "shut up and calculate" approach to empirical science is a total non-starter.
It's a distinct branch of philosophy that is derived from and can (with it's unique set of axioms) find itself in direct conflict with existing modernism.
This thread is about determining which methodology (modernism or postmodernism) can be determined most correct.
My proposition would be that modernism imposes a higher standard for relevance to objective reality. That standard is the entire logos which science and mathematics are built upon. Postmodernism, on the other hand, has no standard; it does not even have an ethic, unless the work of the postmodernist clearly states so.
For these reasons I can only conclude that postmodernism is rubbish. The propositions of it, obfuscated by it's complexity, can not stand up to the slightest criticism. Not because the material is untrue, but because it makes no claim of truth. Instead, it imposes the question of whether or not truth can exist upon it's critic. If the critic is (the entire logical embodiment of) modernism, the modernism essentially reduces to state that truth is truth, and begins the introduction of logicism by next explaining how truth is the sum of parts. T=T, but T = T1, T2, so on and so forth until you've invented the foundation of mathematics. The explanation for why objective reality exists is fleshed out in all the splendors of logicism, but why logic works at all is a very exhausting explanation. Irreducible truth must be agreed upon before the interaction between modernism and postmodernism even begins, but this is what never happens in post modernism. To find an irreducible truth, proofs must be found at all levels: reduction, prediction and reproduction. In the absence of this process, you have a nonstarter.
The deceptive thing about postmodernism, is that it so borrows from all true philosophy on a nonstarter. It does not conform to the logos, period. However, the postmodernist inevitably seems right, having provided such a complex and loosely tied collection of modernist ideas. It appears as if the nonstarter is initiated by the critic, but it actually begins with the postmodernist's choice to refuse conformity with an irreducible truth. Without roots in the fundamentals of logicism, or a willingness to adhere to those fundamentals, we can immediately begin analyzing the main axioms of the postmodern philosophy. The next issue inevitably becomes the the lack of an irreducible primary of truth, other than of course an irreducible primary stating that truth is not an irreducible primary. Which is like saying 1 does not equal 1, without saying why.
In my view postmodernism can immediately be seen to say nothing. But that's the thing, people will often ask questions like "who's postmodernism?" or "what postmodernism?"
These questions are from a lacking understanding, in my estimation. It's not about the postmodernism, it's about postmodernism itself.
Why limit your assertion to formalisms and quantum theory?
Why would your assertion not apply as well to plain prose in a less mathematical endeavor?
In fact why would it not apply to doing washing machine settings based on what the manual says?
That's more or less why you would struggle with postmodernism. It's point is (a) truth is not the sum of its parts at all, but a unique entity, which often co-exists with others, sometimes even to apparent contradiction-- to use your 1 does not equal 1 example: it might be true that 1 is 1 but it is also true that, for example, a person may think: "1 does not equal 1" at the same time.
The modernist account which reduces the world to a single abstracted idea or truth is mistaken, and produces a myth that there is nothing else but that idea.
Where modernism reduces everything to the objective without a viewpoint, the postmodernist points out any instance of (a) truth amounts to a viewpoint. In a sense, subjectivities, viewpoints, are objective and not even contraction or conflict can take them away.
With respect to that, I wouldn't characterize what I have as "my struggle with postmodernism."
I'd characterize it as "the struggle with postmodernism."
The subjective viewpoint of postmodernism is actually therefor the objective viewpoint of all postmodernism. It can be reduced to and equated to a nonstarter. All postmodernism is different, but exactly the same in the fact that it flies in the face of the very concept of an irreducible primary, even despite having one.
That makes it complete and utter nonsense, does it not?
My assertion wasn't limited to quantum theory. Quite the contrary, it purports to apply to all domains of empirical discourse, scientific or not. This may have seem to be surprising to early discoverers of QM (or contemporary thinkers who haven't assimilated its lessons) since classical particle mechanics (and classical field theories) would have seem to offer clear paradigms of "uninterpreted" (or "purely objective") mathematical description of fundamental "material" reality. Prior to QM, physics had been viewed as the science of the "primary qualities" of objects, in the sense of Locke (as distinguished from "secondary qualities" that aren't intrinsic to objects but merely characterize their propensities to affect our sense organs and our minds in specific ways).
But QM turned out to display the mechanics of the smallest bits of mere "matter" not to constitute an exceptions to the case of the "high level" sciences that can't abstract from concepts essentially pegged to human interests. The indispensability of human interpretation in the cognitive apprehension of empirical objets turns out to apply across the board, as Kant had already seen it to be the case even concerning Locke's "primary quality" concepts (including, notoriously, spatial and temporal relationships).
As long as we don't call all of it (the interpretation) "philosophy", which was my original point.
The point is there is no reduction, no (supposedly) irreducible primary to which everything is reduced.
Truths are beyond a singular primary. Its objectivity is not formed by squishing everything into it, but rather by all sorts of different truths expressing it.
Rather, there are many irreducible primaries, sometimes in conflict, all at once-- it's not an irreducible primary that counts for everything, but merely a truth we might talk about. It's not an all encompassing viewpoint at all. There are viewpoints to which there is no truth at all. There are viewpoints where everything is reduced to an idea.
Yes, sure. Scientist sometimes tend to be dogmatic and philistine, especially when they are faithful to the religions of scientism and reductionism. In that case, when they specialize in the science of hammers, they are happy to proclaim that the whole world is made up of nails and nothing else. This needs not hamper their professional abilities so long as they are operating within productive research programs (as often happens within episodes of Kuhnian "normal science") and there is lots of fruitful "puzzle solving" to be accomplished within the prevailing scientific paradigm. When those research programs become "degenerative" (Imre Lakatos), then those scientists often are happy to ignore more productive areas of research, and they keep on hammering screws with a sledgehammer.
Truths are beyond a singular primary. Its objectivity is not formed by squishing everything into it, but rather by all sorts of different truths expressing it.
Rather, there are many irreducible primaries, sometimes in conflict, all at once-- it's not an irreducible primary that counts for everything, but merely a truth we might talk about. It's not an all encompassing viewpoint at all. There are viewpoints to which there is no truth at all. There are viewpoints where everything is reduced to an idea.[/quote]It sounds like you've forgotten that the logos is about reducing itself to the the truth, not being the truth. It's necessary for a representation of truth to do this, otherwise it contains non of that which is seeks to explain.
If postmodernism aims to be beyond a singular primary, it must then be truth -- not be aligned with truth, but be the truth. And that, of course, is not possible for any philosophy. Philosophy can, at best, represent an equivalence to truth. That's what modernism does, and what postmodernism does not.
You're highlighting only the flaws with postmodernism, don't you think?
It would be more accurate to say that most are apathetic to philosophy and too indifferent to care about whether what they do is scientism or reductionism. Those who care slightly more can always call their "ism" methodological and leave the debate to philosophers.
I am very sure ornithologists agree with chemists and physicists about what birds are made out of.
The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm.
Interesting inference.
Physicists can't agree among themselves what atoms are made out of, let alone what birds are. "...Being made out of..." is a relational predicate of restricted scope that has furthermore variable, contextually determined, interpretations. A lump of coal is 'made of' carbon atoms in a different way than a sport team is 'constituted of' individual players (at a given time) or a bird is 'made of' living organs. That's because things that are "made out of" distinctive parts also are characterized by form, and not just matter. Furthermore, what kind of form (or functional organization) they exemplify contributes to the specification of the "...made out of..." relational predicate that relates the whole object to its significant parts (in addition to defining what sort of object it is). Consider also, a computer being 'made out of' elementary logical gates, a governments being 'made out of' agencies, etc. etc.
Even if one conceded that, in a sense, most every "thing" (i.e. broadly "material" things) are made out of atoms (or "physical matter", whatever that turns out to be), material constitution just is one among many of the defining features that most material things have. So, this allegedly broad agreement among different sorts of scientists, regarding the ultimate material composition of empirical entities, would be agreement about very little that is of significance to the understanding of the empirical world (unless one is a rather naive and uncritical reductionist).
What was this broad agreement (if there was one) like in 1000AD (or 1000CE if you like)?
Significance indeed.
It's mostly the young folks with open (and also unformed and naïve) minds who readily embrace emerging paradigms. Scientists who already have been trained, and have been successfully operating within, the older paradigm often stick to it until they die (as Max Planck famously observed). Lorentz came close to develop the special theory of relativity bet never embraced it. Einstein pioneered some key aspects of the new QM but never relinquished the degenerative quest for hidden variables. Fields like biology, medicine, geology, cognitive and social sciences, etc., of course furnish plenty of examples of die hard degenerative research programs that linger on for decades and stubborn advocates of the status quo. Philosophy is, of course, no exception even though is has a built in anti-dogmatic character. I am not lamenting any of this. It seems to be a necessary consequence of the fact that access to uninterpreted empirical reality is impossible.
I am not questioning that physics, and the atomic theory of matter, are significant intellectual achievements. They most certainly are. I am rather arguing that such material sciences aren't any different from other sciences in point of reliance on (often merely tacit and uncritical) interpretation of the scope of their claims (e.g. the interpretation of their "laws", and of what would constitute falsification of then, or admissible auxiliary hypotheses, or genuine boundaries of the domain of the specific science, etc.) I am also questioning the reductionist assumption that material composition of the ordinary objects of the human and natural worlds are any more fundamental or determinative than other equally significant (in point both of definition and behavioral determination) formal and relational features of them.
Isn't that because consciousness of any kind is in some sense interpretive? I think the point of philosophical wisdom is to be aware of the sense in which that is true, in other words, to be critically self-aware.
What scientific methods do offer is a way to discover, measure and describe those elements of experience that are common to all observers, thereby zeroing out, as much as possible, the merely idiosyncratic or subjective. However, in so doing, they're not necessarily disclosing an absolute truth, as scientific hypotheses don't general operate at that level of universality; they're useful precisely because they're very specific in some sense (even though they might have very wide application).
I think where postmodernism fails is that it takes this limitation to be a warrant for a kind of indiscriminate relativism, that as there are no absolutes, in the traditional sense, and as science is a matter of falliballistic hypotheses, then all manner of truths are 'in the eye of the beholder', so to speak.
Absolutism (dogmatic metaphysics, as Kant would call it, metaphysical realism, as Putnam would call it) ignores the constitutive role of human concepts in the disclosure of the empirical world. Indiscriminate relativism ignores constraints that are internal to conceptualized empirical reality. Putnam has proposed an alternative to both a naive conception of objectivity (embodied in scientific modernity) and the unqualified rejection of objectivity. He advocated this alternative under the label Realism with a Human Face. John McDowell and David Wiggins also have advocated forms of naturalized Kantianism that appeal to both Wittgenstein and Aristotle in order to demystify the role of human concepts in the constitution of empirical reality (while also bridging the gap between practical and theoretical reason). If post-modernism is correct in its criticism of absolutist metaphysics, thinkers like Putnam, McDowell and Wiggins have suggested that this criticism can be acknowledged while a suitably pragmatized Kantian concept of objectivity (which Wiggins also called 'A Sensible Subjectivism' -- see Chapter 5 in his Needs, Value, Truth) can be salvaged.
I have an interest in postmodernism in the arts, also I see a parallel process going on to that which is going on in philosophy.
I would say that postmodernism in the arts has had to find/establish/invent its own foundations/feet. This is a reaction to the crisis of identity brought about by the breaking of the foundational mould by modernism. It was left realing for a number of decades with a nebulous expression of personal reactions to this crisis of identity. In the visual arts there was an acute degeneration into shite, quite literally with Chris Offili's Turner Prize winning piece. Other fields in the arts went in various and interesting directions.
The result of all this is that art is now becoming creatively diverse with individual artists following their own personal path of creativity, free of subjective restraints. There doesn't appear to be a new grand movement coalescing at the moment. But there are many interesting developments, or movements on the small scale.
As to the value(read truth) in art these days, there are no rules anymore. A favourite quote of mine is what Grayson Perry said about the value of art. He called it the skip test. Put your work in a skip and see how long it is before someone walks off with it. If it doesn't leave the skip, it has no value and may not be art.
I'd also note that while I know these names, I agree with @Cavacava that this is more of a historical period -- and sometimes I think the generalization of what post-modernism states seems to me to be unfair to what particular thinkers associated with the period actually state.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
So, some scientists do this and others do that. Those who do this tend to be older than those who do that. Got it.
It doesn't bother entomologists. It is possible for some of them to never utter or write the word "quark" throughout their entire professional life. Or even proton for that matter.
Why should reductionists bother entomologists more than - say - nudists?
Put in such general terms, it is true to the point of banality.
I was responding to your claim that "The last time things became degenerative, physicists rushed to the new paradigm." History of science show this to seldom be the case unless your idea of a "rush" is a community wide process that spans decades to centuries. You also are ignoring the main point, relevant to this thread, that even in the odd case of a successful and rapid scientific revolution, the former set of tacit assumptions and unreflexive interpretive practices necessarily gives way to another.
And I was responding to your claim that
Quoting Pierre-Normand
What is true to the point of banality is a fortiori true. Yet, it is the most common thing to be denied by typical critics of "post-modernism".
When something is banal , its the banal and not the a fortiori that people notice.
Yes, and you didn't contradict it, whereas mine was contradicting yours. You also still are dodging the main point regarding the inevitability of an at least tacitly understood background of conceptual practice and shared concerns and interests for sustaining claims of scientific objectivity.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
In the generation that included Bohr and Heisenberg and many more. You are contradicting reality.
Banalities don't need to be dodged.
Scientists are people too, they tend not to notice what you and I now seem to be agreed on, and indeed to angrily take exception to what you now claim to be banal. They tend to object to is as philosophical nonsense, "post-modernism", relativism, etc.
They? Most don't care.
I singled out Bohr and Heisenberg as beacons of light. They were vanguard of a philosophical revolution that is quite antithetical to the "shut up and calculate" attitude that has been wrongly ascribed to them. They never shied from discussing the philosophical implications of the new physics. Most contemporary physicists still happily ignore this revolution and hope for an as of yet undeveloped interpretation of quantum mechanics that would restore something akin to the metaphysical realism that permeated the old Newtonian/Laplacian view of an "objective" mechanistic/deterministic universe that has its salient empirical features determined quite independently from our scientific practices.
It is a sign of a successful discipline when expansion and specialization occur. Some shut up and calculate, others work on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, others do philosophically tinged popularizations and some do combinations of the three.
You seem to need a caricature for banal arguments to be effective against.
Did you not notice the topic of this thread, the content of the original post, or the arguments advanced by the original poster? It would seem that my views fall squarely into the "post-modernist" tendency that s/he laments. But you assert that my views are true and banal. Maybe you think that the prejudices about science and philosophy expressed by folks like Sam Harris, Alan Sokal, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and the original poster, are "caricatures" that ought to be ignored. Since this is a philosophy forum, and the OP purports to be advancing a philosophical argument, I am responding to it seriously rather than insisting that we ought not to care about philosophical arguments.
But I am dissapointed Steven Weinberg is not on your list.
I suggest you fight him instead of shadow boxing. He is good on reductionism. You want a real fight, fight him.
I had assumed the OP in this thread was a human being rather than a shadow. I was a big fan of Steven Weinberg when I was a student in mathematical physics. His Gravitation and Cosmology was the textbook that we used in the general relativity class. I greatly enjoyed his Dreams of a Final Theory and the broadly Kuhnian (and somewhat anti-naive-empiricist) approach to the philosophy of science that he advocates there. His defense of reductionism, though, is fairly naive, philosophically uninformed, and sharply contradicts the pluralistic/pragmatist viewpoints that I have defended here and that you claim to be "banal". If you've been swayed by his defense of reductionism, I would recommend either George Ellis: How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? Top-Down Causation in the Human Context, or Michel Bitbol, Downward Causation without Foundations (scroll down or search the title in the page; there is a direct link to the pdf file) as counterpoints to reductionism that are both scientifically and philosophically informed.
On edit: By the way, another antireductionist paper that might interest you is Bjorn Ramberg (whom I had the chance to meet in Oslo a couple years ago), 'Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson', published in Blackwell's volume Rorty and His Critics, Brandom ed. This is the best piece in the volume, in my estimation, and maybe also in Rorty's own estimation. He had this to say in his reply: "Most of my responses in this volume are, at least to some extent, rebuttals. But in the case of Bjorn Ramberg's paper, I find myself not only agreeing with what he says, but very much enlightened by it..."
It seems like the junior leagues are the only place that a struggle between "modernism" and "post-modernism" is actually relevant. Who else is it that sits around trying to reduce scientific truth to cultural relativism? Is there honestly any serious reason or rhyme to adopt a post-modernist attitude other than the complete over-application of skepticism toward the merits of reason and empiricism?
The only motive I can think of for someone wanting to essentially equivocate science with magic, and ritual human sacrifice with democracy, is that they're uncomfortable with the moral and epistemological condemnation that emerges from the contrast between such systems. If post-modernism is actually all about better quantifying "truth", they're not bringing much to the table by hitting the Cartesian reset button on reason and gluing it down when it comes to morality.
This iteration of post-modernism reminds me of a psychological phenomenon called "semantic saturation", which is when you continuously repeat a word until it seems absurd and loses it's meaning. If a moral thinker has no grasp of the moral roots of democracy, then in the world at large it would seem like some over appealed platitude which is just arbitrarily defined as morally superior or more pragmatically sound to other forms of governance. Likewise, an epistemological thinker who does not understand the source and scope of "scientific truth", especially in the modern world which is downright lousy with science, might take the presumed or apparent absolutism of science as something worth questioning for the sake of questioning. When a rational thinker who does not understand where reason comes from or why we use it decides to apply skepticism toward the entirety of reason itself in order to test it's robustness, is that a form of irony or just run-of-the-mill failure?
I guess the answers post-modernists are(n't) looking for or haven't found are as follows:
Scientific truth is not absolute, but as it changes and improves itself it becomes something that more closely approximates absolute truth. The evidence is it's increasing and overwhelming reliability.
If we can agree on moral ends then we can use reason and observation to discriminate between more and less effective moral positions and systems as we continually seek to improve our own. The evidence for the moral superiority of democracy, along with many other moral positions we consider to be progress, is their reliability to promote a society that is not harmful to it's citizens and their happiness. For instance, it's a moral fact that in the current world collective punishment, slavery, and female genital mutilation are all practices which are detrimental to happiness and prosperity as social or moral objectives.
The attempt at complete disassociation between reason and truth is a backward slide toward what is at best a coarse whetstone which can be used to sharpen and reaffirm the merits of applying reason to the world around us. Before our more sophisticated reasoning we more or less had magic; we could use logic to some extent, but for everything else of import we were left to adopt superstitious nonsense. Using actual meteorological observations in order to predict the weather is much more reliable than subjectively interpreting the entrails of a disemboweled goat. Likewise, the outcome of a battle can be more reliably predicted by understanding the principles of war and the size, strength, and skill of the groups involved than it can be predicted by appealing to an ancient prophecy which may or may not have any basis in reality.
Until the reliability of reason oriented "truth" declines, it's extreme value will continue to stem from it's vast utility. It's not perfect, and our body of knowledge and ability to reason still has room to improve (and is doing so), so I guess in a way "post-modernism" as I have defined it here can be be described as nothing but dissatisfaction with the moral, social, and scientific fruits of modernity.
According to Chomsky it was around the 1970s when a group of Parisian intellectuals and maoists (e.g. Julia Kristeva & Co.) could no longer deny the atrocities in Asia for which other maoists had been responsible. So, did they reconsider? No, instead they became outspoken post-structuralists who rejected the self-sufficiency of right, wrong, true, false, good, bad and so on. As I understand it they exploited problems of philosophy as a means to get away with a dubious past.
Not all Parisian intellectuals were maoists, of course. But most of them had (or still have) an obfuscatory style of writing which has the illegitimate benefits of making themselves (or their interpreters) the sole intellectual authorities of their claims, and thereby also immune to criticism. If one does not blindly accept their claims one runs the risk of being intimidated and accused for being ignorant.
I think postmodernism has little to do with philosophy, although demarcation seems to be a recurring theme. Kristeva, Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze etc. became intellectual rock-stars by making all kinds of outrageous claims embedded in impenetrable jargon which attracted the intellectually curious as well as those with a grudge against established knowledge, skills, or habits.
It is not over yet, though. Currently many professors at our universities are old fans of these rockstars. Most graduates from my school of architecture know very little about how to build, because many of their teachers think it is naive to believe that there would be right or wrong ways to build. As if an absence of right and wrong would make us creative. But the way we build will therefore be determined by power instead of knowledge or rightness. I don't think that's so creative.
Perhaps the anti-PM enthusiasts feel that's a bad analogy because they feel PM has no worth whatsoever. Well, I am unable to find anything in John Cage's 4'33", yet I am undismayed that some people do, and don't think that I am 'right' and they are 'wrong'.
I very much like some ideas some post-modernists have put forward, and there are others that I strongly dislike. If one that I dislike has actual social implications, I will argue against it on a political level. But that's arguing against the idea, not against a nebulous 'ism'. Further, the argument is aimed at persuading not the interlocutor, but the audience of the debate. Hence I am not constrained to use techniques that the interlocutor accepts as valid. All that matters is that the audience sees them as valid.
If I had to do one or the other, it would be a difficult choice.
Actually I brought up Bouveresse v Rorty earlier in the thread - also in the volume. This debate is more "classical" in terms what you would expect in a realist v postmodernist fight.
My eyes glaze over when I see claims like this, these critiques, when unpacked and compared with the exact words actually said by the target, usually show themselves to be talking about something else from what philosophically mature scientists mean.
I know, which is why I brought it up, and also because of Rorty's portrait in your avatar. I thought you might have been open to considering Rorty's own views regarding reductionism. The contributors to the volume comment on various aspects of Rorty's intellectual legacy. There is no such thing as "this debate" that is uniquely being discussed across all the essays. Bouveresse makes one argument, Ramberg another.
I feel your pain. They will say something like
Quoting Pierre-Normand
to make the same point as
Quoting Frederick KOH
I was referring specifically to the Bouveresse v Rorty debate....
From this sentence of yours alone, I am very sure you have no idea what they are.
"Mature scientists" seldom are mature philosophers and they engage in as much pseudo-philosophy as any other intellectuals (including philosophers) do when they venture strong opinions about subject matter that fall outside their fields of expertise. Since I have Weinberg's book in my library, I read it, and used to be utterly taken by it (during my naive scientistic youth) then maybe you can tell me what specific pro-reductionist argument Weinberg makes that strikes you as being very strong and/or generally ignored in the philosophical literature. (By the way, it was one of my physics teacher, Jean Le Tourneux, who had informed me of the Sokal affair, while it was beginning to make waves in 1996, and who referred me to Weinberg's piece on it in the New York Review of Books.)
You forgot the gratuitous name dropping.
Yes, and I was reminding you that your take on "this debate" shouldn't motivate your dismissal of Ramberg's unrelated piece, which is directly relevant to the topic of scientistic reductionism, to Rorty's take on it, and is furthermore endorsed by him.
Challenge accepted. I propose as reference his Reductionism Redux collected in Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries
I picked the text. You fire the first salvo.
Could you show me where I dismissed Ramberg's piece.
I am not optimistic about debating you given your tactics.
You are the one who dropped Weinberg's name and endorsed his views on reductionism as authoritative (without providing specific references).
Do you really endorse that? OK, let me read this chapter and I'll comment later.
Feel free to attack the reductionism chapter in the 'Dreams" book too. I will defend both.
Quoting mcdoodle
Quoting andrewk
What you guys want seems unreasonable. Foucault, for instance, replaced the very idea of argument with discourse, and truth with power (Archaeology of Knowledge). Under such premises it is futile to argue against anyone's detailed ideas.
I haven't read Julia Kristeva. But I know that Deleuze, for instance, was inspired by the social unrest of 1968 in France in writing Anti-Oedipus. I also know that while Derrida indicates later on that he has Marxist leanings, he tried to remain aloof of the political scene in France. I point to 1968 just to note that the writers typically associated with post-modernism aren't necessarily maoists. (I am aware of maoists involved in 68, but it was far from strictly maoists, and certainly had a lot of on the ground political demands which were far away from China and maoist theory).
I think a lot of it is hard to read. But I also think that Godel, for instance, is hard to read. With secondary literature and study it becomes easier, but it takes effort.
I wouldn't expect anyone to blindly accept any writer's claims. It's on this basis that I'm saying what I say, I suppose. Don't accept any of it -- just read it if you want to actively reject it. Or don't read it, but you don't need to have an opinion on it in that case, no?
Quoting jkop
I suppose I'd just advise looking at the writers and criticizing them before criticizing the thing 'post-modernism itself', or at least just not having an opinion on them without reading them. That seems to me to be a pretty reasonable standard for criticism, no?
After all -- we wouldn't criticize a modern philosopher -- from Descartes up to wherever you draw the boundary -- just by belonging to that historical period. Clearly modern philosophers disagreed with one another. They have nuances which deserve attention. The understanding of the historical category is worthwhile for getting a broad overview, but it's not a way to reject all modern philosophers.
Not if one is arguing for the benefit of the audience - and ultimately of the voters. As I said, the yardstick there is what convinces the voters, not what one's opponent accepts. It is futile only if I fail to convince the voters. I very much doubt the average voter uses a Foucaultian paradigm to decide what cause to support.
The fact that I personally am useless at convincing anybody of anything speaks volumes about my lack of charisma and my incompetence at rhetoric, but not about the futility of someone less rhetorically-challenged publicly opposing a political view espoused by Foucault (not that I am currently aware of any political view of Foucault's that I particularly want to oppose).
Good for you! I for one will look forward to reading your comments. This thread could yet turn into something worthwhile and educational - for me at least.
[Insert 'I'm not being sarcastic' icon here, because the internet always makes it look like one is being sarcastic whenever one expresses enthusiasm]
What if your goal precisely is to assert power? Might that not be worthwhile? It need not be nefarious either. One may want to defend ideas in order to assert power on behalf of some oppressed group (or on one's own behalf), say, and not with an aim of revenge but rather as a claim for legitimate re-enfranchisement. I'm not used to argue on those terms, but that seems to be a line that would be available to a constructive (or social-democrat) Foucaultian, if there can be such a beast.
Foucault replaced argument with discourse, recall, so, you don't get to argue at all. Instead there is discourse, and whatever rhetoric you can muster e.g. by word play, charm, bribery, populism... anything but words that refer to facts. Explain the benefit of that.
Anders Weinstein who introduced me to philosophy 17 years ago (on the comp.ai.philosophy Usenet newsgroup) was constantly reminding me of this through his patient attitude to often fairly hostile fellow group participants. Also useful to do is to picture yourself conversing with your interlocutor's 'future self', as it were. People seldom change their minds on a dime. That doesn't mean that some of your (or her) arguments won't sink in in the distant future, when much of the rhetorical dust will have settled, and many stubborn background assumptions will have mollified.
More like he pointed out "argument" or "reason" was actually a functioning of rhetoric and power all along. In many contexts, we told ourselves we dealing with truth (biological essentialism, logic of identity, religions, gods, the technological utopia of modernism etc.,etc.) when it was actually a myth of hierarchy, performed to assert power over others. Under Foucault, the illusion that "truth" or "reason" is something more than rhetoric, word play, charm, bribery or populism is broken.
In dealing with the world and logic, thinkers like Foucault direct us move away from that illusion, to gasp our knowledge not by whether it is "Reason" or The Truth," but in terms of the world and expression itself. Both "Reason" and "The Truth" are empty in terms of knowledge. They don't identify any state of the world or talk about any true logical relationship. All the do is act as a marker for what ought to be believed under their own terms-- much like how "It's God's will" functions in religious cultures.
That's the benefit post-structuralism brings. We no longer confuse our idol of Truth for what is true.
At no point in any of his works did Foucault propose that argument be 'replaced' with discourse, nor truth with power. Neither did he equate discourse with rhetoric (and indeed spent alot of time and effort trying to disentangle the two). These are prevalent caricatures of his work, but they are wrong.
The case of Gorgias is difficult to decide for we may never know whether his claim that Empedocle had ordered his office in Leontini to be "eavesdropped on" purported to be factual or merely rhetorical.
That is useful to know!
Does my use of the word "replace" matter a lot? Foucault's prose is notoriously dense, so let me quote what is written on the subject in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Quoting SEP
As I understand it, what governs the outcome of an argument is, then, not the truth of its premises but some force beyond it and beneath our consciousness. That sounds like a rejection of argument to me, and without argument there are just thoughts and discursive formations (e.g. formed by the act of discourse).
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm sure he did, but did he succeed, or just try, and thus failed to disentangle discourse from rhetoric? Sorry for being so vulgar not being a fan of his.
There are also constraints imposed by the material world. In activities closely tied to the material world like counting, we find a lot less variation across cultures, and once asked, questions like "is multiplication commutative" admit only one answer.
In any case, your own second-hand quote deals with Foucault's work on epistemes, regimes of knowledge and truth, rather than the far more narrow practices of reason-giving and argumentation. These are two different things, and there needs to be some bridging work done to connect the two. Furthermore, even if if inference was legitimate - which remains to be proved - none of it would entail a 'rejection' of argument. What it would entail is a wider conception of what argument is, which, quite commonsensically, always involves questions of power, position, and influence.
Critics of Foucault often make the mistake - as you are - of thinking that Foucault pitches truth against power, argument against discourse or whatever. But at no point does Foucault ever set up such dichotomies. If Foucault is often badly misunderstood, it's precisely because he challenges these simplistic distinctions. The point is instead to demonstrate the workings of power in truth, discourse in argument, and so on. Foucault is explicit about how truth is not simply subject to power which manipulates it from the 'outside', but instead has a power of it's own:
"The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power: ...Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power." ("Truth and Power", in Knowledge/Power). This is hardly an implausible thesis, and from the Foucauldian perspective, it's precisely the power inherent to truth which can make it so effective in practices of giving and asking for reasons (argumentation). The idea that the focus on power and discourse somehow undermine truth or argument is simply a bad one - Foucault himself never makes this claim, despite the frequent projections of it made upon him - based on sloppy misreadings that don't attend to the specifics of the argument.
Quoting jkop
But it could only be a complete and total failure of comprehension that would confuse discourse and rhetoric in Foucault. The intense focus on corporeality, institutions, disciplinary techniques, and historical events at every point undermine such a reading. Like, you'd literally need to have never read a single paragraph of Foucault to make this mistake. Not to mention his explicit understanding of discourse as "a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area." (Archaeology of Knowledge). Rhetoric would be one element in this entire ensemble of considerations.
It is neither equivocation nor misreading to infer that he is, in effect, replacing argument with discourse.
He does so by introducing alleged powers beyond argument, which may compromise the argument even. The explanatory power of the argument is thus made less significant, or irrelevant even, compared to, say, bribery, good looks, or whatever powers there could be lurking beneath consciousness. Hence Foucault sneaks in his own version of "argument": discourse.
If uncritical acceptance of his doctrines qualifies a reader of Foucault, then I'm happy to decline. But I was never applying to be "a reader of Foucault", Instead I am criticising claims ascribed to Foucault, his method, and the deplorable influence they have on the quality of thought (for example, in our universities).
Furthermore, your claim is false that I would be opposing argument with power. It is open to read:
[quote=jkop]The explanatory power of the argument is thus made less significant, or irrelevant even, compared to, say, bribery, good looks, or whatever powers there could be lurking beneath consciousness.[/quote]
I get how the assumption of powers beneath consciousness and beyond logic can have such a deplorable influence on people's respect for argument and the quality of thought.
I'm glad the conversation has shifted to an actual writer. What you say, jkop, sounds quite like what a lot of students and teachers of analytic philosophy have said to me since I've gone back to study (mostly analytic) philosophy in my 60's. Not only are they against postmodernism, they do indeed have some sort of disdain even to read the people they believe they will disagree with profoundly. More than one told me it was sufficient reason not to read Heidegger that he was a Nazi, for instance, and many resist Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucualt...
This puzzles me, but I'm an incurably curious person. My reading is a bit scattered and so are my opinions: postmodernism seems to me a very mixed church, once you read in it. On second reading for instance I thought parts of 'Being and Time' were/are brilliant. I started off thinking Derrida was witty and clever in his deconstruction; now I think he's indeed clever but a terribly, at heart, negative writer.
I would like to stand up among this for Foucault. I read him first many years ago when I was trying to understand the history of mental illness and the growth of institutions that deal with the mentally troubled. I've since read two more volumes. I think his method is tremendously powerful and is firmly in the philosophical tradition. He reaches back to Plato and Aristotle to begin to understand the history of sexuality, for instance; constantly questions received certainties but is clear on what he is proposing to put in its place; his notion of genealogy as a self-written history seems strong to me. Analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power, it is mostly conducted in an imagined world of equals engaging in unrhetorical dialectic. I enjoy that myself, but it can't be the whole picture. Foucault to me excavates how power-relationships, including our own self-discipline, help to form and reinforce the boundaries of our thinking. You don't have to think he's the bees-knees to get something out of him. That's my experience.
What about the world of mathematics and the hard sciences? The dialectic may be rhetorical but the physical world does what it wants.
Not always. Nor does this necessarily effect the truth-value of scientific knowledge. It just points out that said knowledge is often fueled by more than pure, objective interest -- but is directed by the workings of power. (When surely the physical world doesn't care for these things)
What war funded Maxwell's research that got us his equations on electromagnetism?
Anyone who has had a go at grant money knows where the money is at. As I said, not all science is this way, but it's just a fact that these are the interests which have more funding.
It's just the wider focus.
Thank you.
It doesn't change my point, though -- that hard sciences are influenced by the workings of power.
Suppose a world with 10 true statements in it. If 3 of those statements relate to a specific interests, and 7 statements relate individually to there own interests, then focusing on the first interest may yeild more true statements than any other one interest, but it won't be some kind of totality of truth, even if one's methodology is the same.
It beggars belief that this sort of thing is worth so much ink poured. People do what they do. Nature is the way it is. They have to intersect. Duh,,,,
You juxtaposed this to my remark that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I'm not clear what point you're making. Philosophers aren't scientists and obviously shouldn't be mistaken for them. Scientists explore the (physical) world following their own interests and those of their peers and their funders. Philosophers ask questions of them that seem to them appropriate. It's the appropriateness of the philosophers' questions that seems to me at issue.
This last term, for instance, I went to a very well-delivered course of lectures by a leading bioethicist. For him, however, all the ethical questions were individual, a weighing of personal potential choices. I think that is being somewhat blind to the workings of power, which deeply influences ethical choices through our social and political institutions. The ethics of hospitals, hospices, pharmaceutical companies and governments, sugar-purveyors and word-of-mouth custom all matter in the bioethical mix. But that's how the analytic approach sometimes works: these social implications are to do with sociology, across the campus, whom some analytics then sneer at because they're supposedly overrun by postmodernists.
Not that everyone's like that of course or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. I'm a fan of Nancy Cartwright, for instance, who has largely moved over from the philosophy of physics to study how social scientists use causation. She nonplussed me last year by her views on the grave weaknesses of 'gold standard' random controlled trials, which just hadn't occurred to me before listening to her speak.
What sort of powers was Frege blind to in his work?
This is true even of Mother Teresa. That scientists get special attention for this from post-modernists is very interesting.
How would works like "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism" or "Naming and Necessity" be rewritten if their authors weren't blind in the way that you say?
To recap. I'm against vague blanket criticism of some body of work called 'postmodernism'. I've stood up for Foucault and partly justified that by remarking that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I've made a mild critique of current analytic practice about bioethics that it disregards the socio-political, and therefore exemplifies my charge.
I don't want to rewrite the brilliant work of Frege, Quine or Kripke. Just as I defend some of the work of Heidegger despite his Nazism, I don't for instance think Frege's appalling behaviour towards his academic fellows or his anti-semitic beliefs count against his philosophical work in the slightest.
I'm practising analytic philosophy, in a low-level grad student fashion, albeit in my sixties, so it's not as if I think it's a foolhardy exercise. I'm really only arguing for reasonable precision in argument - e.g. be wary of criticising authors you haven't read - and open minds towards the strange. There is some coming together between analytics and Continentals these days and it seems only positive to me.
It seems as if people still remember mild culture wars of the 90's, when Quine was among those who opposed Derrida's honorary philosophy degree. Here's an interesting recent retrospective blog post by Eric Schliesser: the below the line comments are interesting too, including one of the signatories of the original anti-Derrida letter.
What about vague blanket criticism of analytic philosophy?
You want to read accounts where the balance of power is reversed. Bouveresse has written accounts of what it was like to be an analytic philosopher in France.
Yes, I'm against that too. You keep asking rhetorical questions as if they were somehow responses to what I write. I'm very happy to have a debate, but you need to put some cards on the table as I have. Do you think I'm wrong about 'power' for instance, and that analytic philosophy mostly isn't blind to the workings of power? If so perhaps you could explain why you think so. I have given the example of current bioethics.
My personal interest, rarely mentioned in this forum, is in philosophy of language, for instance. I'm interested in how speech act theory does not address the relationship of speaker and hearer in both an emotional sense and a power/status sense, and I hope eventually to do some work on that; I think coming to terms with 'power' would enhance that area of philosophy, and in doing so, we can usefully learn from several Continental strands of thinking, one associated with Jurgen Habermas, and one stretching back to Mikhail Bakhtin which on some vague criteria might be called 'post-modernist'.
There's a name for that sort of thing.
Well I am hoping to read some Bouveresse anyway, about language, though not in the near future as I have a reading list a mile long. What people have said to me though is that analytic philosophy is on the rise in France. Bouveresse himself was not without honours, albeit he may well have found himself paddling a lone canoe for some time. But I haven't read anything by him directly, only of him.
Heidegger's obscurity makes him more of a guru than a philosopher, which might be sufficient reason for students or teachers of philosophy to skip some of his work. Being a Nazi is also part of his obscurity.
Obscurity might intrigue us, but we shouldn't take for granted that something with an assumed meaning has a meaning. Meanings can be absent, and obscure jargon can make trivial meanings appear more significant than they are. To skip obfuscatory literature does not mean that we lack curiosity, an open mind, nor ability to comprehend the language. Bullshit wastes lives.
Furthermore, a writer and a reader share a responsibility to maximise comprehensibility. To simply expect one to "qualify as a reader of Foucault" puts all responsibility on the reader, whereby the writer (or his fan) becomes a self-appointed authority on how to interpret the assumed meanings; anything else can be dismissed as a "misreading". But we don't get constructive debates without a shared responsibility or respect for the truth of words.
Quoting mcdoodle
I get that Foucault was a true intellectual, but I think the premise of his method is effectively anti-intellectual, It is arguably related to today's "alternative truths".
This is nonsense though, for author's like Foucault are hardly that obscure.
Reading Foucault, it's not hard to understand, for example, that he's not just reducing knowledge to discourse or power.
Indeed, one of his major points is how there's is much to know outside of a discourse and expression of power-- those in power act to suppress this knowledge such that no-one is able to think it. Such argument is not of a man who thinks there is no truth. Nor is this hard to understand reading his work.
A lot of the "obscurity" charge thrown at post-modernism is more about the politics of the reader than what a post-modernist is saying. Much post-modernist argument is dedicated to unravelling world defining narratives of power. (e.g. Foucault's challenges to the structures of power, rejection of Western superiority, challenges to gender and sexuality identity, etc.). A lot of people charge it with obscurity not because it's that hard to understand, but rather because they are desperate postion it as meaningless.
And I would say that's what you are doing here. You find it unacceptable that post-modernism would dare challenge the narrative of Reason's superiority and benifit, so you want grant it can be saying anything at all.
Moreover, the charge of obscurity in Foucault's case that you're making is similarly vastly overstated. Foucault is challenging, but hardly obscure in the way you're making him out to be. I've seen legions of first year students come away from class with better understandings of the man's work after an hour of class than your poor 'let me wiki it'-attempt that has characterised your engagement with him so far. It's telling that when challenged on actual, substantial point, you and your ilk continue to fall back on 'well it's so hard to read anyway so who cares if I'm wrong about it'. 'Postmodernism' has nothing on the intellectual dishonesty that you've so far peddled in this thread.
Authors like Foucault ain't that clear either. The context of my previous post was that obscurity of expression might be sufficient reason to skip reading a writer, such as Heidegger or the postmodern writers mentioned by McDoodle.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I never said that he would just reduce knowledge to discourse.
Again you attempt to merely diagnose my criticism from a superior vantage point, and assert that I'm ignorant of details in Foucault's work. What's the benefit of that?
If you know better, then why don't you engage with that premise of Foucault's method which I found problematic. I explained why I find it problematic.
Moreover, isn't Foucault and his own claims susceptible to the alleged powers beneath our consciousness and beyond logic? Can we not discuss this on the ground, without superior vantage points, intimidation, and so on? I mean, that sort of behaviour also a good reason to not read a writer.
I did, and you didn't engage with anything I had to say at all. You simply reasserted your original point without addressing anything I said. So you can stop pretending like you're in any way sincere about this.
There is so much amazing work on this out there actually, especially in the sphere of political theory (where Habermas especially is routinely called out for ignoring questions of power). Chantal Mouffe's The Democratic Paradox is vital reading on the question of power with respect to that relationship of speaker and hearer, and you can find some amazing stuff in Wendy Brown (her States of Injury), Bonnie Honig (Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics), Judith Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself/The Psychic Life of Power) and Denise Riley (Impersonal Passion). All address this nexus between power and language, and the ways in which power has been undertheorized in approaches to speech acts, especially in the liberal tradition of thinkers like John Rawls and Selya Benhabib. 'Tis one of my favourite topics.
No, you circumvented my inference by saying that Foucault's focus on power would entail "a widening of what an argument is". That's effectively a dilution of the significance of argument, hence my reply:
Quoting jkop
Furthermore, you obsess about how critics tend to misread Foucault, but I never said that he opposes truth with power, nor argument with discourse: it is trivially true and uncontroversial that we are exposed to many different kinds of power.
What I think is controversial, however, is the belief that powers beyond or beneath an argument would somehow compromise the argument or its outcome, and thus render the truth of words insignificant... simply put: anything goes, and its deplorable effects.
Can you provide a reason for this so-far unwarranted inference? Why would a widening of what we understand to be argument 'dilute it's significance' rather than amplify it? You're missing a line of argument and I'd like to see you provide it. As far as the literature goes, it's commonly acknowledged that such attention doesn't grant any sort of 'dilution' or 'amplification' either way, and that the whole point is that one must pay attention to the specificities of an argument in order to see, empirically, as it were, how power functions any one concrete situation. That's the entire point of Foucault's 'archaeological' method, which you seem to want to critique without even grasping the most basic of it's workings. So as it stands, your argument is both unsubstantiated and eccentric to received readings.
Quoting jkop
Again, this is not an argument made by Foucault, and the fact that you keep bringing it up is only more evidence of your unfamiliarity with the position you're ostensibly critiquing. The 'controvesy' here remains one wholly of your own making, existing nowhere but in your head at this point. I mean, you know its OK to admit that you've simply never read a word of Foucault in your life?
That's why I say your opposition is political. You literally don't know what's being argued. You haven't read it. You don't engage with the concepts being talked about. In you opposition, you use the charge of "obscurity", and you own unwillingness to engage with their argument, as an excuse to say their arguments or wrong and meaningless. I mean what the fuck even is that?
Does one go to a doctor, rocket scientist or quantum physicists and say: "Unless, you can give my a full account of how everything works in simple terms where I don't have to do any study, everything you say about your field is untrue or meaningless"? It's anti-intellectualism of the highest order.
You did. That's why you've been asserting he is so terrible. All along you have been accusing Foucault of taking aways the relevance of truth, as if his arguments turned knowledge into just a matter of who was talking and who as power, such truths were no longer relevant to reasoning or thinking.
Well, you neither amplify nor widen the explanatory power of an argument by adding the power of physical violence, for instance. We might be exposed to many different powers. But violence won't change the truth of words, their conclusion, nor the explanatory power which arises from a conscious use of grammar and logic.
Now suppose Foucault's premise is correct, that an argument consists not only of its explanatory conscious use of grammar logic, but also other powers beyond them, such as violence. Then we are not only exposed to many different powers, but we are helplessly infuenced by them, as well as our conscious use of grammar, logic. That's how the power or significance of the truth of words is reduced or diluted to a point of homeopatic nothingness. In effect a sneaky covert way to replace true argument with his own version: discourse.
Quoting StreetlightX
And again, it is inferred from the premise of his method.
More than half of your posts attempt to intimidate and diagnose my alleged ignorance. That's low quality argumentation. Someone who is confident about a subject does not usually behave like that. I think we're done.
Right, but I never said that he was terrible, nor that he was just reducing argument to discourse. He did many things, and perhaps he was a great guy. I'm neither attacking the person, nor all of his work, only that premise of his method, from which it seems possible to infer something that to me looks like a philosophical disaster. I hope I'm wrong..
I could also mention that you have also ignored where I pointed out that the equivocation between argument and epistemes is something you also have not argued for (as I asked before, where does Foucault speak about argumentation as such? - it's not in the Archaeology which you off-handedly referenced), but I imagine it too will fall on deaf ears. And as for this: "But violence won't change the truth of words, their conclusion, nor the explanatory power which arises from a conscious use of grammar and logic." - again cite a reference where Foucault says that violence will "change the truth of words, their conclusion, etc". Show me evidence of your work beyond the charlatanism of these made-up charges.
So don't tell me that I'm not engaging you on substantive points - what would be nice is for you to actually make one with reference to the relevant source material. And if I'm being harsh it's because of the sheer hypocrisy of people like you. You harp on about the lack of coherence about postmodernism, while committing yourself to falsehoods, bad readings, a lack of attention to either detail or rigor, or even basic reasoning. It's a breathtaking lack of intellectual consistency.
One Foucault's major points is that an argument (or discourse) is itself an expression of power.
When we argue a case we do violence to other ideas, cordoned them off, make them unacceptable, believe they are meaningless and cause other to reject or denounce them within their own thoughts-- it's the ground of thought which sets-up the violence committed against particular people (e.g. the mentally ill, the criminal), to a point where it cannot even recognised as an act or violence and power), such as thinking the punishment of a criminal is just "inevitable" or that someone with a mental illness cannot make truthful (or "reasoned" ) comment or have honest motivation.
It's this awareness of power you are struggling with. Your problem is really not that Foucault somehow rejects truth or says some nonsense like "there is only power, not truth" (though your argument may claim that, as you can only think in terms of true/false, rather than a wider context of what is valued and how power is expressed), it is that he dares make power explicit.
If someone uses Foucault's method, they will know the context of the world and knowledge is bigger than whatever truth you are describing. They might go, "Well, yes that is true... but if we act in a way where that truth is worshiped, it will cause X,Y and Z violence against theses people, so we should reign in our excitement..."
The myth of The Truth no longer functions. We are cursed (blessed?) to recognise what our understanding, culture and actions do to others in the context of power. The blindness to the violence which accompanies our understanding of others and the world around us is lost.
I don't think that it is common sense or obvious that political power influences the hard sciences. Many people seem to resist the idea.
>:O He didn't quite say that....
Sure, but powers beyond grammar, logic, and awareness are not part of, nor do they necessarily influence, the grammar, logic and truth of words from which the explanatory power of an argument arises.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
He also sneaks in powers beyond logic and grammar, recall. I doubt there exists a "ground of thought" of powers beyond or beneath thought. If it exists, would we not still be free to veto the outcome of our supposedly power-induced thoughts?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
One does not have to explain away truth as a myth in order to understand and avoid bad effects of power, ignorance and so forth.
The salient point I think you are missing is that argumentation is not about truth, but about consistency. Argumentation seeks to draw out the entailments and implications of what is already assumed to be true (which is given in the unargued premises of the argument).
What is assumed to be true is very often mediated by power (social influences, individual flourishing and so on); I think if you look around you, and at your own motives for believing to be true what you do, this will become undeniable. The practical will always take precedence over the so-called pure.
Frustration is understandable. And even if frustration is expressed it doesn't draw away from the point -- that in order to criticize a text or group of texts it is fair to ask the critic to read them, or at least to not have an opinion on them until they do -- or, even if one has an opinion, it is fair to say that said opinion is not an informed one which is going to hit its mark.
This sort of requirement looks like a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill norm for rational understanding, discussion, critique, and debate. So I'd say no one here, at least, has rejected either truth or logic as tools of Western oppression.
Sure. And I have, which means I feel justified in my judgment. If you asked me two years ago, I wouldn't have had much of an opinion, but I've had quite enough postmodernist claptrap crammed down my throat in graduate school since then to feel confident in my dismissal of it. Consider also that postmodernist texts are enormously unreadable, if not deliberately so (this is what initially raised my suspicions: what are they trying to hide in all this obscurity?). Roland Barthes, for example, quite literally argued against clarity in language and of having a natural prose style. Other postmodernists are less explicit about the degree to which they are poseurs pretending to sound profound and complex, but it's obvious to me now that that's what they're doing in many cases.
The basic point is this: they make seemingly wild and outrageous claims through the use of impenetrable jargon, which when pressed or upon further examination, turn out to be rather trivial claims that don't really need making. That, and they're all butthurt Marxists.
The ground is not beneath thought, it is the thought itself. It's "beneath" other actions-- e.g. the rejection of people, punitive measures taken, whether or not one realises power the are expressing over others. Power is not a predetermining force. It's an expression of freedom.
When one makes an argument, dismiss an idea, expresses power, it is done in collusion with freedom. The question of vetoing action is meaningless because the expression power is done with what people have freely chosen.
If I, for example, think of criminals as not people, but of objects who have brought their own suffering on themselves, it's the choice I have made. I am making the argument with my freedom, to (supposedly) make explicit the nature of criminals and what it means for them to be punished.
I want and have chosen to think in this manner. My freedom is directed to thinking this and expressing power in this way.
One is always free to veto any instance of these power inducing thoughts (by free will, anyone could choose to think otherwise), but the point is people are not doing so, and are so expressing power in that particular way.
No-one is doing so. What's being argued is that arguments express power. Whether true or false, right or wrong, the argument has an impact in the world. When we make an argument about truth, we aren't making an isolated statement which amounts to the entirety of the world. It also has impacts on what we think, on what ideas people choose to reject or accept, on the ways people are treated based on how they are understood.
The myth of "The Truth" is not truth. It is the idea of a single True idea being relevant or governing the world, such that if we talk about it, we have thought of everything that's important.
Like, when you say, for example, that the power expressed by an argument is irrelevant. That's a myth of The Truth. You've reduced, by choice, the horizon of our knowledge to only that particular argument. The idea it is, for example, important to consider the way you argument impacts on society, on how people are affected by the way you are arguing, is rejected.
In seeking Manifest Density, you will pillage and destroy indigenous communities, for nothing accept that argument is important. When running your factory and seeking profit, you will abuse your workers because the only truth that matters is maximising your profit. The history of human societies it littered with instances of abuse and ignorance chosen in favour of The Truth. Recognising it as a myth is critical to avoiding bad effects of power. It's how those in power avoid getting caught-up in their own visions and enacting destruction on those they rule.
I've been a professional writer most of my working life and pride myself on my clarity. Nevertheless I think there's something to be said for Barthes' argument, which in my opinion and slightly dim memory is not exactly as you put it. 'Clarity' for Barthes is one of those rhetorical tricks of 'realism' in fiction, used by the bourgeois novel and Soviet socialist realists alike: a pretense of fidelity to how life is, that sought through its very style to persuade its readership of the 'reality' of its portrayal. I've certainly used such rhetorical tricks in creating fiction. TV or cinematic realism, for instance, which I've scripted, apes the purported 'clarity' of the documentary or news genres to persuade the viewer of its fidelity to life as it's lived. But woven through such 'realism' is a web of lies, masked by the pseudo-clarity.
Once you've understood the tricks you can play with writing, what then? Oddly enough much analytic philosophy seems written in the way that Barthes himself sometimes seemed to argue for: that you should know how difficult the ideas are by making the very sentences difficult to read. Have a read of Robert Brandom, for instance, who often reads as if ill-translated from the German. I can't tolerate that myself. I gather Barthes came to advocate a version of the 'simple' later on, though I've never read whatever that's in. All the same, I think his analysis of clarity-as-rhetoric is illuminating, and not at all wild or outrageous. You can emerge from it a clear - or simple-sounding - writer all the same.
Hi, I don't think we debate whether absolute truth exists. If you look at the premise of the archaeological method, there is an assumed ground for thought beyond logic, grammar, and beneath consciousness. I question whether such a ground for thought exists. What conditions satisfies its possibility?
My understanding would be that there is an assumed ground for understanding the history of thought beyond the rules of logic and grammar and beneath consciousness. This is Foucault and he later called it 'genealogy', but to me it amounted to the same thing, perhaps someone will correct me if there's a major difference.
Our existence, the actions we take, the understanding we hold, which expesses power. Life isn't just an argument, true or otherwise. The world always has more going on as we speak and act.
Strictly speaking, it is not so much beyond any grammar, logic and experience-- I am talking about its truth now-- but rather beyond the particular grammar, logic and experience of the argument.
Even for me, for as I make this argument for Foucault, there is an unstated (in my argument about what Foucault says) expression of power. When I defend Foucault's method, I am not just speaking a truth, but taking a stand in what we ought to think and do.
When someone tells a truth (or falsehood), there is always more going on in the world than them just saying what is true (or false).
Foucault's method is an understanding and observation about the relationship of our ideas to social structure and impact of culture on people's lives.
That's hilarious, gave me a good laugh! Sometimes I am so glad you don't bother correcting your posts too mulch (sic)!
I'm tempted to claim it as commentary on food and sugar industries putting the truth of profit above the health of the community, but it would be both approprative and a confusion of mass with density.
There's certainly a "manifest mass" out there! :)
But these criticisms just do not hold water in Science and everyday life...
The statements I need to put on a red shirt vs I need to stop at a red light....
do not declare the same kind of meaning through the use of the word need and one as an ethical/functional statement, one is matter of fact in import the other is not. Postmodernism assumes a false relativism of hypothesizing 'theory' can be applied as a Worldview and it can't....
If it did these people would treat turning on the television as an equal danger as putting metal in the microwave and scissors in plug sockets.... I wouldn't have a postmodern condition because an evolutionary principle would have taken over. The entire thing about postmodernism is it isn't interested in truth or sincerity at all.... Because everything in some sense or another is a game of language... Ironically taken out of context from Wittgenstein who was a person deeply concerned with sensitivity of language, talking passed people and so on.
So discussing how the critique of structuralism cannot be applied to Science at a base level of natural laws and quantification that is 7 yards not 7 miles and there is no real opinion on that which will change the factuality... All you will get from the postmodernist typically is the skeptical theory of signs and deconstruction that says something obscure but in English means.... Facts and Truths are only so because of their building parts...
Completely agree.... 7 yards is true because 7 cannot be 6 and yards cannot be inches or miles.... now back to my question of the unarbitrary nature of meter? The question goes nowhere instead the more successful attempts of postmodernism seem to ignore, deviate or best con the materialist into trying to defend 7 and yards in some platonic sense.... NOPE the language is not the thing I agree but the distance from point A to point B in the world of the phenomenon is a completely different order of truth than one's reading and opinion about Shakespeare...
It assumes all language is a game in a very arbitrary way to the idea a postmodernist wants to debate you fairly, has or is capable of sincerity or is interested in any way of defining themselves positively is already ascribing a kind of decency I have no reason to presume exists. I am not saying that genuine people who call themselves postmodernists exists... I am saying the position allows for these kinds of toxic shenanigans so rather than try and debate them the best thing you could do is put them in a dog house until they actually show they are somebody or a group of people who actually want to talk and reason like human beings. Because based on the descriptor postmodernist you can't be sure of really a much of anything.... unlike materialist it is safe to assume they believe in gravity, Copernican model of cosmology, an atom, a base 10 number system and so on.... A postmodernist.... can you really assume the same thing?
Being a science teacher and having to put up with this nonsense coming into my classroom I have seen the advocates of Michael Foucault and Derrida come in the form of 14 yr olds that don't know Michael Foucalt criticized Derrida of obscurantism more than Chomsky did.... I am also to skeptical to simply say 'these are kids' .... because I have seen adults as inexcusably ignorant on their own self ascribed position.... But in the post-truth and politically correct age where a duck cannot be a duck how can such a person be considered a shallow thinker?