As somebody who makes a living "as a philosopher" in areas that overlap with CS, decision making, logic, AI and appear to be more scientific in nature, I may find this article emotionally somewhat appealing but still don't think it's a useful view about philosophy.
The first and foremost thing about philosophy laymen should realize is that the vast majority of philosophers do not consider philosophy a science. They also kind of agree to disagree about what philosophy is and what the subject matter of the discipline is. To put it bluntly, I'd say the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit and only the rest is even worth reading, but they all disagree about which 80% percent...
So Yes, I sometimes did also have the suspicion that some colleagues are bullshitting and obscuring intentionally, but overall this is not a helpful attitude. If you don't like a particular philosopher's work, you generally don't read and support it, and that's it. Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything.
Things are different in neighbouring disciplines in the humanities. After many years in the field and having to do with some of these disciplines, I believe I can say with some confidence that some of them are indeed pseudo-sciences. I don't want to mention which and why for fear of being identified later. All I can say is that there are disciplines and sub-disciplines/fields of study in the humanities that bear all the hallmarks of pseudo-science: extremely small communities, lots of jargon, few journals controlled by everyone in the communities, bouncing articles back and forth between those journals, constantly mixing empirical theses with some philosophical claims ("ideal models"), and so on. I'd be fine if these disciplines would at least apply the fairly stringent standards for publications in philosophy, but they don't even do that. These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy and often make unfounded empirical claims based on qualitative studies or studies with way too small sample size.
I appreciate this comment but I have some questions/comments:
> I may find this article emotionally somewhat appealing but still don't think it's a useful view about philosophy. The first and foremost thing about philosophy laymen should realize is that the vast majority of philosophers do not consider philosophy a science.
I don't think the article was making a claim about philosophy being a science. On the contrary, it seemed make a pretty clear distinction between them and highlighted some perils of falsely mixing the two.
"Often implicit empiricist assumptions in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are relied upon as if they were self-evident, and without awareness of the threat that those very assumptions pose to the author’s own reasoning. We can call this phenomenon scientistic pseudophilosophy."
"While pseudoscience can perhaps be counteracted by science education, the cure for pseudophilosophy is not science education but philosophical education."
> If you don't like a particular philosopher's work, you generally don't read and support it, and that's it. Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything.
The article wasn't about disagreeing with opposing philosophers' work, it as a critique of those non-philosophers who "fail to grasp the content of many of the philosophical claims and arguments that they criticize"
"There are two kinds of pseudophilosophy, one mostly harmless and the other insidious. The first variety is usually found in popular scientific contexts. This is where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, walk self-confidently into philosophical territory without realising it, and without conscientious attention to relevant philosophical distinctions and arguments.
The insidious kind of pseudophilosophy, which I will focus on here, is an academic enterprise, pursued primarily within the humanities and social sciences." (e.g. phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy)
Not OP but here,
> I don't think the article was making a claim about philosophy being a science.
How I understood it, is not as saying the article says the opposite but as an statement to introduce the idea that people disagree on what 80% is worth reading and that all fine because is not science.
>> Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything.
Upon reading the first paragraphs I thought the author was engaging in completely arrogant "my philosophy is better than yours" and "only experts can understand philosophy".
Your comment that 80 percent is bullshit explains a lot. And the idea that practitioners can't agree on which 80 percent even more so.
My impression is that philosophy is simply a means of framing our existence in such a way to reduce internal stress over the realities we face. From that perspective it makes perfect sense that one can adopt different philosophies and reject others.
> All I can say is that there are disciplines and sub-disciplines/fields of study in the humanities that bear all the hallmarks of pseudo-science: extremely small communities, lots of jargon, few journals controlled by everyone in the communities, bouncing articles back and forth between those journals, constantly mixing empirical theses with some philosophical claims ("ideal models"), and so on.
Aren't all of these kind of common to all science fields ? I mean, even in physics, you can see things like string theory... (Though calling it pseudoscience would be too harsh, it's more like 'metaphysics' until we manage to find a way to empirically test it.)
The difference is, that there's very advanced mathematics behind string theory and at leas that part can be checked/verified by independent researchers.
> the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit
> These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy
Given your earlier statement, may I ask what you consider to be the higher standards of philosophy?
I ask somewhat rhetorically as a former philosophy PhD student who left because I felt the whole field seemed quite indifferent to anything other than careerist journal stuffing.
Not the OP, but well regarded philosophy journals (in my academic neck of the woods) have ridiculously low acceptance rates (2-3% often), and in general peer review is done and taken seriously.
> well regarded philosophy journals (in my academic neck of the woods) have ridiculously low acceptance rates (2-3% often)
This just shows that academic philosophy is a very exclusive club. It doesn't say anything about the standards involved.
If anything, an extremely high rejection rate tends to enforce intellectual conformity and conservatism on a field that you would think is least in need of those qualities.
It stands to reason that most papers will not be impressive, so even if the filter is biased it likely has some sort of value.
It's always a balancing act. Become too restrictive and good ideas could get snuffed out, but too open and it's just a giant cluster of bad ideas and too much noise.
To be clear, what we refer to as "science" is the discipline formerly known as "natural philosophy" in the European canon. And there was some connotation that as such, it was pseudo-philosophy for dealing with mere appearances rather than true essences and for eschewing morality and eternal truths for empirical reasoning about ordinary things.
> " I'd say the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit and only the rest is even worth reading, but they all disagree about which 80% percent..."
Are you saying that philosophy in general encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking?
One of my favorite things I've ever read is David Stove's essay on this subject, "What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?" wherein a cranky old philosopher excoriates his profession.
To be fair, as the GP states, most philosophers are honest about this. How much better off we'd all be if economists would admit the same truth about their "discipline".
That is certainly an interesting article. He bluntly declares it obvious that a bunch of leading, mainstream philosophical thought it utter bullshit without explaining why (and instead arguing that nobody can explain why), and I completely agree with him.
Well, except with the bit that numerology is to astrology as astrology is to astronomy. It seems to me that numerology is to mathematics as astrology is to astronomy, but I admit that like the philosophers he's criticising, I too have not read a book on numerology.
(I wrote that before I finished the article. I still haven't quite finished it, but he later ponders about the possibility of creating a nosology of thought; a system to diagnose these maladies of though. And then he gives up because it can never be simultaneously complete and usable. I think that's foolish; you can enormously expand the current nosology by identifying, naming and describing even just a few of these (and some of them seem pretty easy to me). And that vocabulary can grow slowly as people add more.)
It's kind of hard when your discipline is pretty much tasked with finding out the very meaning of 'bullshit'...
Gödel's incompleteness theorem come to mind (mathematics straddling science and philosophy), but I doubt that philosophy will be so 'lucky' to solve this problem in such a concise and clear (though admittedly unsatisfactory) way. (Maybe (late) Wittgenstein is the closest philosophy can hope for ?)
It almsot sounds likes what we need is a differentiation of words. Most people that like "philosophy" disagree on what they mean. I mean, that's a layman problem. But if philosophers themselves disagree on what philosophy in general is, then perhaps it should differentiate into specific philosophies.
Say, "scientific philosophy", which is the subset of thinking that considers philosophy as a science, with assigned true/false values. Then the rest of the philosophies can name themselves, or otherwise in aggregate consider themselves the nonscientific philosophies.
Would it make more sense to see the work of a philosopher as that of a performance artist? I do not mean this in a sarcastic sense, but in the sense of coming up with intuitive but applicable ways of considering and interacting with the world
I've done well by staying clear of anyone airing their thoughts about post-modernity in the past 15 years. (perhaps with the exception of some very few individuals like Zizek).
This is because of the constant efforts from conservative pseudo-philosopher's like Stephen Hicks[0] (who on his YT channel hasn't shied away from inviting neo-Nazis to talk about the subject) all the way to JP[1] who do not understand the topic yet enjoy discrediting and twist the ideas of post-modernity. The odd thing is that these ideas have not been traditionally linked to the left.
I find most people who have an opinion about the subject often have not studied them, nor have they read any (or very few) of the original thinkers, and rather form their minds by listening to condensed misrepresentations in tweet-storms, etc.
I agree with you and don't understand why you're being downvoted.
"Post-modernity" has become almost entirely a straw-man (for bizarre political reasons), as the debate between Zizek and JP illustrates nicely. I mean, JP tried hard, but why would a psychologist agree to participate in an online debate about a very complicated topic in philosophy about which he has read almost nothing in the first place?
reflecting on my comment I realize it could perhaps be construed as an attack on OP (specifically my dismissal of anyone with an opinion on the topic the past 15 years). But it wasn't meant like that. I am so deep in my habit of reading only old books and original thinkers, that I forget people don't share this passion. My habit makes me automatically dismiss content generated by anyone still alive or any book that is displayed as new release in a bookshop etc.
Secondly I guess it's always a gamble to mention JP no matter in what light on HN since it is considered flame-bait. However IMHO it's impossible to separate the political element from the discussion about post-modernity (whether it's PM in art _or_ philosophy - though oddly those who don't grasp the philosophy also don't get the art).
It seems that applied postmodernism takes a very anti-materialist stance that rankles left wing (old school) progressives and centrist liberals as well. Standpoint Theory and Social Constructivism contradict materialist conceptions of knowledge and power, and they contradict classical liberal ideals of progress.
Also, we often see criticisms of social constructivism as "alt right" and the evidence for this are people who are on the right. But there are plenty of people on the Left as well who criticize applied postmodernism and it seems they get swept up unfairly in labels.
> These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy and often make unfounded empirical claims based on qualitative studies or studies with way too small sample size.
Unfortunately, I found even the standards in philosophy as a field to be quite low, which is why I stopped pursuing its study in an academic setting. But, yes, I think many people have noted that there are particular fields in the social sciences which are mostly BS, partly because those fields are heavily based on ideas that use pseudo-philosophy as their foundational basis.
The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all?
I imagine there's a delusional rich person, or academic running a foundation who wants his confirmation biases satisfied. I figure there's got to be more to it than that though.
> The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all?
For the same reason that academics spent a lot of time researching tobacco and producing results saying that it wasn't harmful, until that shifted, there are some fields which exist primarily because they're predominantly politically motivated and funded on that basis. It's not always an easy ride, but if you follow the money, it's very rarely altruistic how anything gets funded in any aspect of life, perhaps least of all in academia, which is one reason why rigor is so much lower outside the hard sciences where it's harder to unambiguously disprove BS. As my initial example points out though, the hard sciences are also not immune to money influence.
This sort of thing is always by turns boring and frustrating to read, because there are good and interesting philosophical criticisms to be made of Foucault's epistemology, but the idea that for him facticity itself is questionable isn't one of them. Foucault is never really in doubt about what constitutes, e.g., an event, occurrence, or fact - actually his entire corpus very self-consciously relies on having a common set of texts that we agree constitute accounts of what happened in a given field of inquiry in a given time period. Foucault's epistemology strongly requires and insists on the objectivity of the archive. He wouldn't be able to make authoritative claims about the historical importance of Kantian representation, or Bentham's pantopticon, if he didn't think the archive of philosophical and scientific writings had some objective merit that wasn't in question. He's emphatically not the moral relativist he's made out to be by low-hanging fruit conservatism like this. What he - and a lot of his colleagues in France at the time - wanted to know was whether the system of interpretations that has accrued around this archive has gotten to the bottom of what our 19th century forebears were really up to when they were, for instance, busy examining the shapes of skulls to determine personality traits.
There would be little problem if his methods were confined to examining questions such as the truth of phrenology, the ideological presumptions that made it an appealing set of beliefs, and power relations that motivated them. Unfortunately, his followers (and Foucault himself) cast a far wider net than that, to the point at which power-knowledge becomes the predominant or even the only acceptable analytical framework in some fields. While that may not be entirely Foucault's fault, it is harmful nevertheless.
The Focaultian mindset makes you twitchy, paranoid, and hostile.
We think of it as "of the Left", but there's also nothing to stop "the Right" from buying the idea that everything is just about Power. Then if you keep at that line of thought pretty soon you turn into a Nazi. Or at the very least, you will hear all claims from "the Left" about "care" or "empathy" with knowing cynicism.
And my perception is that these ideas have begun to spread subliminally throughout the culture, particularly among people who are younger or more educated. Everyone becomes more guarded. The social anxiety ramps up. The persona you see is increasingly a mask. The wall goes up a mile high and ten feet thick.
Have you ever met a friendly dog (stereotypically, perhaps, a golden retriever), that has never been mistreated? It will walk up to you wagging its tail; it is happy to meet you, because you are a person, and people, it has learned, are friendly and good.
Next: Have you met a skittish street-dog, the kind that shop-owners kick and curse as a cur, that walks around with nimble jumpy motions, with its tail between its legs?
The dog is a social animal, and is a model for humans. I observe that we humans are turning into the second, skittish type. You could call it a process of "de-domestication". We are all going feral. Uncivilized.
Life as a social animal is difficult to tolerate when your amygdala is constantly firing around others. But that's exactly the emotional effect of these ideas. And they are infecting everyone.
You blame this "de-domestication", this guardedness, on the spread of Foucault-esque ideas about the nature of truth.
My counter-hypothesis - maybe this is what happens when the heights of power and wealth keep getting higher and higher. We are transforming more and more into a dog-eat-dog society. This is how civilizations have fallen repeatedly over the past and we are increasingly turning to a new gilded age.
A lot more wealth and power these days is coming from value creation rather than political or historical roots. Or, as was the case of the gilded age, people from poor countries migrating to a country that was rapidly enriching its citizens.
Foucault's biggest inspirations were Nietzsche, where Foucault gets the basic notion of power's universal systematicity (everything is already/can be articulated as a master/slave relation); and Heidegger, for whom the core essence of Being was always and eternally retreating from sight. combine these two notions and you get someone endlessly searching for a power he knows is screwing him but which he can't see or hear or touch. and combine THAT with generally declining career prospects for left-leaning Anglos studying continental philosophy... yes i'd say you have yourself a personality type.
Under that model, it makes sense that one's ability to control would be dependent not only upon how good one's effectors may be ("power"?) but also upon how good one's sensors may be ("knowledge"?). (let alone questions of system identification!)
But that could easily be me using the wrong prism ("observability/controllability") for analysis.
I'm not familiar enough with closed loop control theory to make a statement if the analogy is appropriate. But a quick skim is definitive not enough to get an understanding of Foucault. However these two quotes from the plato article should make a good starting point:
> The key idea of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.
> On Foucault’s account, the relation of power and knowledge is far closer than in the familiar Baconian engineering model, for which “knowledge is power” means that knowledge is an instrument of power, although the two exist quite independently. Foucault’s point is rather that, at least for the study of human beings, the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and in controlling we know.
I didn't read the linked article yet, but to me, Foucault really is one of the most interesting intellectuals of the 20th century (or longer) - if only because of how differently people perceive him. There's that old debate between him and Chomsky, and it's incredible how different people will score that debate. Some see obscurantist posturing versus Chomsky's towering, rigourous intellect, where others see Chomsky outclassed so thoroughly he doesn't even understand what's going on.
(It is "this debate" in a broader sense, not this specific debate, which I also happen to love. I both agree with you that it is amazing how everyone sees what they want to see in that debate, and also am in the "lol Chomsky got owned so hard he didn't even know what was going on" camp.)
The position taken in that post is an even more severe indictment of "postmodernism" than anything Chomsky (or even anyone in this thread) wrote: it is saying, basically, that postmodernists intentionally adopt a dialect and "styles of discourse" to turn off people like Chomsky and drive them away from its circles.
If true, this is even worse than simply being obscure, wrong, muddle-headed, nonsensical, or whatever. By default my assumption when encountering stuff I don't understand is that there's something meaningful and useful being attempted to be communicated, and if I just work harder I may be able to get something of value out of it. But if the claim here is true (would most postmodernists agree, BTW? have they said something to that effect?)—namely that, let alone failing to be clear, they're not even trying (worse, actively trying not to be clear to everyone)—then I can just ignore them completely, as they're not even operating in good faith. Being wrong is just an intellectual failure that can happen to all of us; being intentionally unclear is almost a moral failure. (Or at least, it's diametrically opposed to my values, and while I can recognize the possibility of other systems of values, I have no wish to engage with a community rejecting this value.)
(BTW, the link in that 2012 post to Chomsky's post is broken, but it's saved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120711000559/http://cscs.umich... — it's not quite that, as the post claims, Chomsky threw out everything "on the basis of dialect alone", but what he asks in that post is for examples of all that "theory" throwing up some practical conclusion that wasn't already well-known. He also points out that in say, physics or mathematics, where too he may not understand everything, "I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty" — but this is not true of (what is/was called) "[critical] theory".)
The link provided was just an elaborate way of saying 'postmodernism is good, Chomsky doesn't get it'. It doesn't tell you what the novel 'ways of thinking' are, just asserts that they are there and require 'investing serious time' to grasp. There's no defense here and I don't see how you can appreciate this take unless you are already firmly decided beforehand and just like seeing people you disagree with pilloried
Not every piece of writing is trying to convince, it's true.
FWIW, I don't see the piece as saying "postmodernism is good." And I think the final two paragraphs are good bits of advice, regardless of the topic at hand.
very good take here, and it gets to the heart of the issue: Chomsky comes out of the analytic tradition where the goal is to rigorously explain and define everything that can't quite be pinned down by mathematical symbolization. French intellectual traditions owe way more to existentialism and phenomenology, where the goal is rather to understand experiences in new, historically appropriate ways. the latter partakes, even where Foucault, for instance, is apparently undertaking a historical analysis, far more of poetic language, because the thinking is "we here in history are disclosing the historically unthought that everyone before us couldn't see"
I think the longest version that exists is just over one hour with some narration in between. I've watched it recently on Youtube, but I didn't save the link.
It is always funny how long boring sentences are found in philosophy. I think the problem is that our language is lacking in clarity for describing the subtle nuances of reasoning and logic.
And sadly it is a bit confusing. Especially if one (like me), does not know all the people listed in the paragraphs.
Personally I tend to shorten the sentences and focus on the presentation of the information in logical blocks. While it may not read as glorious, it can improve the clarity of the information. Maybe this tendency is related to my background in programming.
What problems did Foucault try to solve?
And I think that your statement is related to the differences in problems that Foucault tried to solve, and problems that we face now.
In his culture people believed that personal traits were related to skull shapes. So the idea that these facts about skull shapes do not really matter, seems very reasonable. Especially we now know that this does not relate at all.
So, the "facts" are related to "beliefs" that give certain values to those "facts". In science we would call those beliefs "models". And while well tested, they have some limits that are relevant.
Pseudo-philosophy or different belief systems?
Some philosophy wants to avoid "facts", here called pseudo-philosophy. But often they do not deny the "facts", but have complete different "beliefs" in which the "facts" do not have the same meaning.
The writer of the article wants to downgrade the "false beliefs" as "pseudo-philosophy". But as a solution, I prefer to look at the limits of the beliefs (or models) that are held on to. This is for both true beliefs and "false beliefs".
Talking about limitations gives an opportunity for dialogs and understanding different sides. People don't feel attacked but feel that they can contribute to mutual knowledge.
And regarding scientific beliefs/models, we may find problems with them, which is essential for scientific progress.
I don't think the problem is inherent flaws and limitations of our language. In the spirit of "I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time" I have seen many examples of, with proper effort and skill, highly complex ideas described in clear and simple language.
When you read incomprehensible gobbledygook, it is because the author is being lazy, at best. At worst it is a deliberate attempt to appear as if making a complex point, while saying nothing. Verbose and opaque writing can make one appear intelligent and be a shield from criticism. (If you don't understand me, it's because you aren't smart enough, and until you understand you aren't allowed to criticize.)
Remember, the burden is on the author to be clear and understandable. If they can't be bothered to make the effort, you are under no obligation to believe a single word.
Would you apply the same criteria to literature? Film? Art? Why isn't someone like, say, Jackson Pollock as 'clear and understandable' as a renaissance painter?
You clearly have a pragmatic mind so perhaps you’ll find this of interest. The problem of clarity has been recognized for a while. CS Peirce took a pretty good stab at it with How to Make Our Ideas Clear[1] and even that is a little dense. Partly due to 19th century prose though.
I was told he was an excellent writer. I accept that his reasoning/arguments were very lucid; I did not find his writing lucid.
> our language is lacking in clarity
I take it you mean English. English is highly allusive and ambiguous. Many words that mean completely different things are spelled the same. Many concepts are referred to by severaal different words, typically imported from different languages, and carrying different connotations. It's a wonderful language for describing things, but not so good for pinning things down.
There's a reason that the language of International Law is French (and just because you speak French, that doesn't mean you have to write like Foucault). German is a pretty matter-of-fact language, very well-suited to philosophical discourse.
If I read someone like Fred Ayer, I have the sense that it would have been easier to understand him if he wrote in German. Wittgenstein's Tractatus I have only ever read in English; but it was originally in German, and even though the Tractatus is more difficult than Ayer, I find it hugely more lucid.
> Many words that mean completely different things are spelled the same
Homographs are rarely a problem precisely because they generally mean completely different things. Inelegant, sure.
> Many concepts are referred to by severaal different words, typically imported from different languages, and carrying different connotations.
Mostly true, but the richness of English vocabulary is the exact opposite of a problem. When you need to distinguish between shades of meaning, having more words available is useful. English doesn't have the problems of using the same word for 'high' and 'tall'; or for 'pasta', 'paste', and 'dough'; or for 'pen' and 'feather'. Loneliness and solitude really are distinguishable states.
There are facts and facts. The OP thinks that Foucault's (pseudo-)philosophy is against the fact that the Earth is non-flat, or that saying that the Earth is non-flat is somehow infused with ideology, but there are also facts that are given to us as true (and which affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people) which are indeed infused with ideology, one of the latest examples being the "fact" that austerity was the thing to do after the 2008-2010 crisis (a "fact" which has recently been debunked by the IMF itself, originally one of its most important ideological backers).
yes. the point of my post was that Foucault, rightly or wrongly, has a clear delineation of what counts as fact and what counts as Fact. we can freely debate the ideological implications of THAT division. but he does not - and this is my point - throw the baby of reliable objective reference out with the bathwater of ideological knowledge formation.
I agree with you. I also thought it was odd that this piece's author specifically called out "the humanities and social sciences" as the main purveyors of "pseudophilosophy" before directing all his fire at Foucault, a philosopher. And then he concludes that the solution to pseudophilosophy is a philosophical education but I'm not sure who in their right minds would argue that Foucault didn't have one of those? Or Sartre, for that matter, who he also called out as a pseudophilosopher.
It starts to make one wonder if his idea of "pseudophilosophy" is really just a new coat of paint over some already well-worn critiques of postmodernism.
> It starts to make one wonder if his idea of "pseudophilosophy" is really just a new coat of paint over some already well-worn critiques of postmodernism.
I think pretty clearly yes, along with the preceding continental philosophy and also Sam Harris (?).
> This kind of fallacious critique of the notion of objective truth is a particularly pernicious aspect of obscurantist pseudophilosophy in general. Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity (as in the case of Foucault).
Now, surely if this is a valid claim, it would have been made during Foucault's life ? What did he respond to criticisms like these ?
Yeah, isn't it basically a repeat of Jordan Peterson's criticism of 'French Theory' academics ?
I don't know that much about 'postmodernism', but it seems like both JP and the North American academics responsible for the 'French Theory' are pretty much misunderstanding those French philosophers (which is partially the fault of French philosopher's dense prose, which isn't new for philosophers (I hear some Germans are even worse ?), and maybe also the North American academics being unable to read French, which is new ?
Funnily enough, Peterson is in a way right about calling their bullshit ? But that's easier than being constructive... (Which he probably also is in that book of his, but self-help isn't philosophy.)
French intellectual celebs from the period only started talking postmodernism in the 70s and 80s, after Anglos started asking them about it!
the idea itself is largely derived from Fredric Jameson's writings on it in the 1980s. he characterizes it primarily as a flattening of emotional and historical affect such that all time periods represented in culture fundamentally partake of a liberal market-oriented ideological framework. in that sense, Foucault can be seen as paradigmatic through his willful 'rewriting' of the historical archive.
> Harris’s failure to grasp the content of many of the philosophical claims and arguments that he criticises
> Lawrence Krauss engages with philosophical arguments for theism without understanding them properly. Most saliently, he ends up criticising a caricature version of the so-called cosmological argument about the existence of God.
Oof. Perhaps back up those drive-by-shootings with some clarification.
> Usually, the prose is infused with arcane terminology and learned jargon, creating an aura of scholarly profundity. We can call this phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy.
I mean harris is pretty bad with this. I agree that the article has that tone that most of us normies find distasteful, but it's not really wrong in my experience. If anything, in not directly calling Harris' straying from his area of expertise charlatanism, the author is being generous.
It's only ironic if you haven't read this so called "obscurantist pseudophilosophy." This sentence hardly holds a candle to the writings of someone like Deleuze or Derrida.
Agreed with this. Also, to give the author of the Psyche article credit, he defined what he meant by obscurantist philosophy earlier in the article. In my fairly limited reading of them, Foucault, Derrida, et al., don't always do this, even when the terms they use are much less self-explanatory than this one.
I admit Deleuze's writing is hard work but he has some really interesting metaphysical ideas linked to complexity and systems theory, try reading Manuel DeLanda for a more accessible introduction
That's just a sentence that isn't afraid of using long words, they're all pretty precisely, neatly used IMO. Not ironic at all. This would be a mouthful to say or understand out loud but it seems like normal writing to me.
> There are many kinds of pseudosciences: astrology, homeopathy, flat-Earthism, anti-vaxx. These ‘fields’ traffic in bizarre claims with scientific pretensions. On a surface level, these claims seem to be scientific and usually appear to comment on the same kind of things that science does. However, upon closer inspection, pseudoscience is revealed to be bullshit: it is indifferent to the truth.
...combined with:
> A problem is that most of us are lacking in epistemic conscientiousness, at least sometimes and to some extent. In order for something to count as pseudoscience, some minimal degree of unconscientiousness is therefore required. A good rule of thumb for being conscientious is to keep an eye out for classical fallacies such as ad hominem, straw man, false dilemma and cherry-picking. Such fallacies occur in all kinds of contexts, but in pseudoscience they occur more systematically.
They "surely" occur more systematically in "pseudoscience", but it's funnier when they occur in an article that is literally criticizing others for this kind of thinking.
Both of the passages you quoted read as coherent and even convincing.
Sure, terms like "epistemic" or "unconscientiousness" may be a bit unfamiliar, but they have specific meanings that are clear in the passage, and are used to make a salient argument.
The use of jargon does not equate to obfuscation! For example, these two statements are very different:
"Making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between endpoints." (Silicon Valley season 1 episode 6)
"And then there are other aspects of complexity that come into programming with any of these more commonly used statically typed languages, which have to do with the complexity in the language space." (Rich Hickey talk)
If you aren't familiar with the jargon, they're both unintelligible, but if you are, one sounds silly and the other does not.
> Both of the passages you quoted read as coherent and even convincing.
They sure do - that's the problem! The author shows little sign of being concerned with the degree to which they are true (which considering he's representing skills in epistemology, seems like a bit of a shortcoming).
>> These ‘fields’ traffic in bizarre claims with scientific pretensions. On a surface level, these claims seem to be scientific and usually appear to comment on the same kind of things that science does. However, upon closer inspection, pseudoscience is revealed to be bullshit: it is indifferent to the truth.
Setting the stage by choosing "astrology, homeopathy, flat-Earthism, anti-vaxx" at the start of the article seems like a bit of the very "straw man, false dilemma and cherry-picking" the author complains about, since they go on to discuss pseudoscience in general.
I suspect "These 'fields'" is hinting (without explicitly saying) at conspiracy theories in general, going on to say "...upon closer inspection, pseudoscience is(!) [implicitly: without exception] revealed to be bullshit". (An example of using persuasive rhetoric to misinform readers.)
> An illustrative example is Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape (2010), in which straw men are lined up due to Harris’s failure to grasp the content of many of the philosophical claims and arguments that he criticises.
The author seems to not considered the possibility that the same applies to him (he who is without sin...).
And then wraps it up with this beauty of a paragraph:
> While pseudoscience can perhaps be counteracted by science education, the cure for pseudophilosophy is not science education but philosophical education. More specifically, it is a matter of developing the kind of basic critical thinking skills that are taught to undergraduates in philosophy. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy [Oh? Are you sure?]. Students should be taught things like learning to distinguish in a disciplined way between central philosophical concepts such as belief, truth, rationality and knowledge. They should be aware of the way ambiguities can be exploited by equivocating arguments, and become adept at how to spot other fallacies such as ad hominem and straw man. With these fundamental tools in hand, there would be a good deal less pseudophilosophy going around.
Perhaps we should add psychology and mindfulness (self-awareness) to this list.
> The use of jargon does not equate to obfuscation!
Name one prominent modern atheist that is clueless when it comes to the theism discussion and present one point he/she misrepresents/lacks understanding of.
Dawkins thinks that the first three "Ways" of Aquinas all hinge on the premise that a chain of causes can't proceed infinitely backward in time. This is a standard misreading that could be straightened out by a quick perusal of secondary literature, or just by reading a little more Aquinas, who makes clear elsewhere that he thinks the universe does not, in principle, need to have a beginning in time.
And plus he could look at Duns Scotus arguments which even grant an infinite causal chain, e.g. by forming a circle. Modern atheists are just very snobbish thinking everyone who existed before you could post online take downs on reddit was an idiot.
The four horsemen are all woefully uninformed when they try to deal with standard arguments for theism. Although I will say I like how upfront and clear Dawkins is in his statements. Bertrand Russell at least had the intellectual honesty to admit the ontological argument is logically valid (which is now proven with a computational theorem prover), and says it is very difficult to identify the problem with the argument even though it feels unsatisfying.
>>> Most of the modern atheists are clueless when it comes to the theism discussion.
>> Name one prominent modern atheist that is clueless when it comes to the theism discussion and present one point he/she misrepresents/lacks understanding of.
> The four horsemen are all woefully uninformed when they try to deal with standard arguments for theism.
Dawkins' argument that the presupposition of god requires then yet another explanation of god. He doesn't realize this criticism applies to any posited ultimate cause, including physicalism. In fact this very issue forms the foundation for some of the classic arguments for God. The only way the regress can terminate is with an uncaused cause, which only can be met by a godlike being. So followed to its logical conclusion Dawkins argument proves the existence of god.
Sam Harris seems to think the problem of evil disproves god, yet most philosophers now believe it does not after Alvin Plantinga's work. At any rate, at best it can disprove a good god.
Dennett doesn't seem to have an argument, and just tried to explain away everything he doesn't believe in.
Hitchens also doesn't have an argument and relies on emotional appeals, claiming god is like the north korean dictator, the irony apparently being lost on him that north korea is a forced atheist state.
So overall the most glaring problem is lack of any argument whatsoever, which is not promising for a supposedly intellectual position. When an argument is offered it would not even pass a freshman logic class.
Prior generations of atheists were not so intellectually vapid. Anthony Flew would be a good example if it were not for his conversion to theism.
Oh one more thing, all of the besides Hitchens erroneously like to rely on computer science to support their claims. Whereas if you have a background in CS you understand they don't know what they are talking about.
I don't think Harris would claim he's making philosophical arguments aimed at philosophers. I think he would say he's making arguments against beliefs that most people (non-philosopher) hold. Most people who show up to church don't claim that they worship a god who just so happens to not be good. They believe in a god is perfectly good, who takes an interest in their personal lives and will decide the subjective nature of their experience after death.
The problem with Atheism is no one will agree on the basic ground rules for a conversation. For example if I say I'm not an Atheist because I don't care to subscribe to a specific definition of god upon which to focus my lack of belief, I get accused of propping up a Straw Man.
It's clear that religion exists, it's impossible to find a human culture that lacks it. But the minute you try to put the discussion on a more rigorous footing the process seems to fall apart, hence the term pseudophilosophy. Carl Sagan was described as not wanting to be called an Atheist because that already requires knowledge that has not been introduced into the conversation. I guess that makes him an epistemological agnostic but even that choice of terminology can be challenged.
So where is one expected to go with this apparent dilemma?
There is no dillema. Probe it, or GFTO. It works with anything: science, self-called "engineers" applying for a job, trials in order to be guilty or not... easy.
If someone says "gold cures cancer", everyone and his mom would think he is a nut, unless that's true there's no proof that gold cures anything. The same with religion.
>It's clear that religion exists, it's impossible to find a human culture that lacks it.
So what. A lot of tribes had chamans too, and no magic did work, ever. Look up for "cargo cult" in order how religions works, that's the biggest slap to arrogant American Christian ever, because it works like a huge reality mirror, kinda like: hey, look at that bullshit these Australians are believeing, think for a while on your own bullshit from the Stone Age, because these people with no knowledge of the world (no one in China have heard of Jesus until very recent times (relatively) in the late Middle Ages, so maybe it's religion and god wasn't as Universal as they tought).
The same with Native Americans, no matter North of South. No one have heard of crazy world-wide floods, or whatever.
Also, Bible's great flood was a rehash from the Mesopotapian tales, whose legend maybe date back to the end of the Ice Age.
Ditto with Roman/Greek Gods: if you believe in Zeus/Iupiter, most people will tell you to head an asylum, yet the Judeo-Christian God looks "right". It's just hypocrisy. And fear.
Religion is an aspect of the human condition. The question of whether any particular religious belief can be thought of as "true" needs to be unpacked in a careful way.
As soon as someone claims that a thing "exists" in a way that can't be demonstrated, I can choose to be polite but ignore the claim. That's trivial.
What's more complicated is the entire idea of substance dualism, and how human consciousness can apprehend an idea that has nothing tangible to back it up.
These questions matter, and are worth unpacking, regardless of how you happen to feel about religion.
- God is greater than the greatest imaginable thing, so must exist (this one is proven to be logically valid with computational theorem prover, and Bertrand Russell even said it was sound at one point in his life)
- the world is intelligently designed
- there must be a first cause, and that must be God
- nothing in this world is perfect so there must be a transcendently perfect being
- we can only be satisfied be an infinite being, so the object of our desire lies beyond this world
- moral laws exist and require a law giver
- our mind is not reducible to our body, and must have been created by an even greater being
- jesus existed, claimed to be God, and rose from the dead according to reliable historical documentation
Off the top of my head
On the other hand it is impossible to prove atheism, you cannot prove a negative
So we are left with theism and a lot of proofs, and atheism which is inherently incapable of being proven
You and I have very different ideas of what the word ‘proof’ means. I have no doubt this is how it looks to you. From where I sit, we have theism and a lot of nebulous thought experiments that gel with the way religious minds already think, and atheism which is simply the default until the day God decides to grace us with a press conference.
There are tight logical proofs. Note I point out the ontological argument is now validated by computer. I am merely sketching them above. I also disagree atheism is the default. As Einstein says, simplify as much as possible, but no further. Atheism is incapable of explaining reality as we experience it. While simple it lacks explanatory power. Saying atheism is the default due to simplicity is like saying nothing is a better explanation than something because nothingness is simpler than something, which is clearly the wrong way to go about picking theories. Monotheism is our most parsinomous theory to date.
> Note I point out the ontological argument is now validated by computer.
While an invalid argument is useless, a valid one can still be no good.
Here is a logically valid argument:
Major Premise. all who post claims of proofs of God’s existence on HN should be killed.
Minor Premise. yters posted a claim of proof of God’s existence on HN
Conclusion. Therefore, yters should be killed.
Now, if I claimed I proved you should be killed, you would probably object, and claim there was a problem with the major premise. And I think many people would agree with you, but the correctness of the premises isn't relevant to logical validity, only soundness.
Well that's the problem with all proofs. If the premises are false the proof is not sound. That doesn't preclude the proof being tight, i.e. as in well reasoned and logically argued. Outside of mathematics you will be hard pressed to find a proof where someone doesn't disagree with a premise or two. And even within math we have intuitionists and constructivists claiming things like proof by negation is invalid. So if your criterion for solid proof is one that everyone agrees with, you are bound to be perpetually disappointed. On the other hand if your criterion is proofs that highly intelligent people find convincing after fully understanding the argument, then I again submit to you the ontological argument which even Russell claimed was sound at one point in his life before walking that back and saying it is wrong for some unknown reason.
No, its the problem with pure logical proofs, which is why for statements about reality rather than abstract relations of concepts, empirical proofs (despite being less absolute) are generally preferred.
> the ontological argument
Since you have merely waved at and sketched the argument, let me do the same it's demolition: existence is not a predicate.
Sure, if I give an axiom that “The greatest imaginable thing must exist”, “God is an imaginable thing”, and “God is greater than any other imaginable thing”, a computational theorem prover will validate “God must exist”.
This doesn’t prove God exists. It just proves either God exists or one of your axioms are wrong.
> the world is intelligently designed
That’s not a proof, or even proven, just an unprovable conjecture.
> there must be a first cause, and that must be God
Those are two unproven claims, (“There must be a First Cause” and “If there is a First Cause, it must be God”), not a proof.
> nothing in this world is perfect so there must be a transcendently perfect being
That’s just a non-sequitur. Even taking the premise to be true, it does not (at all) lead to the conclusion.
> we can only be satisfied be an infinite being, so the object of our desire lies beyond this world
The “we can only be satisfied” part is unproven (and unprovable), and the other part doesn’t follow from it. That there must exist something that fulfills are desire to be satisfied is wishful thinking, not some kind of logical necessity, so even an infinite being was necessary for that that doesn’t mean such a being must exist.
> moral laws exist and require a law giver
All “moral laws” which provably exist are attributable to a huan lawgiver. Any other “moral laws” are speculative, as is any other lawgiver.
> our mind is not reducible to our body, and must have been created by an even greater being
The premise is not true, and isn’t even related to the conclusion. If it were true it would require a mind to have some nonphysical component, not “an even greater being” as a creator.
> jesus existed, claimed to be God, and rose from the dead according to reliable historical documentation
None of that is true based on “reliable historical documentation”
I recommend you look into these things more carefully, e.g. read the wikipedia article on historicity of Jesus. I am just throwing out sketches of the many different well know arguments for theism that atheist believe they don't even have to engage with to have an intellectually robust position. Well fine, anyone can believe anything they want to believe, but that doesn't mean they've put any careful thought into their position.
>Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity
Sorry, but the pseudophilosopher here is the author of the article.
He can't disambiguate between truth as some property of the universe/time-space/actual historical occurence, and truth as it matters to us, and thinks that just because Foucault doesn't spell the distinction out, as if he spoke to 10 year olds, he himself confuses the too.
For those actually reading continental philosophy, Foucault's meaning is perfectly clear, and no, he doesn't mean truth in the sense of "this table is wooden" or "the sun is hot". Foucault doesn't do philosophy of truth in the way some analytical philosopher would.
It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy, and this is a tired, trite, post.
As for the quote from Foucault he gives as an exercize to the reader, it's trivial to parse. Here's my take, with extra examples to make it even clearer:
"The definition of what is true (and thus what is not) is based on power relations. We're speaking about social and political truths, here, dummy author, the kind people actually disagree about, not whether fire is hot or Australia exists.
Truth, contrary to myth (whose workings will be worth it to examine some other time), is not some higher ideal that you achieve when you free your spirit, or something that you arrive at in quiet contemplation in solitude, or a privilege of those free from social constraints.
It's something that is manufactured in this world, and it is produced following many different constraints. (e.g. truth in the medieval world followed religious constraints)."
> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy
The article's claim is not that this distinction doesn't exist or that it is not a useful distinction, but that "pseudophilosphers" tend to equivocate between "truth as some property of the universe" and "truth as it matters to us". That seems to me to be an interesting position that is worth considering.
(btw. the claim that "The definition of what is true (and thus what is not) is based on power relations" is untrue even in the "what matters to us" sense, if you take it to mean power is the only or main determinant of what is true. That's the problem with Foucault and his followers—the monomaniacal focus on power as the primary determiner of truth and human relations. It just ain't so.)
>but that "pseudophilosphers" tend to equivocate between "truth as some property of the universe" and "truth as it matters to us".
Which he fails to demonstrate - besides them using the same term for both (which everybody does).
He also fails to realize that "truth as some property of the universe" in many cases is only available through "truth as it matters to us" anyway. In which case, it's wrong to extend your claims to that too.
This is not just the case for things like morals, social norms, politics, etc., but also seemingly "hard fact" things.
For example, X historical event might or might have not have happened. Or might have happened in X or Y way. How exactly it did happen is "truth as some property of the universe".
Lacking a time machine though, and going through history (the academic endeavor), we only have access to it as "truth as it matters to us" - even sources of the time are subject to distortion due to power relations etc, and how we accept or not some source as valid and accurate is also subject to modern power relations, ideologies, and so on.
This "truth as some property of the universe" historical happenstance is thus not that objective in the end, in the sense that it's not (and will never be, without a Delorean) availabe in any objective form in which we can obtain it and use it.
So you're defence of foucault's language is that: (1) there is no practical distinction; so (2) let's not make any.
(1) is by the way False.
It is precisely by establishing epistemic standards for deciding when we are mistaken, and when not, that we are able to evaluate historical sources and even formulate the claim that they are "subject to power relations".
So your defence is rests precisely on the sort of underhanded equivocation being described.
>It is precisely by establishing epistemic standards for deciding when we are mistaken, and when not, that we are able to evaluate historical sources and even formulate the claim that they are "subject to power relations".
Only Foucault already knew that, and had studied extensively how those "epistemic standards" have been established and developed.
That's part of the problem, those standards are not some objective yardstick, but involved in the same issues themselves (again: not for hard facts nobody really cares to challenge, like "water boils at 100oC" but for facts that people do care about, have interests invested in, and so on, whether they are political, pedagogical, historical, and so on).
>So your defence is rests precisely on the sort of underhanded equivocation being described.
Well, then again, your comment rests precicely on "vaguely know about the works described, so will attribute strawmans to them, as if those authors haven't already considered the naive solutions I'm proposing to the issues they study"...
Re (1) there "being a practical distinction" is irrelevant, if the distinction is of no practical use. At best one can self-congratulate himself of knowing the "real truth", while outside, the accepted truth is something different. And nobody in their right mind would just trust that person, or trust that "they" have the correct epistemology/methodology, when most disagree.
For example, in the 19th century South the "truth" was that "blacks are inferior", and that didn't change with a different epistemology -not to mention most scientists agreed at the time to the same "truth" in every "civilized" country-, only with different power relations and social work. In the end, it took a whole civil war. Any "methodology" will be applied (and accepted) once the power relations change (or are forced to change) not before. It's the power relations enabling the change of the "truth".
Heck, even in hard sciences, like physics, as Kuhn wrote: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy
Hmmm. Kant, Frege, Hegel: these Germans laid the foundations of anglo-saxon analytical philosophy. Frege (who I struggle to understand) was a towering figure in language and logic, as well as maths. And wasn't Descartes from the continent?
Sartre had never heard of postmodernism. His work was of a literary kind, which I associate with Nietsche. He's considered an existentialist, par excellence (and 'scuse my French).
FWIW, I think it's the study of logic that has the power to immunise you against bad reasoning (you also have to be bright). In one of the Enid Blyton books, the kids visit an academic uncle who bemoans the fact that "they don't teach logic in schools any more". Dammit, that was in the 1st half of the 20th Century.
You still can't learn logic at school. I went to a good school; logic was not on the curriculum. I had only the vaguest idea of what it was, until I started a philosophy degree.
I've never read a book by a postmodernist. So I don't have standing to attack postmodernism. But it doesn't interest me much; nor do bodice-buster romantic novels.
>Hmmm. Kant, Frege, Hegel: these Germans laid the foundations of anglo-saxon analytical philosophy. Frege (who I struggle to understand) was a towering figure in language and logic, as well as maths. And wasn't Descartes from the continent?
Sure, but Continental and analytical are not geographical terms. They only originate etymologycally from the loose preference and emergence of difference schools in different geographical areas -- but obviously a European philosopher can be analytical, and an American philosopher can be continetal. Sort of like an merican band can play Irish folk and be good at it. But the Irish do it more, and usually do it better - it's, so to speak, their thing.
>FWIW, I think it's the study of logic that has the power to immunise you against bad reasoning (you also have to be bright).
You get immunity against some kinds of bad reasoning, and a vulnerability to others (scientism being one, systemic over-explanations being another, blindness to subtle things not quantifiable or qualifiable as truth propositions or logical axiomatic statements, but important nonetheless being the most important).
This is a rhetorical trick that people have been using for a long time.
The Thinker takes a bold and shocking stand, which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing: "People don't actually care about their children." Or "Truth doesn't exist." Or "We should kill poor people to increase the average level of happiness."
People are instantly nerdsniped by the idea. The implications! Could it be true? The curious reader finds there is always a deep and sophisticated literature backing up the crazy-sounding claim. Only after investing a huge amount of energy can the scholar even hope to unpack the fact of the matter, which is: the Thinker never really meant that claim, not the way it's stated, not using those words the way most people mean them. It always, always, always turns out that the Thinker was either being intentionally provocative with the big-bold-claim, or else using language in an idiosyncratic jargon-ified way.
(Sometimes there is no single Thinker, and instead the big-bold-claim is a meme that bubbles up organically out of a whole school of thought, and is memetically selected for promulgation on the basis of its outrageousness.)
If Foucalt had just written: "The agreed-upon 'truth' of the social, subjective stuff that people tend to loudly disagree about is often decided by who is in power, and who is advantaged by the 'truth' coming out one way or another," well, that's not a body of thought, that's a low-performing tweet. He needs to make it seem big, important, sweeping, general, touching upon every facet of human endeavor. This is not necessarily to say that Foucalt is some kind of intellectual grifter; this is simply the pressure that the universe exerts on all thinkers. To be more general, more important. But, as the Thinker is forced to make their big idea more general and more important, it loses the simple and obviously true (and fundamentally anodyne) tweet-length core.
You seem to have exaggerated the 'stands' you give as examples. The problem with that is that I'm instantly reminded of all those times where I've seen critics of some 'Thinkers' accuse them of taking 'stands' like these, and after more or less digging (depending on of unpopular they were) it indeed ended up being either words taken out of context, or just strawmen.
I think you have misunderstood my point about the influence of the memetic apparatus on the promulgation of ideas. I'm not taking a particular stance on whether or not the Thinker himself would say X; I'm saying X is the version of the idea that is widely ascribed to the thinker because of memetic selection, and X is usually a version of what the thinker actually thinks.
To say that X is a "strawman" implies some degree of disingenuousness, some intentionality, as if you could only possibly believe that Robin Hanson thinks people don't really care about their children if you are actively trying to misrepresent his real stance, which you secretly know deep down. In reality, Robin Hanson actually does think that people don't care about their children nearly as much as they say they do, add six more pages of caveats. This gets rhetorically rounded off to "Robin Hanson thinks people don't care about their children." The result is endless stupid conversations. This may or not be partly Robin Hanson's fault for making his blog post titles intentionally inflammatory and attention-grabby ("Healthcare is not about health", etc.). I am agnostic was to whether Foucalt has intentionally turned into the skid on this; but I do personally suspect that many big thinkers lean into obscurantism because they don't want to be nailed down.
Another way of phrasing the above: What you just posted is actually my point. On reflection, I'm not actually sure whether you read beyond the second paragraph.
I might have misunderstood/skipped the part 'which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing' ?
How much is the Thinker to blame ? What can Thinkers do to avoid this issue (besides 'obscurantism') ?
I guess sometimes a specific critic wouldn't even be to blame, it's just that the critics are over time slowly going to shift the initial meaning until only the hollow strawman husk remains ?
But yeah, I guess that we're talking about the same thing...
I agree that this article is rehashing the age-old continental vs. analytical debate, I disagree that because the debate is old, it is thus worthless.
I see many defending the "perfectly clear" meaning of continental philosophers, even if they don't obviously build up a clear argument from assumptions like a "10 year old" analytic philosopher might do.
Many, in my view, are forgetting just quite how obscurant many of these philosophers are. I am a little older than 10 years old now, but this passage (from Judith Butler), for instance, is close-to-incomprehensible to me
> The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Wow! As far as I can see, that "passage" is a single sentence. I haven't managed to parse it, so I could be wrong.
It's possible to discuss difficult subjects using plain, sinple language. Not everyone that writes sentences like that is a charlatan, but my instinct on encountering something like that is to ask: what is being concealed?
Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time.
This is no different than a paper like "Attention is All You Need" expecting you to have a background in neural networks, recurrent neural networks specifically, neural-language models, and the transformer architecture.
It's strange to me that philosophy is presumed exempt from having technical language and expecting a prepared reader where nearly all other fields are not.
When I consider that sentence, except with all the technical terms replaced with ones with which I am well acquainted, it would still be quite a severe mouthful, begging to be rewritten for clarity.
It's still difficult to parse. If I replace the parts that I don't understand with variables, I get
> The move from a <FLOB> in which <FOO> is understood to structure <BAR> <similarly to BAZ> brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of <QUIN> that takes <QUUX> as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the <QUUZ> inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the <CORGE>.
Consider all the different ideas that are being referenced in just one sentence. There are only so many ideas I can hold in my mind at once, even if I'm familiar with them. Butler's ideas might be worth considering, or they might not, but writing like this is forcing a sort of labour upon the reader, regardless of whether they're familiar with the concepts used or not.
Check my interpretation above (I did 3 levels, expanded simplified, quite simplified, and explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-18).
It is indeed tedious writing, but her audience isn't the general public, is other academics and people who get off with this sort of think and have read 100+ other books on the same subjects.
So, it's more like Dijkstra writing something to Knuth (and laying the technical language thick to save time), more than an O'Reilly book or a Hacker Noon post.
Thank you for your translation. That helps to clear up the meaning, and was much clearer than the sentence in question. That said, I don't believe it invalidates my criticism, as it's not the technical language that I'm opposed to. Given your comment about it being tedious writing, I think we may actually be in agreement, and that I expressed myself poorly.
The point I was attempting to make was that even if you replace the variables with anything that results in an intelligible sentence, it's still going to be difficult to read. Regardless of whether you understand the terminology. The structure of the sentence itself is contributing to the difficulty in interpretation. Could time have been saved by writing it in this style? Sure, but it takes the readers' attention away from the actual argument and forces them to spend extra effort on interpreting the sentence structure.
I see this as a problem with academic (and even popular) writing in general. It's far from being exclusive to either Judith Butler or philosophy.
> the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time.
Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, they are all quite clear.
Many modern marxists, like G.A. Cohen, write similarly clearly.
> Attention is All You Need
That paper actually defines quite a bit of what it is talking about. Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this.
I've actually read quite a bit of the "psychoanalysis"-inspired philosophy sub-genre inaugurated by Lacan. I think it is insulting to compare the jargon used in that context, where authors will often admit to be intentionally obscurant, with a technical paper like Attention is All You Need.
What's interesting about this comment is that Butler defines three terms explicitly in that sentence. The 'in which' can be read as 'defined as'
a structuralist account: capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to
etc.
> intentionally obscurant
Academic technical papers are also very frequently intentionally obscurant. That's part of academic writing, and certainty is itself worthy of critique.
> Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this
"In this section we compare various aspects of self-attention layers to the recurrent and convolutional layers commonly used for mapping one variable-length sequence of symbol representations(x1,...,xn)to another sequence of equal length(z1,...,zn), with xi,zi∈Rd, such as a hidden layer in a typical sequence transduction encoder or decoder."
Attention is All You Need is no different than the equivalent postmodernist text (this line of Butler's is certainly not the "Attention.." of the postmodernist theory world). Both are impossible to understand with one read, require lots of thought and study to understand and it typically helps to have someone else guide you through the text.
>Many, in my view, are forgetting just quite how obscurant many of these philosophers are.
Some continental philosophers hide bad ideas or unclear thinking with obscure prose. But some analytic philosophers impose bad ideas and hide the lack of clarity in their thinking by rejecting whole areas of reality, experience, etc. from their examination, and then pretending the simplified model them came up with is great interpretation of the real world, the corners they cut are irrelevant, and so on.
>but this passage (from Judith Butler), for instance, is close-to-incomprehensible to me
Took it up as a challenge, and did 3 takes, the extended, the TL;DR; and the ELI18. Please tell me whether you like it :-)
Expanded version:
Some used to say that Capital (money/rich people/economic structures) influenced social relations to function in the same form [homologous] as Capital itself functions (that is, it turned social relations once mediated by nobleness, morals, religion, custom, etc. into economic relations/exchanges). [1]
Nowadays, we see that control over society [hegemony] works through power relations (relations between people with different levels of social power), that are subject to repetition [actions like marriage repeated as custom, versions of truth perpetuated through repetition in education and official historical accounts], convergence [many power holders -e.g. school, church, state, news, etc.- aligning and forcing the same ideas and thus establishing them] and rearticulation [power holders come up with new social norms, or articulate older ideas in new ways while continuing their lording over society aka "hegemony"].
In short, we had a static structural view that "Capital changes society in its image" and we now see that "Power relations change society in a dynamic way, through repetition, convergence, and rearticulation of ideas and social norms".
Both of those views are still answers about the question how power (in the old view, the Capital through the structural influence of economy on society, in the new view, hegemony, that is those with the upper hand in power relations - not necessarily just Capitalists, but also e.g. men over women, clergy over believers, the press over the public and so on) influence/run society.
This move, from the old way of seeing how power influences society to the new way makes us see that the way social structures are imposed changes over time (and is amenable to change).
This move, thus, marks a shift from the way Althusser considered structures as fossilized theoretical objects, to a new, dynamic way of seeing power over society [as contingent], and makes us see the shaping of social structures ("hegemony") as tied to different temporary strategies and positions as it constantly re-invents itself.
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TL;DR;
Capitalism doesn't just shape how we live [social structures] in its image, by making everything an economic exchange.
Rather, those having power in various domains (the "hegemony"), influence how we live through repetition, scratching each other's back and pushing to the same direction [convergence], and by inventing new BS to convince us what we should be doing (re-articulation).
This means the shaping of how we live is more dynamic than thought (also implied that this allows for more opportunities to change it).
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ELI18
Control is not just about money and capitalists making us their bitches and only caring about money, bro. The Man controls us by overflowing us with the same BS over and over, with getting along with others with power to fuck us over, and by coming up with new shit when we don't buy his previous BS anymore.
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[1] This is similar to Conway's law: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure". It's also how Marx described Capital working: changing the world to its image, changing older ways people related - e.g. lord and peasant, husband and wife, etc. - to economic relations
When you add the next sentence in the original text, it's even more blatant:
"And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourses which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true”
> The definition of what is true (and thus what is not) is based on power relations. We're speaking about social and political truths, here, dummy author, the kind people actually disagree about, not whether fire is hot or Australia exists
I think 'dummy author' has your number. From TFA:
"When challenged, the obscurantist will typically retreat to the safe house provided by the trivial interpretation of his claims, only to reoccupy the controversial ground once the critic has left the scene."
That's not a backtracking to a "trivial interpretation", it's what the quote says.
(In fact @fratajcz continuation of Foucault's except in the comment above, makes it extremely clear that he speaks of social truths and their construction).
The author makes a strawman that Foucault here implies something else ("objective truth doesn't exist at all even concerning hard facts"), and then triumphantly declares that it doesn't hold, or that Foucault doesn't justify this claim (which he never did).
In the meantime, he fails to showcase that his strawman was actually meant by the philosopher, or that the intended meaning is a "safe house" retreat.
(Not to mention he fails to see the cases where the "extended" -non trivial- interpretation also holds, e.g. see my answer to parent comment re: history and "facts of the universe").
It's rather the opposite: it's the trivial cases, that Foucault's thesis doesn't apply (of the "fire is hot"/"water is wet" variety, which everybody agrees anyway) - and the more impactful and profound cases (political, social, historical, truth) that it does.
The author seems to apply the inverse prioritization (that challenging "fire is hot" would be the profound non-trivial claim, and challenging "abortion is a crime" kind of truths would be a retreat to triviality. That, though, is because he thinks in terms of analytical philosophy. The former were never the truths Foucault cared about or wanted to challenge.
Even if it isn't evident from the except, Foucault has written extensively about and was preoccupied with, the social truths, on sexuality, mental health, crime, morality. His subject was never the trivial hard-fact truths of the "fire is hot", "water turns to ice at 0o degrees" kind. The author here pretends as if Foucault "over-extended" to them when speaking about truth, to build his strawman.
I created an account to say this, but you said it better than I ever could.
I just want to second the idea that the quote he gives as an example of Foucault's "obscurantism" is perfectly clear to someone who's actually read Foucault. The quote is unclear to someone who's never read Foucault because the author took it out of context. The "constraints" on discourse which Foucault references at the end of the quote is literally what Foucault spent his entire early career studying and explaining. To act like he just throws the word out there and never explains what he's talking about is intellectual libel.
To me it seems like this is the trouble: for you, reading Foucault, it is clear what is meant by truth and that the word is constrained to a narrow scope. But to others, including me, it is not at all clear how far the scope goes.
So if the defense of this ambiguity is to require everyone to read several books by the author first, I find it unacceptable.
Without clarity, people can think they agree, while they disagree. Similarly, they might think they disagree, when in fact they agree. I have a hard time comprehending why so many people defend vague language.
>To me it seems like this is the trouble: for you, reading Foucault, it is clear what is meant by truth and that the word is constrained to a narrow scope. But to others, including me, it is not at all clear how far the scope goes.
Well, why would it be clear from the start (without familiarity)?
I mean, what "weight" on a NN means is not clear to me until I study machine learning, right?
Then I find out that it doesn't have the same meaning as it does in dietary terms, physics, or legal matters (the "weight of the situation").
For people reading Foucault when he wrote it, which is theory-obsessed bibliophiles in 1960-1980s Paris academic and student and political world, primarily, it was as clear as would be for Peter Norvig to read an AI paper and understanding everything.
I think you can criticize Foucault to a point for being unclear sometimes, but you have to remember that sentence was taken out of context. Words get meaning from their context, so I don't think it's fair to expect every sentence a philosopher has written to make perfect sense on it's own without reading the surrounding essay/book.
This sentence reflects a socially constructed truth (or falsehood) insofar as we have to agree on what the symbol XYZ stands for, what a currency is (is bitcoin a currency, are apples -- depends on the context) and what criteria of stability we have.
We can measure the exchange rate of a currency compared to others and we can define criteria for what we call stability in this context -- and we can make propositions based on that model, but only if we agree on the model. But all of that comes down to our socially constructed definitions. We cannot objectively measure the value of a currency like we measure the wavelength of a photon.
Other examples: "A Tough stance on crime works" (or has a lower crime rate other possible explanations). "Tomorrow there will be a traffic jam on intersection XYZ" (or won't there be a traffic jam because people assume that there will be and avoid that intersection).
Are these examples like saying "this movie sucks" or “specific person X is tall?” In that “tall” is fuzzy and social, but if we agreed on a precise definition (“any person at least Y height is defined as tall“), we could give it truth in the photon sense, but as it’s collectively used today, it’s too imprecise a word to assign true or false?
Not every fuzzy proposition is necessarily a social construct. Your example of a tall object is as good as your definition of "tall" is, but once that is defined any object can be measured objectively.
A good way of determining if something is a social construct is to ask yourself if the proposition would still hold if one were to remove all social lifeforms from the universe. A "tall" object would still be tall (to the degree that we can define tall) and it could still be measured somehow. In my example talking about a currency or an exchange rate wouldn't even make sense if we don't have a society that exchanges money or goods.
Well, "obviously" everything that I know must be truth; otherwise it would be mere belief. But for everything I think I know, there's someone that believes different. In that light, it seems unreasonable for anyone to think they have access to truth.
So truth seems to be reduced (or elevated?) to something we can never reach, and only aspire to. It makes it into some kind of metaphysical object, whose nature can't be empirically established.
I think it's best to avoid talking about truth, when trying to do philosophy. Just do the reasoning, and draw some conclusions if you can.
But what are these conclusions worth, then? How do you accept that the premises and reasoning are solid? Where does it go from "this table is wooden" (an example used in this discussion somewhere; let's ignore the linguistic problems) to "but that truth is manufactured"?
Wouldn't be the first time a field of philosophy has been trashed. The logical positivists did their best to trash metaphysics (I think rather effectively).
Epistemology is theory of knowledge; it's a statement in epistemology (one which you might disagree with) that knowledge and truth are not the same thimg.
In the Phaedrus, it was predicted that writing and reading in general (let alone specific examples such as pseudophilosophy) would eventually encourage confused, self-indulgent thinking.
> You offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.
I haven’t read phaedrus in a while, but I think that interpretation is taken a little out of context. It’s better to say reading and writing, alone, would encourage these things.
There’s this theme in Plato that power isn’t the end all be all. By that same logic, reading/writing were a technology that gave you power. Specifically the ability to record/recall things. Plato/Socrates argue that power alone gives you as much ability to achieve bad as it does good. Then they go on to argue that it’s wisdom that allows one to know what is good bad, thus wisdom is critical in all things. So, that’s why it’s says that in phaedrus, probably haha. It’s not that controversial actually, and not the sky is falling kind of thing. Socrates was just really particular about the pursuit of truth being sort of like the singular focus to achieving good, and the rest were important but had to follow from there.
Parenthetically, I’ll add, he also seemed to believe that working out your body was just as important and necessary to being a philosopher.
I’ve engaged in philosophy for years, and the most important thing you learn when actually debating, is to learn to think in different frameworks of mind. This alone is of great benefit when reading or taking in thoughts of others.
There's a strand of suspicion towards literacy in Plato. Mainly I'm thinking of the dialog in which Socrates talks to a man about to sue his father (I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name of the dialog); mainly the idea is that writing enfeebles the memory and intellect.
> In the Phaedrus, it was predicted that writing and reading in general... would eventually encourage confused, self-indulgent thinking.
We don't learn things, according to Plato, but the soul is brought to remember them again, and the remembering happens by virtue of a Socratic interrogation. If you read "x is the case", your soul hasn't been made to remember it, and worse, that proposition just might not be true which you won't discover without interrogation.
Elsewhere (apologies, can't remember which dialog) Plato offers a description of thinking: the mind asks a question and then answers it. The form of the dialog models that process nicely.
Plato was an elitist; he wasn't against reading and writing in general, he simply thought that proles and people who weren't "like him" shouldn't be allowed to attempt it.
2,200 years later, I find I disagree. There's much that is good in Plato, but I don't include his social opinions.
That Plato's criticism of reading and writing comes down to us through his composed dialogs (and who furthermore abandoned his aspiration to become a playwright) was the surface-level irony that caught my attention.
That Plato didn't want people to read and write in order to keep them out of philosophy because he was an elitist seems very doubtful. In fact, wouldn't the literate, educated, paying students of the sophists constitute an elite? The concept of elitism itself, I find a bit anachronistic here. I think there's something more interesting going on, and it has to do more with epistemic concerns than gate-keeping.
Sure, there's the dialog where Socrates encounters the two brothers who teach people how to "fight with words" (Euthydemus). The dialog is really pretty funny to read, and the arguments the brothers throw around I've seen referenced as examples of eristics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic).
I am unaware of any such passage in Plato where the verbal expression of an idea is compared with the written expression of that idea; he criticizes eristics and he criticizes writing.
> While pseudoscience is particularly prone to causal fallacies and cherry-picking of data, the most common fallacy in obscurantist pseudophilosophy is equivocation. This fallacy exploits ambiguities in certain key terms, where plausible but trivial claims lend apparent credibility to interesting but controversial ones. When challenged, the obscurantist will typically retreat to the safe house provided by the trivial interpretation of his claims, only to reoccupy the controversial ground once the critic has left the scene.
I found this to be a very helpful description of a specific kind of sloppy argumentation I have seen a lot of (usually about politics) in the last few years. It seems like it's made worse by anonymous online group arguments - one person will make one trivially true claim, another person will make a farther-reaching, incorrect claim and say it is proven by the first, a third person will defend a critique of any bad claims by just defending the first trivially true one, and bad ideas thrive in the space between all these people.
Distinguishing science from pseudoscience is called the "demarcation problem" and is surprisingly difficult and subtle. It would seem to me that the analogous "philosophical demarcation problem" is even more difficult and probably completely meaningless because of the open and fluid nature of philosophy itself.
The author believes that "pseudophilosophy," whatever that is, encourages confused and self-indulgent thinking and therefore must be separated from proper philosophy. But many people would level the same criticism at philosophy itself. Why then is it useful to distinguish between between the two?
I don't view this as a problem because philosophy is not science and is concerned with the "hypothesis generation" side of human inquiry. That is to say, the value it provides is in coming up with new, interesting, and diverse points of view that may or may not be correct but certainly broaden the mind. As Paul Feyerbend[1] argues in his book Beyond Method, "anything goes" when it comes to hypothesis generation and the more creative the better. Philosophy, chaotic and ill-defined as philosophy is, it certainly useful for hypothesis generation, and there are many famous cases of scientists citing philosophers[2] as inspiration.
Once we pin down a theory and begin to seriously question if it is a good model for reality we have left philosophy and entered the realm of science.
I personally don't see how it could be otherwise: theories and ideas don't spring fully formed from the head, but evolve piecemeal as vague ideas are made more coherent through criticism, and this activity is labeled "philosophy." To deny the human mind a space in which to play with half-formed ideas is to put an end to new ideas altogether.
Philosophy as a field may be “open and fluid” to an extent, but analytical philosophy isn’t at all. As the author writes, there are basic, well-established methods for sniffing out fallacious ideas.
All ideas—even those originating from the philosophy department itself—ought to be subjected to basic analytical philosophy before being let out the door. I think that’s what this piece boils down to.
Yes, if we were absolutely convinced of the correctness of analytical philosophy and the impossibility of good hypotheses arising from other approaches that would indeed be a good filter. If we are not quite so certain perhaps we should not prematurely put the kibosh on ideas just because they run afoul of one particular point of view, but rather let them all into the arena to fight it out?
That is correct. As my argument was not a proposition expressed in or reducible to a formal language, nor was it an empirically verifiable statement of fact, it is neither true nor false but is in fact meaningless. There was no point in my expressing it, and there is certainly no point in you arguing with it. As Wittgenstein said, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
There's a contradiction in the conclusion. Foucault was an academic philosopher, got a degree in philosophy, was awarded a doctorate, and is respected by many people who also got a lot of education in philosophy. So, how is more philosophy education supposed to have stopped him?
Publishing books on analytical philosophy, logical philosophy, and philosophy of language generally doesn't get you a bestseller that makes you rich and famous.
>by using the word ‘truth’ in an impressionistic fashion, the distinction between belief and truth is smudged over, allowing Foucault to make seemingly profound statements such as:
>>[T]ruth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.
>I leave it as an exercise to the reader to disambiguate this statement and see what remains.
Foucault wrote in French. Translation of any work between language is hard, and always a creative effort. Philosophy, I think, suffers from this to the highest degree ... to the end that a lot of philosophy in translation comes across as nearly indecipherable nonsense which is perhaps not the fault of the author, the topic, or the translator, but only the fact that translation is difficult.
Baudrillard would have more parallels to what they are trying to convey than Foucault if they want to pick French Post-modernists.
The author is just a member of clergy upset that uneducated barbarians and peasants have unorthodox beliefs. Yet they are just victims to post-truth hyperreality. What is their solution to keep people in line? The AI from Metal Gear Solid 2? Who is this written for? Are flat-earth people or anti-vax people going to read this and change their mind? It's just ball fanning.
The author used to be my philosophy teacher.
Fun to stumble on a article written by him.
I think I agree with him just a smal amount of philosophy in grade school would probably be very helpful for getting more people on to a “better” path.
I have an old coworker in a group of friends that fits this description. Its frustrating because they will continue to spout this stuff off confidently, but not ever listen to the counter argument or understand that their philosophy is flawed. It makes it challenging to continue to engage with this group of friends.
Really interesting piece, and I especially appreciated this:
> Usually, the prose is infused with arcane terminology and learned jargon, creating an aura of scholarly profundity. We can call this phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy.
But more of a meta comment: can we please not start calling people who disagree with us "pseudophilosophers," or start using it as an insult to hurl against people we don't agree with?
The amount of ad hominem accusations of "pseudoscience" drive me crazy. So often (especially these days) we take a "real" thing and broadly misapply it to anyone or anything that disagrees with us, all the while pretending we're using "science" or "philosophy" to disarm the opposition.
I wonder if this an attempt to validate philosophy as a science in itself now that other sciences have invalidated many philosophical positions as being valid. My primary feeling about most philosophy is that it is a historical science instead of a systematic science, where the ideas of a certain philosopher are placed in the context of history. It also seems to me that the philosophers are more important than their ideas and that when a philosopher changes his ideas, they talk about the early and late.
The article isn't trying to "validate philosophy as a science".
To some degree science relies on certain philosophical assumptions to be viable and philosophy aims to make those assumptions explicit and to allow one to understand the choices one has made in accepting them.
I agree that certain philosophical positions have been encroached upon by science but that is not a process that can continue indefinitely. The realm of enquiry that science can operate on is by neccesity smaller than that which philosophy can act upon.
Many people are going to respond to the above by saying "If your statements aren't empirical and/or falsifiable then they are meaningless - therefore philosophy outside of the natural sciences is meaningless".
If that's your response then congratulations. You've just done some philosophy. Now take a step back and examine the assumptions that brought you here.
> The realm of enquiry that science can operate on is by neccesity smaller than that which philosophy can act upon.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're suggesting that philosophy can talk about anything that science can. And of course, it can, in the sense that there will be uni positions for talking about just about anything in philosophy department, but I'd say that for a long time now when science is able to treat a subject, philosophical investigation of it becomes meaningless pursuit of words, disconnected from reality. And just like religion used to answer some questions about how the world works, but over centuries was in perpetual withdrawal up to the point where it's not its domain at all anymore, philosophy in areas of empirical reality is expected to be superseded by science and as such seems to be as worthwhile as ancient talks about arche and medieval religious talks about creation of the world. What understanding did we gain from arguing over whether the world is made of fire, of water, of ether/whatever? Whether it's deterministic or not? None.
It seems it would be a better use of everyone's time if philosophy withdrew from areas of current and future scientific inquiry.
In this discussion I am regarding science as a strict subset of philosophy. One where more constraints are added.
So of course philosophy can talk about anything science can because science is a branch of philosophy.
You can't do science without implicitly doing philosophy. Science relies on epistimology to justify it's foundations. Debates about whether topic A or topic B are really science is a philosophical debate. This isn't flippant intellectual game playing. Find a theoretical physicist and an experimental physicist arguing (which they tend to) and they are arguing about the philosophy of science and the nuances of the scientific method.
It's hard to do cosmology or particle physics without tripping over philosophy. "Shut up and calculate" can only take you so far.
Scientists argue about philosophy of science, because it's about their field. It doesn't make science a philosophy of science [EDIT: in previous version I wrote it the other way around].
> It's hard to do cosmology or particle physics without tripping over philosophy. "Shut up and calculate" can only take you so far.
It's also hard to do cosmology or particle physics without using a computer, and scientists will argue the merits of C++ vs Julia vs Python; yet they aren't a branch of IT.
If you don't like the 'branch of' terminology, then what about :
chemistry needs foundations based on physics and physics need a foundation based on mathematics/philosophy ?
P.S.: We used to do particle physics and cosmology long before 'computer' became a name for a machine rather than a job.
Would you argue that, although philosophy used to concern itself with how to live a good life (for example, Stoicism) these questions are now better addressed through science of the type done in uni psychology departments?
> Would you argue that, although philosophy used to concern itself with how to live a good life (for example, Stoicism) these questions are now better addressed through science of the type done in uni psychology departments?
No. I don't think it's science's business. Science is descriptive. And psychology in particular doesn't live up to Popper's standards for science. There are psychology departments trying to change that. I wish them all luck and hope they succeed.
And I do think that there are worthwhile elements in the writings of Stoics and Epicureans (I favour the latter), once you subtract from them the parts that are in the domain of science.
It is well know that the Math department is the second cheapest department at a university. The people there only need a pencil, paper, and rubbish bin.
But which is the cheapest department?
The Philosophy department. There you don't need the bin.
I'm not sure how much philosophy and science can ever be connected. There is surely little biological basis for systems of ethics or epistemology. Abandoning that, we're left to wonder if they can apply to social systems in the aggregate.
There we find a wide variety of social systems in partial or complete disagreement on what constitutes ethics. In some systems murder is a sin; in others it is tolerated or necessary. Fidelity is variously required or shunned. Simpler things like truthful speaking are all over the map.
Even epistemology is in doubt. Secular science types love provable measurements and consistent theories. Others embrace inspiration, devine communication, even mushroom-induced hallucination as true sources.
So where does science impact philosophy? Perhaps as a tool for describing philosophies, like describing species of animal. That doesn't make philosophy a science, but a subject of scientific study.
My experience is exactly the opposite. My undergraduate philosophy degree had exactly one history class. Names of philosophers were important mostly to label ideas.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with respect to philosophical positions invalidated by science. I can't think of any myself.
The ancient Greek philosophers contain some real howlers like Aristotlean impetus and belief that women must have fewer teeth than men because of a smaller skull and an assumption that human teeth are identical in size and spacing. They refused to check their ideas to reality under a self indulgent concept of "purity of thought". I blame aristocratic influnce and the disdain for the practical.
That would be the "pre-socratics". I was forced to study them for my degree, and I could barely contain my laughter.
Some of those guys had some pretty bonkers beliefs, and it does seem to be true that they often disdained actually cheecking their claims empirically. A few of them were on the nail, though, at least sometimes; Democritus, for example.
Science used to mean knowledge in general, which is its root. Philosophy was a subset of science, and theology was the top science. Natural philosophy, what we now call science, was a subset of philosophy.
I have not read either Harris or Krauss's book, but yes. 100% this. If people want to learn about philosophy I suggest they create a reading list of leading analytic philosophers and just read the source text. Straw Man Hume is not as good as the real thing, trust me. Hume will not teach you anything about meditation, but he will teach you better methods for thinking.
Reality is subjective and so should philosophy be. Nobody knows what is going on here and anyone that thinks they do is lying. What is right for me may not be right for you. Learn what is right for you through trial and error. Failure is the best teacher to find out something will not work. Nobody should follow anyone else. You should be the leader of your own life as it is your experience. The goal is not self indulgent thinking, the goal is to stop thinking. To go with the flow. To trust in yourself and believe that you can do what you set your mind to. To remove the fear of I cant and the fear of failure. It is as simple as that, no philosopher or book can tell you that. Only experience can. You can read all the books in the world, but you do not gain any true understanding until you put words into action and actually experience it.
> Reality is subjective and so should philosophy be.
There is no reason to believe reality is subjective. If it was, why would you appeal to a shared, objective reality to convince us otherwise? Even if it was, that still wouldn't mean that philosophy "should" be. Declaring what something "is" doesn't show you how it "ought" to be.
> Nobody knows what is going on here and anyone that thinks they do is lying.
Of course nobody has a perfect knowledge of it all, so lets not pretend this is an "all or nothing" deal. There are an awfully lot of well informed people who have learned quite a bit about the human experience, better and worse ways of navigating through life, and take great pleasure in sharing that hard-earned knowledge.
> What is right for me may not be right for you. Learn what is right for you through trial and error.
You mean you like vanilla and I like chocolate, right? Or do you mean to say for one person it can be legitimately "right" to exploit others (emotionally, economically, whatever) so long as their experiences affirm it to them?
> Failure is the best teacher to find out something will not work.
No, finding and learning from good teachers (and/or those who already made some mistakes) are the best teachers. Failure is necessary, as there is no trying without failure, but it is not inherently a superior model for learning.
> Nobody should follow anyone else. You should be the leader of your own life as it is your experience.
Of course at the end of the day you need to build and put trust in yourself as the architect of your own life, but attempting to do that without ever following and emulating others you admire (friends, families, figureheads, and even celebrities) is pure folly.
> The goal is not self indulgent thinking, the goal is to stop thinking.
This is an awful lot of thinking to convince people to not think. Is this also not self-indulgent? Every statement is about "you, your experience, your subjective reality" and push you to close yourself off from working with others to figure life out.
> To go with the flow.
How do you both discount having faith in others to support you (e.g. nobody knows, learn whats right for you, nobody should follow) and go with the flow?
> To trust in yourself and believe that you can do what you set your mind to. To remove the fear of I cant and the fear of failure.
Amen! The worst part of thinking you can't and that its not worth trying is that you might just convince yourself you're right and created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> It is as simple as that, no philosopher or book can tell you that. Only experience can.
I'm afraid I must revert to disagreeing. Philosophers (both the kind who call themselves that and those who are too practical to don such a title) and books can create worlds and scenarios that challenge us intellectually and emotionally to question the current boundaries of what to accept and reach for in life.
> You can read all the books in the world, but you do not gain any true understanding until you put words into action and actually experience it.
Amen again! As Hamlet said "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.". All the ideas and dreams in the world are useless until to attempt to put them into action.
> While pseudoscience is particularly prone to causal fallacies and cherry-picking of data, the most common fallacy in obscurantist pseudophilosophy is equivocation. This fallacy exploits ambiguities in certain key terms, where plausible but trivial claims lend apparent credibility to interesting but controversial ones. When challenged, the obscurantist will typically retreat to the safe house provided by the trivial interpretation of his claims, only to reoccupy the controversial ground once the critic has left the scene.
It's somewhat tangential but it's quite amusing to hear that in France many academics are decrying the importation of "American" schools of social science and the effect it's having on French society [0]. Quite the "volte-face" with respect to ongoing complaints in some corners of the American press about the pernicious influence of Derrida and Foucault on American society.
>Usually, the prose is infused with arcane terminology and learned jargon, creating an aura of scholarly profundity. We can call this phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy.
Is this a joke? I honestly can't tell if it's a joke.
great comments and replies in this thread! one thing that it really brings to light for me is that unfortunately, a lot of us in the West just aren't conditioned to receive continental thought. for us academic disciplines are supposed to have specific empirical domains to whose technical development they have a historical mission to contribute. for continentals in the 60s and 70s, that very notion of "missionness" was in question, especially for a discipline like philosophy which had historically partnered as much with labor as with capital.
This article is pretty standard analytic bilk: demand readers use your definitions of words and complain about the decline of western civilization when they don't.
(a): The complaint is about using the same word in different ways, without marking the difference, which has the effect of hiding that the conclusions are unfounded.
(b): It's a small part of the essay, one sin among many.
Oh wow, what a topic. I have experienced this from all angles. I'm writing programming books in which I have to extend/combine the work of various philosophers[1], I am a huge fan of history, science, and philosophy, and hell, I just tweeted about this subject[2]
I agree with the general gist of what the author is saying, but I find that I have a lot of problems using the word "psuedophilosophy". If you want it bluntly, all philosophy is bullshit and trying to stick the word science in there does disservice to both. The longer version is that programming is applied philosophy: we meet, we learn, we define, we codify into a formal system, we use that system to explore the universe around us.
The longer version gives us a hint, a compass to find our way around in the bullshit maze (and I use "bullshit" affectionately. My only point is that philosophy is a terribly different thing from science). Where are we going? After all, I'd argue that philosophy is the mother of all sciences, including math. It's obviously critical to humanity. But in my formulation, coders use the process of philosophy to do something, agree, create, formalize, explore. We do philosophy all of the time, but we actually do it. We don't write books on it or spend much if any time quoting or hero-worshipping others who may have done bits and pieces of it 100 years ago or more.
Just this morning I ordered the Great Courses series "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida" I am extremely pumped to get started on it. Because of my books and my interests, I've ran across all kinds of philosophy groupies: professors, doctoral students, fans, grads who hate the subject now, etc. My take: if you don't study philosophy you're missing out on life. Some of the smartest people on the planet have spent their entire lives thinking about tough problems. Use that work. Having said that, most all of them only had a handful of good ideas and spent the rest of their career taking them too far. You have to understand that too if you're actually going somewhere with that knowledge. Otherwise you're just intellectually self-stimulating.
If you're learning stuff to go places you can always look back and ask "Where am I now that I wouldn't have been without this knowledge?" That tracks well with this author because his core complaint, whether he states it clearly or not, is that folks pick, choose, skim, and misunderstand great philosophic works as a crutch to actually understanding or teaching something. It's either a prop they use to make rhetorical points or it's a mask they use to cover up their own lack of ability. Yup, they sure do. And you can tell because when you get through reading them you're not left being able to do something you couldn't have done before. Instead your previous opinions are validated, just with bigger words and some loose-fitting historical anecdotes.
> There are two kinds of pseudophilosophy, one mostly harmless and the other insidious. The first variety is usually found in popular scientific contexts. This is where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, walk self-confidently into philosophical territory without realising it, and without conscientious attention to relevant philosophical distinctions and arguments. Often implicit empiricist assumptions in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are relied upon as if they were self-evident, and without awareness of the threat that those very assumptions pose to the author’s own reasoning. We can call this phenomenon scientistic pseudophilosophy.
This sounds similar to engineer's syndrome/engineer's disease: https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee... (which isn't limited to engineers, IIRC there's an equivalent term that I forget for medical doctors that overconfidently stray outside their area of competence).
One smart aleck but serious question - what precisely makes the naive scientific distinctions wrong compared to the philsophical argument?
It is overly literal and somewhat unimaginative to immediately answer theship of Theseus with "Did it sink or wind up disassembled in whole? If not then it is the same ship." But it is a consistent philosophical framework - it never was destroyed so therefore it is the same ship.
Is it convention and semantic akin to say "literally" being used as figuratively? While clearly bad for cross communication and a reciepe for confusion self-consitency is all that is needed for within subset communication even if it leads to cringeworthy constructs like "he actually literally exploded" for what was previously just "he literally exploded".
Be nice if this philosopher started by defining terms. For instance, are we all crystal clear as to what pseudophilosophy is? A quick search came up with (chiefly pejorative) Any philosophical system that does not meet mainstream academic standards.. I hope there's no possibility of this being an own-goal.
It's hard to believe that there are still people writing the old "post-modernist philosophers are bad for civilization!" rant.
One thing that always surprises me about these posts are that they always fail to get the arrow of causality right. In general postmodernist philosophy is a descriptive philosophy, not a proscription one. That is Foucault and the many other philosophers this author wants to write off as pseuds aren't stating "we should live in a world where all truth is in question" but observing that we do live in this world.
The rise of "astrology, homeopathy, flat-Earthism, anti-vaxx" in recent years for me is a strong argument that these thinkers were largely correct. People aren't reading Foucault and becoming anti-vaxx, and people who think Fox news is reality aren't doing so because they read some Deleuze.
While it is of course folly to try to paint all of these thinker with a broad brush, the general themes that they describe is that in our postmodern, late capitalist society we're seeing systems of meaning and value begin to break down. And again, they largely aren't saying that they should break down or that this is a desirable direction to go. Just observing that this is happening.
If these philosophies had made any predictions it's that as global capitalism grows more manic, we'll see the continued breakdown of systems of value and meaning, were people become completely enmeshed in a world of symbols detached for any real meaning. Not only the rise in "..., anti-vaxx" but also things like "fake news", the commodification of identity in social media, the surrealism of the radical "right" in the US, all of these things are the logical conclusion of what you would expect given the descriptions these thinkers have of who society works.
The bizarreness of rants against these thinkers is somehow blaming them for the very state of society, culture and knowledge that they predicted. It's like blaming epidemiologists for a pandemic. If anything we should view postmodernist thinkers as absolutely validated.
>It's hard to believe that there are still people writing the old "post-modernist philosophers are bad for civilization!" rant.
As someone on the outside of philosophy as a discipline, this is the only sort of description of postmodernism I see. Regardless of its prevalence or correctness, what do you think leads people to interpret postmodernism in this way?
The thing about Foucault that makes his work meaningful to me is how he hit the nail on the head about how power is changing and continuing to change in society. It has become diffuse and self-perpetuating. It lacks a direct, physical force but still coerces. It is no longer socially acceptable or legal for men to withhold food from their wives, but women suffer from eating disorders in large numbers. Slavery is no longer legal in the US, but a large % of black people are incarcerated and forced to do free labor. The internet has given us access to an enormous amount of information, and yet we are addicted to social media and controlled by algorithms.
I think the same can be said about Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. A lot of their work does not hold up, but within their work are gems of insight that have stood the test of time. Just because they do not adhere to the methodologies of analytical philosophy does not mean that they haven't produced important thought.
I like how he criticizes specifically people who reference hegel, jung, marx, etc. but then does not proceed to analyze hegel, et al or anyone that references them.
Pure philosophical shade, in the exact "aura of scholarly profundity" that he is supposedly criticizing.
The line: "Usually, the prose is infused with arcane terminology and learned jargon, creating an aura of scholarly profundity. We can call this phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy." struck me as especially hilarious in context.
While "critical thinking skills" are great in principle, empirically they are invoked almost exclusively by people practicing their very own brand of pseudophilosophy.
The core tenets of that particular groupthink are the rejection of the "mainstream media" as corrupt/"biased"/irrelevant (usually in favour of some guy publishing daily 60 minute rants on YouTube), an unhealthy obsession with IQs in general and its variability between races and/or genders in particular, and the unwavering belief that Flat Earthers and Holocaust Denialists are the result of a lack of information on the respective subjects.
"Self-Indulgent" is a perfect term here: these people expand the universe of possible sources to almost infinity, which is laudable, at least in theory. But in the necessary next step of cutting it down to the amount one can actually handle, they fail to preserve the diversity of the input signal.
From the rich buffet that is on offer, they pick 15 cheeseburgers.
Good read. The author’s real point is buried at the end when they argue that more emphasis needs to be placed on reading and thinking critically, and that being sure we teach students about fallacies is very important to combat this pseudo philosophy.
> Harris’s failure to grasp the content of many of the philosophical claims and arguments that he criticises
> Lawrence Krauss engages with philosophical arguments for theism without understanding them properly. Most saliently, he ends up criticising a caricature version of the so-called cosmological argument about the existence of God.
Haha. Sorry. So you are the only one who understands all of it all.
> What makes pseudoscientific beliefs deficient is that they’re formed in an epistemically unconscientious way. That’s to say, these beliefs are made from culpably confused and uninformed reasoning. For example, the belief that the Earth is flat can be sustained only by self-willed disregard of the massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, accumulated over several centuries by several different sciences.
The Earth is flat. Tangentially where differentiable. :)
> There are two kinds of pseudophilosophy, one mostly harmless and the other insidious. The first variety is usually found in popular scientific contexts. This is where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, walk self-confidently into philosophical territory without realising it, and without conscientious attention to relevant philosophical distinctions and arguments. Often implicit empiricist assumptions in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are relied upon as if they were self-evident, and without awareness of the threat that those very assumptions pose to the author’s own reasoning. We can call this phenomenon scientistic pseudophilosophy.
What were your assumptions when you said the Earth isn’t flat then?
I stopped reading here. I can’t stand more crap.
You’re way too overestimating your level.
The first and foremost thing about philosophy laymen should realize is that the vast majority of philosophers do not consider philosophy a science. They also kind of agree to disagree about what philosophy is and what the subject matter of the discipline is. To put it bluntly, I'd say the majority of philosophers silently agree that 80% of all publications or more in philosophy are nonsense or bullshit and only the rest is even worth reading, but they all disagree about which 80% percent...
So Yes, I sometimes did also have the suspicion that some colleagues are bullshitting and obscuring intentionally, but overall this is not a helpful attitude. If you don't like a particular philosopher's work, you generally don't read and support it, and that's it. Calling the work pseudophilosophy will only enrage people who disagree and not help with anything.
Things are different in neighbouring disciplines in the humanities. After many years in the field and having to do with some of these disciplines, I believe I can say with some confidence that some of them are indeed pseudo-sciences. I don't want to mention which and why for fear of being identified later. All I can say is that there are disciplines and sub-disciplines/fields of study in the humanities that bear all the hallmarks of pseudo-science: extremely small communities, lots of jargon, few journals controlled by everyone in the communities, bouncing articles back and forth between those journals, constantly mixing empirical theses with some philosophical claims ("ideal models"), and so on. I'd be fine if these disciplines would at least apply the fairly stringent standards for publications in philosophy, but they don't even do that. These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy and often make unfounded empirical claims based on qualitative studies or studies with way too small sample size.