The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (2005) [pdf]
philpapers.org
philpapers.org
The backlash against these methodologies has been pretty severe within continental philosophy itself. For example, Meillassoux's critique of correlationism pretty much says that the whole epistemological manoeuvres, perhaps vulgarised by postmodern turn, by which it is claimed there is nothing "real" without a human correlated to it and that "reality" cannot be truly accessed, only reality as it appears to human beings, distorted by power, ideology etc etc.
There is a good description here though might be pretty high level. https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-e...
On the street and in less academic varietals of intersectionalism, this just consists of "you should shut the fuck up, because you are male / white / heterosexual / cisgendered / wealthy / neurotypical / had good parents / some other form of privileged that I just thought up".
In more respectable garb, this gets dressed up as "your arguments have no validity, because <insert postmodernist gloss on ad hominem dismissal here>". Which is no less toxic to having any kind of rational and inclusive dialogue, and deserves to be taken down on its own terms.
(Note: this is coming from someone who is firmly left-wing and even has considerable respect for many aspects of intersectional feminism when applied in a philosophical / analytical context; I just despise what it has done to the tone of left-wing activism over the last 10 years.)
Recognising that structures of oppression with regards to race, gender, sexuality, etc. are not totally uncorrelated, but have commonalities that are worth identifying and studying in their own right, is a significant innovation of intersectional feminism, and I respect it.
Similarly, the concept of "privilege" is very worth unpacking. To those who can think of themselves as "just a person" living on some kind of neutral substrate, that feels like the most ordinary and natural thing in the world -- but it's a huge privilege. If you're a woman, this fact is continually thrown in your face, in a way that distinctly qualifies and limits your "personhood". If you're a gay black woman, then the qualifications and limitations genuinely get multiplied. I think it's important to unpack and understand this, and I welcome philosophies that aid in doing so.
(As an aside, I don't consider this kind of cultural analysis is at odds with rationality, until it crosses the threshold of insisting that it is describing the whole of reality in a totalising way, at which point it does start having genuine philosophical problems.)
The problem is that the populist expression of this pretty much boils down to "you have privilege, so shut up", which A.) is illiterate, because "privilege" is neither a personal nor even a cultural failing -- it's the lack of privilege that's a problem, and B.) utterly inimical to fostering any kind of understanding.
Anyhow, I suppose this is no different from what happens when any other nuanced philosophy gets used as a tool in populist conflicts. I have huge respect Buddhism as a philosophy, but it is nonetheless being used as a justification for persecution and genocide in Burma. Here or there, I think it's important to not let enlightened ideas be used as an excuse for being a jerk. (Nor to let jerks discredit enlightened ideas, although on the whole I'm less concerned about this).
Does such person exist? For example, does there exist a young adult which life has been completely uninfluenced by society? I don't see how such person could even exist, and much less so a whole demographic group.
Male identity carries with it cultural expectations from society, which distinctly qualifies and limits "personhood". Race identity also carries with it cultural expectations, which as you say multiply (or at least appends), limiting the personhood even more. We would need to quantify those expectations in order to unpack the concept of "privilege", a job which in my view is too entangled with culture to actually be achievable. Unsurprising, "privilege" is used as a term that can't be proven or disprove.
Understand however don't need us to quantify how much each limitation is worth. If we look back at equality feminism, we simply need to focus on the basic similarities to find commonalities. Similar we have cultural homogenisation that finds understanding between people by identities into a single global one. Modernism mostly discarded those views in favor of the polar opposite.
Forms of privilege aren't just thought up on the spot, activists have been talking about privilege for the better part of a century.
You complain about internet flame wars, but you have interpreted left-wing activism in such an uncharitable way that almost no reasonable response is possible.
Well here's the problem. Arguments that discredit another perspective based on the identity of who is making it are ad hominem. Arguments about the discursive process itself that address representation of various identities aren't. For example, if you tell me that privilege prevents minority voices from contributing to a national dialogue on poverty alleviation, I would agree. But that's not how people use identity in most online or casual arguments. They use identity to directly discredit and silence their opponents. Telling others to shut up isn't a good faith starting point for a productive conversation. That approach is based on an unrealistic, zero sum interpretation of how people interact, where it's only possible for one person to speak on any given subject. Getting more black people involved in a conversation on race doesn't mean silencing all the white people. Yet that's where these conversations often progress to. It's extraordinarily unpleasant to experience and completely useless for fostering dialogue.
However the mainstream manifestation of intersectional activism is opposed to this, apparently predicated on the notion that speech is a zero-sum game, and that if you're part of any kind of majority-group, you can't be on our side.
This both morally and strategically wrong: morally because it is founded on a notion of race/gender/culture/identity essentialism that is the entire fucking thing I've spent my life fighting against, and strategically because the only winning condition is one where you get the majority on your side -- and telling them how much they need to shut up will never, ever do that.
Your claim that white people are being silenced on race is absurd. In all mediums, whether it's newspapers, blogs, TV, or anywhere else, you see white people pontificating on race. It's people of color whose opinions are being silenced.
Besides, a real discussion on race needs to be uncomfortable for white people. A pleasant conversation about race with white people doesn't result in minds being changed. Coming to terms with the way society oppresses people of color and favors white people is inherently unpleasant.
Well this is exactly the problem. You're assuming from the get go that white people have nothing to contribute to the conversation.
>Your claim that white people are being silenced on race is absurd
I have never made any such claim. I argued that people frequently use identity as a tool to silence opponents. That used to be a common tactic for suppressing minority views. "Oh, he's just a dumb negro, what does he know," and similar statements used to be socially acceptable ways of dismissing someone's perspective purely on the basis of their racial identity. Nowadays that more often takes the form of what you just did: assuming that white people have nothing relevant to contribute, where the reverse argument has become socially unacceptable. That does not mean white people are universally silenced, nor on the other hand does it mean that we as a society are devoting enough time to listening to minorities. The whole point of this argument is that you cannot discredit any individual person's argument on the basis of what proportion of our national discourse is devoted to people who share that person's identity. The argument and the arguer must be separated where the arguer is acting in good faith. A problem with the mix of views available does not detract from the individual truth or validity of any one person's arguments.
>Besides, a real discussion on race needs to be uncomfortable for white people. A pleasant conversation about race with white people doesn't result in minds being changed.
I don't think that approach convinces anyone. You don't win political arguments by alienating people. That sort of verbal aggression just provokes a backlash. Movements make progress by making people feel good about themselves. White people marched with MLK because he made them feel like they were part of a grand moral crusade. Which they were. The gay rights movement has had similar success by proactively recruiting and including allies. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
Ultimately this is the fundamental flaw in your thinking:
>The point is that people can't talk and listen at the same time.
That's true in a one on one conversation, not a national discourse. The consensus that governs a democratic society is the product of a million simultaneous and contradictory voices clamoring in a thousand separate media. Me writing this post doesn't stop a black person from replying. My speech doesn't detract from theirs. It's not a zero sum game.
It's cannibalizing the left.
Holy narratives bat man. That is such an inaccurate assessment of what is being discussed, I'd wager you have ulterior motivations for being so disingenuous.
I feel like the "shut the fuck up" part of that is a complete misunderstanding of what happens when people who have secure livelihoods in whatever form attempt to "educate" or dismiss the complaints others have about the society they live in, even though the "educators" often have no experience with the hardships being discussed and don't see (and even worse, don't appreciate) the advantages that were given to them -- either due to aggregate "system" side-effects or just straight up inherited security (in its many forms). Or even worse, these "educators" can't even begin to abstractly reason why these complaints might have some merit.
In other words, they aren't presenting arguments. There isn't some attempt to counter-reason with the complaints. The actual "shut the fuck up" comes from the "other" side, which strangely seemed to be entirely missed in your post.
If you're going to try to use SJW-boogeyman talking points, just come out and do it. Don't try to dress up a turd with poorly used and understood philosophical nomenclature.
>Holy narratives batman
Postmodern narrative analysis as gloss.
>you have ulterior motives for being so disingenuous
Straight into the ad hominem.
>when people who have secure livelihoods in whatever form attempt to "educate" or dismiss the complaints others
Some other form of privilege you just thought up.
That's not an ad hominem. If you're going to use logical fallacies you had best understand what they are. And don't try to partially quote me to make my statements seem more definitive than they were presented.
Nothing I said even remotely resembles what his point was attempting to state. And I definitely didn't just construct some random form of privilege there.
What is the point of your response to my post?
It absolutely is. You are attacking the person, not his argument.
I could have called it ignorance, but that'd require he demonstrate some unfamiliarity with the subject, which he clearly isn't all that unfamiliar with it.
It is strange that his his "quote" is getting a free pass, despite it not having any backing to it what so ever.
Have a good read: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adhomine.html
Why? OP claimed to see people on left-wing side use this tactic (and assuming he is telling the truth) how is his/her perspective shifted?
The OP stated left wing tactics boils down to: "You're view doesn't count since your aren't black/trans/queer/female enough". Your message was almost, "Your view shouldn't count because of your perspective".
Personally, I've seen the same argument be used (i.e. "Shut up cis/hetero/male/white/etc.") in various forms on various forums. It would not surprise me that it's used in Democratic circles, in some shape or form.
That's the thing. It isn't that. It has never been that. No one says that. No where in academia does it even approach that. He whimsically went back and forth between pretending to address philosophical tenets and then right in the very core part of his statement, just slapped in a mischaracterization of entire philosophical and anthropological field. He didn't even pretend to transition or weasel that in, he just did it full stop. This conversation is annoying to have because it always devolves into this meta-argument, because people's egos get involved. Try doing that with any other less "fuzzy" subject and people would immediately and rightly call you out on it. Which I did.
> Your message was almost, "Your view shouldn't count because of your perspective".
No, my message was specifically and has been repeatedly his "view" is a complete mischaracterization of both the philosophical and social anthropology view points this subject brushes upon. Which is totally and blindingly ironic given his "shut the fuck up" quote. This is where one might get told "to shut the fuck up", as you would in any other discussion on any other subject, when you want to waltz around and wave your own very personal view point around (without any solid basis) when serious subjects are attempting to be discussed. It's a double whammy in that case, because people might realize that you're fully unwilling to reason about your own and other's position in society.
>Personally, I've seen the same argument be used (i.e. "Shut up cis/hetero/male/white/etc.") in various forms on various forums. It would not surprise me that it's used in Democratic circles, in some shape or form.
If we're going to use anecdotes and SJW-boogeyman talking points, then don't pretend that you're addressing philosophical tenets. Just go ahead and do it. As I said in my original post.
The OP didn't talk about academia, but the more prosaical use, hence the
> "On the street and in _less academic_ varietals of intersectionalism"
---------------
> If we're going to use anecdotes and SJW-boogeyman talking points, then don't pretend that you're addressing philosophical tenets. Just go ahead and do it. As I said in my original post.
We are discussing tenets, but not as they exist in academia, but how they apply to general populace. I mean, you can talk Nihilism in media, without discussing nihilism in academia, even if Nihilism originated in academia.
I didn't constrain it to academia. I was quite clear in the fact it doesn't really exist anywhere. It doesn't exist because it's a complete mischaracterization. It's extremely frustrating that people, when confronted with this subject, will nitpick and somehow fail at basic reading comprehensions just to attempt to make a point. And then you get the classic e-logicians that want to try to use logical fallacies, when they're clearly very inexperienced in doing so in any kind of rigorous setting, just to devolve the conversation into a meta argument. I mean, I understand the normal human tendency to blockade uncomfortable discussions, but it's so ludicrously obvious when this subject gets brought up. On a "hacker" forum, of all things too.
>We are discussing tenets
Where? Because all that was done in the original post that I replied to was just repeating a talking point used to anchor a narrative into the conversation. They didn't address anyone's actual stated opinions/perspectives/tenets on this subject. I pointed out specifically and very directly where they started to act like they were going to tackle the subject, and then just immediately shifted gears.
> > That's the thing. It isn't that. It has never been that. No one says that. No where in academia does it even approach that?
Are you claiming that using privilege to shut down discussion isn't used in academical or are you claiming it's neither used in academical nor casual setting.
Because I claim, it very well used for that purpose in casual setting. "Check your privilege" isn't a meme for no reason. So, I do see how it isn't used in academia, but its definitely present on forums and other places.
If you want to have a discussion you must separate statements from perspective. Otherwise we just end up arguing if the credibility of your perspective of nkoren is pretty fundamental to the basis of your perspective. If we then call that perspective to be ignorance on your part, we simply enter the realm of name calling and the quality of discussion enter that special place for which a lot of words are waisted and no agreements are ever found.
His perspective has no basis, it's a narrative, and it was specifically constrained to the current subject matter.
>If we then call that perspective to be ignorance on your part, we simply enter the realm of name calling
Uh, what?
That is your perspective. It has no basis, and is just a narrative that you have made up.
One has to go beyond Solipsism in order to have a meaningful discussion.
It's a fact.
We're dealing with a problem of unjust exclusion through intimidation and violence. The SJW solution? Exclude white male cis from social participation through violence and intimidation. Not a working path.
That won't work. Read the first 10 pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. He talks about the folly of the oppressed that seek liberation by emulating the destructive behaviors of their oppressors. He explains that the oppressor is confined in his role and cannot be expected, even by force, to change. He/She (the oppressor) must be liberated from the cycle of ignorance, fear, and suffeung by the oppressed.
I tend to agree. It fits with what we've seen in history. It makes sense morally. It also aligns with almost every single moral teaching in the world.
Is there any way you can back this up in some solid, less qualitative manner? I understand the broadness of what is being discussed, but I've never seen this talking point come to fruition in any relevant manner. It's always a mischaracterization (normally designed to appeal to outrage "consumers") whenever I look deeper to any specific incident that gets presented as "exclusion through intimidation and violence"
I try to apply the scientific method to my internal beliefs. I've changed my mind many times when presented with a sufficiently strong argument and evidence to back it up. I'm wrong about stuff all the time, and one of the main ways to find out and fix it is to talk about it!
This is a large part of why I'm opposed to silencing people, instead of letting them talk and honestly engaging with them. Righteous indignation might make you feel good, but it probably won't convince anyone to change their views. You can change someone's mind by being polite, doing your research, and chatting with em. Daryl Davis shows us a prime example of this: How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc
[1] http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convince...
What's this about?
This sounds to me that Peterson is pissed because people in humanities tend to oppose capitalism. But I think that's mostly because people in humanities have a role in criticizing the system in which we live, instead of trumpeting to the world that what Western societies have achieved is the best thing humans have ever created...
Depends on who you include under the definition of "postmodern thinkers". I don't hear a whole lot of noise coming from Academic Philosophers per se, but the intellectual heirs of the postmodernists as expressed in the social sciences and various intersectional "studies" programs certainly seem to make a big deal of deplatforming people these days.
> This sounds to me that Peterson is pissed because people in humanities tend to oppose capitalism.
No. he tells you why he is mad, why invent reasons?
He is mad because of the lack of gratitude at the improvements in absolute standard of living (even though he admits that relative inequality is a problem). As a clinical counselor for many years he has seen the harms caused by persistent resentment.
He is mad because his colleagues in the humanities and social sciences have, in recent decades, consistently opposed the free exchange of ideas on college campuses. He is far from the only academic to voice such concerns[0].
He is mad because of the dearth of good scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
And regarding this said fanbase, the fact that they're de facto paying him ~$60.000 a month[1] to play their intellectual "red piller", will probably not help him become more objective, if you ask me.
As a great antidote I'd recommend Rick Roderick's lectures[2], since already back in the 80's the same arguments were being put out against these alleged horrible post modernists, treating them as some destoryers of civilisation. In short, he's a hack.
[0] https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/87194043854615756..., http://kekistan.wikia.com/wiki/Jordan_Peterson
It's full of reductionist rhetoric, hostility and provocation where his angry comments are greeted with applauses. So both the listeners and the speaker already seem to have a "view" on postmodernism.
How could such an hostility be a "great" video on postmodernism?
In fact, this pattern of not really knowing what he talks about could be stretched to cover basically everything but clinical psychology (which is what he works in). To quote the man himself[0], in a recent Deepak Chopra moment:
> Proof itself, of any sort, is impossible, without an axiom (as Godel proved). Thus faith in God is a prerequisite for all proof.
Most of his knowledge about postmodernism isn't from actually reading the texts he so dislikes; he just gets it[1] from a self-published/vanity-press book (Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism) that ... just isn't very good. From a review of the book, which could very well be applied to Peterson's videos:
> Second, although it accuses (rightly I think) postmodernism of being too polemical, Hicks' text is itself an extended polemic. Instead of disproving postmodernism, Hicks dismisses it; instead of taking postmodernism seriously and analyzing it carefully on its terms, Hicks oversimplifies and trivializes it, seemingly in order to justify his own prejudice against postmodernism. If postmodernism is in fact untenable, which it very well might be, Stephen Hicks has unfortunately not demonstrated that.
A quick search for his name on /r/askphilosophy will turn up a ton of reasons (from people actually working in philosophy) why anyone is -- to put it charitably -- better served engaging with other critics of postmodernism.
His current popularity is largely due to the controversy around him bravely "sticking it to feminists" by daringly refusing to call trans people by their preferred pronouns. Another reason is his conspiracy-theorizing on "cultural Marxism",
> 'Cultural Marxism' in modern political parlance refers to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing movement to take over and destroy Western society.[2]
both of which find favor with a section of the right today.
--
[0]: https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/40520012623631155...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/6n6rhg/why_a...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...
http://greyenlightenment.com/defending-postmodernism/
Likewise, many on the far-right oppose ‘Whig history’, a historical narrative that posits the inevitability and desirability of liberty and enlightenment values, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. The same for Francis Fukuyama and the inevitability of liberal democracy, what he called ‘the end of history’.
Peterson says postmodernists don't engage in debate but that is also false. There is footage of Foucault debating Noam Chomsky.
Also, agree w.r.t. the right/left distinction being meaningless where this phenomenon is concerned. For example, the whole "post-truth" condition is now very pervasive across the political spectrum. Someone who remembers their Socrates and his spat with the sophists will recall that bullshitting (understood in the Frankfurtian sense as not really caring if something is true or false as long as it brings about the desired result) to get your way is not really something new. Therefore, to make postmodernism the ultimate source of such activity is wrong. If postmodernism did anything in this regard, it was to contribute to making sophistry respectable again.
It is important to note that a rejection of (at least part of) modernism does not imply an embrace of postmodernism. Much of our modern, liberal sensibilities draw on Locke and Locke himself had difficulty in reconciling liberty with knowledge.
People seem to talk around the simplest postmodernist theses, usually by knowing nothing about postmodernism. In my mind, there are two:
1) Doubting the truth of all knowledge, and 2) an incredulity towards all metanarratives.
Now, please, please recognize, that disbelieving the truth of knowledge is not the same as disbelieving truth! The Popperian concept of verisimilitude could easily be construed as an extremely rational form of this doubt. Is any scientific theory, strictly speaking, true? Or are they all models that approximate a reality we can never ultimately reach? If you think I'm being too kind towards the postmodernists with this interpretation, then you don't understand postmodernism.
With respect to 2), incredulity towards metanarratives was not an assertion in Lyotard's essay, but an observation about the state of our society. And is this not, obvjectively, what we observe? Don't kill the messenger! Certainly not when the messenger is Lyotard, a man who was extremely politically engaged in the Algerian revolution and whose disillusionment ultimately led him to question all grand ideologies.
tldr; these essays are strongman arguments that show they don't understand postmodernism or even their own terms.
The alarm-bells began to ring from the point at which I realised that the author thought too much of himself to bother to actually engage with any post-modernist. It's easy to impute a series of highly contrived 'rhetorical manoeuvres' to someone if you don't do the hard work of unpacking their thought.
As for the substantive first-order claims, it's hard to know where to even start.
The author describes the 'troll's truism' as an equivocal statement that rides on a truism to make wild claims that it cannot in fact support. When the wild claim is pushed, the proponent retreats to the truism. The truism here is social constructivism, and the wild claim that illicitly rides on this truism is the denial of a mind-independent world. First of all, I don't know in what possible sense social constructivism is a 'truism'. It only rose to any kind of institutional prominence during the 'linguistic turns' of the 20th century. And it probably remains - in philosophy departments, certainly - a minority position. I suppose that perhaps depends on what one takes to be social constructivism; but the brevity of the author's treatment does not allow for this kind of basic detail. The statement quoted from Fish is not 'trivial' in the least.
Second, the real question is the one that Wittgenstein struggled with between his early and late works: is language a device with a single veracious use for the naming of objects in the world, or is it something that is defined by its use as a protean tool of social communication among humans groups through historical time. I have never since any convincing response to Wittgenstein's defence of the latter in the Philosophical Investigations. And if that follows then, whether one has the ontological view that a mind-independent world exists, one is nevertheless committed to a form of linguistic contextualism, i.e. a given statement only has force relative to the criteria of language-use that prevails in the particular social context in which one is speaking. But the author simply collapses the ontological admission of a mind-independent world into an admission that linguistic contextualism has no epistemological purchase - which is completely not the case.
I can't be bothered to sift through the rest of the paper. The treatment of Foucault is especially vacuous.
P.S. I am not a post-modernist.
I've tried to grok philosophy a few times. The reading makes me anxious. Just like when I try to understand poetry and complicated software. I hate knowing that I'm missing something. On the plus side, I have deep empathy for people who don't grok stuff that seems to come easily to me.
Why I'm writing: I think my core mental defect is impaired short-term memory. Most people can keep 7 things (+/- 2) in their head at once. Allegedly geniuses can keep 10 (+/- 2). I suspect that my capacity is 5, or maybe 4, though I'm afraid to check.
In both philosophy and complicated software, the levels of indirection, the nested subclauses, quickly leave me behind. I'm more a Gettysburg Address kinda thinker.
So. If in your travels you find any kind of clue about short-term memory, or IQ in general, and ability to understand philosophy, poetry, code, please show some extra patience for people like me who are struggling to keep up.
---
I'm totally on board with the abstract of that SHATVO paper. If I wasn't overly, unreasonably optimistic, I wouldn't get out of bed every day. Whatever the paper's logical failings, denial is what keeps me going.
Its thesis is apparently that secret Marxists propped up post-structuralism/postmodernism because they knew communism had failed (in the 1960s? Yeah. Right.) and needed their ideology to be furthered via a new channel. Or something.
The author also has a hard-on for Ayn Rand, which coming from a philosophy professor I find funny.
It's odd that Peterson is very specific in some parts of his discourse, but has such lackluster premises. If I wanted to convince the world that postmodernism was bad, I would point people to a more established work. It's not like criticisms of postmodernism are rare, no?
Because that is the most prominent application of postmodernism: to push forward neo-Marxist ideology.
'Cultural Marxism' is a pejorative term for the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. It was invented by fascists to dismiss the whole enterprise without engaging with it.
The Frankfurt School emerged in the 1920s/30s in response to the failure of the proletariat to overthrow capitalism in the way that Marx had suggested would happen, and as a response to the crude economism of a lot of early Marxism (i.e. where 'culture' was just an epiphenomenon rooted in the economic base of a society). It was a German school - its main sources were Hegel, Marx, Mannheim, etc.
Post-modernism, on the other hand, is a term for a very amorphous group of (largely French) thinkers who reacted against the dominance of structuralist social theory in the 1960s, which itself was a reaction to existentialism. Its sources are usually the canon of phenomenology, the structuralists before them, and Nietzsche.
The Frankfurt School is best known for its formulation of ideological critique, its critique of 'instrumental rationality', its holistic view of a critical social science, and its collected writings on aesthetics and mass media.
The post-modernists are best known for their rejection of a lot of the heritage of the Enlightenment, their focus on the fragility and contingency language, and their emphasis on 'play, metaphor, rhizomes', etc. But they are not a single school - they are FAR more varied than the Frankfurt School. For example, Pierre Bourdieu (who had a fairly empirical sociology of cultural hierarchy and class) is worlds away from Jacques Derrida (who was an abstract theorist that wrote very opaquely, and IMO is responsible for a lot of the bad reputation of post-modernism).
There's simply no evidence for it; Peterson's confusion is his own and I hope that others do not follow him on this and instead choose to do their own research into philosophy.
His evidence is presumably his own conversations with postmodernists, and his theory as to why this is seems based more in a psychological than philosophical framework.
> 'Cultural Marxism' in modern political parlance refers to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing movement to take over and destroy Western society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...
No it wasn't (and no it isn't), it's aimed at abolishing the class structure.
>There are people who don't like the current structure and aim to replace it. How is this a conspiracy?
GP is referring to "cultural Marxism" being a conspiracy, and it is, not that Communists want to replace the class structure. The "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory posits that there is a group of people who want to destroy Western society. This is false. It relies on the idea that at some point Marxists changed to thinking in terms of gender or race rather than class - this is also false and lacking in evidence as GP also noted. The Wikipedia section really is a good overview of it.
So it was aimed at replacing the existing structure...
> The "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory posits that there is a group of people who want to destroy Western society.
How is this a conspiracy theory? There are people on the fringe left (and fringe right) who want to do exactly that. They wouldn't necessarily phrase it that way, but what they advocate for would accomplish that as a side effect. If the conspiracy theory is that these people are everywhere, then sure, but that such people exist is in no way a conspiracy theory.
> It relies on the idea that at some point Marxists changed to thinking in terms of gender or race rather than class - this is also false and lacking in evidence as GP also noted.
That is precisely what intersectional feminism is about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality#Marxist-femi...
If I told you that I'd be replacing your broken windshield, would you understand that I'd be simply removing your windshield and not putting anything in its place?
>There are people on the fringe left (and fringe right) who want to do exactly that.
I should have been more specific; the group which is accused of being "cultural Marxists" includes the Frankfurt School which did nothing you describe nor expounded any intention to. Of course they exist, but the people accused of being those people who exist are not those people.
>That is precisely what intersectional feminism is about.
That's true, though it does little to hold for Peterson's argument that "Marxists" in general have moved to such a position, or have mutated class theory rather than simply adding to it. Marxists, orthodox and otherwise, still think in terms of class.
That's not how societies work. You cannot have no social structure anymore than a person can have "no age". You can try to create a flat social structure, but that's still a social structure (and not a stable one, obviously).
> That's true, though it does little to hold for Peterson's argument that "Marxists" in general have moved to such a position, or have mutated class theory rather than simply adding to it. Marxists, orthodox and otherwise, still think in terms of class.
Intersectional feminism certainly seems to be by the most popular strand today. Of course some old school Marxists still exist.
Class is not equal to social structure; when Marxists talk about classes they refer to economic power relations, as in, there is no group of people with majority or exclusive control over the main social means of production. This is in contrast to today in which the social means of production are owned almost entirely by the bourgeoisie, as in, the capitalist class, which employs wage labour.
In higher stage Communism, there is free association of people and the method that may be chosen would likely be decentralised direct-democratic councils with random or rotating delegates.
You could nitpick the absolute shit out of any non-trivial work in the humanities--even the great ones--but most people have enough sense not to.
BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!
He is, indeed, even though I've read him in Romanian translation and the translator seems to have done a very good job, because when I skimmed through the English translations of his works the flow of words (or whatever the English term is for that) seemed a lot more complicated and convoluted. It also helps that both Romanian and French are Romance languages, so that maybe helped.
What is indeed really tough to process is anything written by Deleuze and Guattari. I've read Deleuze's "Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement" and "Cinéma II: L'image-temps" in original French and at many points while reading it I was feeling like I was riding a boat on a river, I was just going with the words/phrases without really processing what they meant, if they were really meaning anything. Though "Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?" (written by Deleuze and Guattari) is a lot more readable.
This suggests that you have never bothered to read Foucault. He is extremely readable.
Some 'continental philosophers' are difficult to read. Derrida is a spectacularly bad writer, for instance. Foucault is not one of them however. Discipline & Punish is about as readable as Dickens IMO.
I think so? :)
Read it again – You could nitpick the absolute shit out of any non-trivial work in the humanities--even the great ones--but most people have enough sense not to.
(Emphasis mine.) They are saying that there are trivial and non-trivial works in the humanities. Some non-trivial works are great works. You could nitpick those non-trivial works--even the great ones-- but you'd be wrong to because while you're busy at that you're missing the wood for the trees. To me it sounds like they've read quite a few texts from the humanities, just not Foucault.
I'm just very used to people dismissing an entire cultural and philosophical movement based on hearsay. It's not that hard to just pick up and read Foucault, Derrida, etc., and find out for yourself.
The original remark was made with the hope of getting someone else to read Foucault. Not so much a fan as a fellow traveler though, since my sympathies are more in line with the Jacques Ellul / Ivan Illych direction.
RE: Christian anarchists / Tolstoy
I read Maxim Gorky's My Universities recently - a novel about his coming-of-age in late 19th century Russia. The reigning philosophy that rears its head again and again is Tolstoyan, that Gorky tries to press his Marxism against. Interesting cultural battle!
This paper is just a very typical example of that failure. Getting buried under `P and Q, therefore R` statements, nitpicking individual examples, missing the whole, thinking mechanically and all...
For example, the author confuses Foucualt's notion of "truth" with basic "truth conditions" and refers to Tarski's "material adequacy condition" to "debunk" Foucualt's reasoning as "false theory."
The author also mechanically replaces the word "truth" in Foucault's quoted writing with Foucault's so-called "definition" of truth and expects a fairly reasonable reading to come out as if English semantics was as mechanical as Lisp.
Sorry, the paper has failed to pass the facepalm test while attempting to "expose" the most cited author in the whole field of Humanities as "false."
This kind of mechanical, logic based reasoning ignores the poetic style, metaphors, and most importantly, the whole context of writing by focusing on the details and missing the whole.
It's like teaching an AI to understand Shakespeare's poems but AI constantly finding "contradictions" that "does not compile."
Foucault's philosophy is mostly "political philosophy" and has nothing to do with truth conditions. He also deliberately does not ground his arguments on definitions after definitions. Rather, it is more like an ongoing, deep, open reflection on power, truth and subjectivity in general.
As to "social construction" of truth, you would be amazed at how beautifully Foucault traces back the emergence of "free market" as a "site of veridiction" for "truth" starting from 18th century and how that interacts with "power," "governance" and "subjectivity," all constructing a "regime of truth," covering multitude of implications that a "syntactic analysis of English grammar" cannot explain.
I think there are more things to be found that would interest a hacker in postmodern thought yet gone missed.
Isn't that intentional? Words that have no fixed meaning can't be refuted by logic.
I'll tell you my problem with this paper. It's not that it doesn't seem, to a certain extent, well reasoned. That it does. My problem is that it does not correlate with what meagre bits of Foucault and Rorty I've encountered. (I've, uh, never heard of Bloor and to this day I haven't read Lyotard) I've come away from these encounters enriched. Certainly I get a sense of the respect that they have for the millennia-hulking colossus that is the history of ideas. I want to say to Shackel, yes, you may be correct but so what?
Here is Rorty on Truth, 1m:41s long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY
I dare anyone not to be seduced by that. Whatever could he mean? What could he be getting at? There goes five years of your life.
These interrelated issues are not as simple as Shackel make them out to be. The game is not to pick out crappy definitions of Truth or Knowledge from your opponent's texts and to shred them into little pieces, douse them in gasoline, and then set fire to them. That's not the game. That game is boring.
Speaking of Truth and Power, and speaking Truth to Power, here is Shackel on Wikileaks: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29...
“There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on.”
I'd say we have a good idea whose side Shackel would be on if push came to shove. Does that make his philosophical arguments about t/Truth invalid? No. But if one doesn't want to rock the boat then the kind of t/Truth you're going to like is a very apolitical asocial truth thank you very much. And that's not the kind of t/Truth a lot of Continentals and Post-modernists are interested in.
It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind.
Post-modernism is first and foremost a realization that modernism was a failure. In modern times, people thought that we could find some universal mechanism that describes nature, and that from there we could find a logical language (or structure) that could explain the way everything works.
Great. But then we realized that things were way more complex than they appeared. We found that combining a large number of simple rules quickly resulted in a mess that was nearly impossible to describe. Take for instance the double-rod pendulum or 3-body problem. Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc.
Nature is not neat and tidy, and neither is the human brain or human societies. That's mostly what postmodernism is about.
I don't really see what the problem is with that...
People love to throw around junk like this, and it's maddening to try to argue against such vague statements. Which physicists? Have you interviewed all of them? How many material science PhDs do you know? What properties of glass are not well understood? Is it not possible to engineer structures and objects out of glass? When in fact, physicists know tons about glass. What is made of, how its crystalline structure looks, its tensile strength, shatter resistance, acoustic and thermal properties, molecular weights, melting points, optical properties. I could go on and on and on, and it'd eventually be clear that physicists know a hell of a lot more about glass than /you/ do, and then you could still make that vague statement with a derisive smile.
It's just absurd argumentation to say some group doesn't /really/ understand something.
What is memory, what is an atom /really/? For that matter, what is language? Art? Feeling? Love? Hackernews?
Citation needed.
Do we?
That said, I think the place where postmodernism enters normal (non academic) human thought is not disimilar to funkier parts enlightenment era philosophy.
Take Des Cartes famous meditations, remembered mostly for his "stage 1" of rejecting all knowledge of anything but ones existence. He then attempts (IMO fails) to rebuild a foundation of knowledge based on pure reason, without any faulty assumptions.
What impact did des cartes have on normal people's thought? Almost no one is convinced by his proof of god. No one is convinced to reject all knowledge and stop there. People are still better for going through the exercise. Challenging assumptions & knowledge authorities. Aknowledging knowledge dependencies, how do I know this.
Des Carte's solipsism doesn't end anywhere concrete, but it opens the door to less ambituous but much more practical epistimology like Karl Popper's.
Likewise, I don't think that enlightement (and subsequent) ethics goes anywhere concrete. Utilitarianism, deontology or whatnot all lead to their own little absurd conclusions if you go down the rabbit hole. Very few people "adopt" them. But, the process does sometimes result in usable ethical frames for situations that do not involve a fat man in a cart.
So that's essentially (oops, no essences!), a lot of modern philosophy in a nutshell (are nutshells structures?). Reject earlier thoughts. Attempt to rebuild with mixed success. Meanwhile, get a better understanding of the limits of knowledge.
So... postmodernism... Like I said, fuzzy on what postmodern means......
But....I think it's a similar contribution. Reject existing frames. Criticize traditional systems. Try to find alternatives. Hopefully evolve in the process.
I think postmodernism opens up some doors to ideas like Yuval Noah Harari's description of human history. A big part of his ideas start with recognizing "fictions," all the things which aren't really real. Things that were made up by people. Tribes, nations, corporations, named places, kingships.... He then asks what are these for? When were they invented? What role do they play..
Postmodernism probably contributed something towards this way of thinking, or the public interest in it.
As to the methods used by postmodernist academics.... I've got no idea.
Edit: this was not meant in a pejorative way, it was a sincere question. I thought it was Off-topic.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
http://theconversation.com/truthiness-and-alternative-facts-...
Pertinent text from the submitted article:
“But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knockdown argument,’” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”[1]“A Troll’s Truism is a mildly ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may trade on a trivial truth.”