Hacker News Reader

Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

I have come to see postmodernism and critical theory and all that stuff not as inquiry, but as a game.

Usually, academia is inquiry: physicists are inquiring into how matter and energy work, historians are inquiring into what happened and why, etc. From a distance, postmodern philosophy looks like it is inquiring into how society works, what hidden assumptions we have, etc.

But it isn't, really. It's a game about who can say the most interesting thing, constrained by some rules about how things being said have to be grounded in other things that have been said, and with some way of scoring interestingness that i don't have a firm grip on. There's no genuine attempt to understand things, or to test what is said against reality. Truth doesn't matter at all. Foucault, for example, was successful not because he said true things, but because he said new and previously unimaginable things, and expressed them lyrically.

View on HN

This take is interesting. It reminds me of a concept I came up with to explain some behaviors I've observed. I called it "moral entrepreneurship". It's basically a game where the goal is to signal one's virtue in a way that one ups your peers. In order to succeed you have to be creative and do things that, when looked at from the perspective of practicality or effectiveness seem completely preposterous, but when seen from how you can "appear" to be virtuous make complete sense.

I came across this article some time ago: https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2019/09/20/3-concordia...

At first the concept seemed completely ludicrous. Three white researchers from Canada want to "decolonize" science and will try to integrate "indigenous" knowledge into physics. Then I remembered the concept of moral entrepreneurship and it all made sense. The goal is not to advance physics or to achieve "social justice" whatever that means, it is to appear virtuous in a novel way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur

Interesting, could it be that I heard of this term before and I appropriated it without consciously remembering it? Let's say a terminology appropriation.

Since you have only provided one meaningful example, I will focus on it.

>> that being you said, “Foucault, for example, was successful not because he said true things, but because he said new and previously unimaginable things, and expressed them lyrically.”

>> Wikipedia: “Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.”

Your reasoning in sum appears to be that you don’t understand something, so it must be without merit.

Sure, one might argue that Foucault's theories lack mathematical proofs, but to argue against them without as much is no better.

What proof do you have Foucault's theories depart from reality?

The fact he openly supported the abolition of the age of consent and almost certainly engaged with sexual activities with minors

I think if Foucault had waited until he could demonstrate everything he said with proofs and experiments he would have failed to the same extent as a physicist who makes provocative claims without any evidence.

There are endeavors that call for lots of rigor and little creativity and others that call for the opposite. Not everyone has those two qualities at the same time so there has to be some division of labor.

OK, but... at some point, don't you have to start caring about correspondence to reality? Or is Postmodernism the String Theory of philosophy, that it can go on for decades untethered by any connection to the actual world?

I have no idea about string theory or how it ties into this but if it's untethered from the actual world yet provides new perspectives and poses new questions that (on occasion) yield new avenues for inquiry I think that it's practical and important even if it isn't true on its own.

Also something can be great for other reasons but I am focusing on why someone who cares solely about the advancement of science should love Dadaism and critical theory.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com