Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

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.

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.

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 ?)

https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html

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".

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.

"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?

(SFW even though it's on an .xxx domain)

(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.)

After a quick skim of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#HistPris I think I can relate the idea of power-knowledge to something with which I am much more familiar: closed loop control theory.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/5396/5525631/docu...

OMG Willard Quine!

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.

That austerity was the thing to do was never a fact. Even in 2008-2010 it was a much debated policy.

Just because governments do something that you believe is wrong, it does not mean that they have used their power to somehow change the truth.

> 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 (?).

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.

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.

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.

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.

tl;dr: Memetics ruins everything.

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.

(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.

So no retreat was ever necessary.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Kind like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow thing.

>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.

===

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).

===

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

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).

"Gays are sick"

"Orange man bad"

"Your daughter needs a lobotomy"

"We are bringing democracy to Iraq"

"Drugs are bad"

"We need to stop/continue growing the national debt"

Just the tip of the iceberg.

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.

2,200 years later, I find I disagree. There's much that is good in Plato, but I don't include his social opinions.

I guess you're claiming that analytic philosophy is to philosophy in general more like mathematics to physics, rather than 'just another paradigm' ?

But are you certain it is so ?

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.