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> 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."

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.

tl;dr: Memetics ruins everything.

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...

"People in the Middle Ages don't care about their children" was a real view argued by Phillip Aries in Centuries of Childhood:

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

> 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).

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.

> is close-to-incomprehensible to me

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.

And that is the point.

> 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.

> That paper actually defines quite a bit

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.

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.

If you don't understand "capital", you're probably punching above your weight anyway.

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.

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?

>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.

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.

---------

[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.

So no retreat was ever necessary.

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.

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.

>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.

You gave some examples of what this kind of truth doesn’t cover. Fire is hot. Australia exists. This table is wooden. The sun is hot.

Could you give some examples of what it does cover?

Currency XYZ is stable.

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.

"Abortion is murder"

"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.

How can you disagree without agreeing what "truth" means?

Ha!

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.

> 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.

Yes, let's throw all of epistemology into the trash

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.

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"?