This is only redeeming to me really because generally its the philosophers that are presumptuous enough to tell other fields what they should do or think. Nice to see the tables turned on them!
I'm sorry but in my experience, this is not at all a one-way street. It is very common for me to hear engineers and other STEM-types to complain about modern art or about the supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts. However, these complaints rarely come from Engineers who take an active interest in the fields they criticize.
Admittedly I'm mainly speaking about general people I work with or whom I (sadly often) encounter on the internet. But there are some eminent names who are just as guilty. In addition to Kaku, as bakuninsbart mentioned, I could also bring up, off the top of my head, Stephen "philosophy is dead" Hawking and Richard "Shakespeare would have been better if he were educated" Dawkins.
I think I could come up with many more examples if I started looking. On the other hand, we fortunately also have people like Murray Gell-Man, who has gotten us to quote from the most experimental book in all of English-language literature every time we talk about elementary sub-atomic particles.
Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one?
I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style.
It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure.
[1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/
All academic literature is specialist literature. If you aren’t trained in the field you likely won’t understand it. It’s totally reasonable to me that a STEM person would have no idea what this abstract is saying just as a Humanities person probably couldn’t make heads or tails of the abstract of a dissertation on category theory or on a particular branch of computer science.
I find it funny that STEM folks always go after humanities academics for being obtuse when its just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black—dense STEM research and theory uses language that’d be considered equally obtuse to the untrained reader.
I have a theory that most STEM people simply don't think like most humanities people, literally at a neurological level. (I edited my post to add some thoughts around that, possibly after you replied.)
STEM work rarely comes off that way to me. The only time it looks to me like the person is going out of their way to be obtuse and technical, is some higher math stuff (which is a known thing and acknowledged even by some mathematicians). This includes the stuff from entirely different parts of STEM that I don't understand at all.
I think part of it might originate from the fact that the abstractions used for talking about things in the humanities aren’t fixed as well as they are in science. Take the abstract in question for example—the writer uses the palimpsest as a sort of visual analogue and abstraction to try to describe interactions and relationships between texts/narratives—while it’s not an absurd metaphor, it’s difficult to grok, because there is no real standardized metaphor for describing this set of relationships. You could argue the object of study isn’t as well defined as it is in the sciences where we have fairly standardized abstractions like “waveform” etc. that make it a lost easier to talk about things clearly.
It might be that they are less fixed, as you say. That is a feature rather than a bug. It would take so much more text to describe everything literally than to use literary devices, which seem to be things that humans are really good at grasping. They are everywhere in film and TV but not everyone has experience naming them and referring to them in text at a meta level.
Imagine writing a symbolic AI in Go or C. There is a reason why people use Lisps and functional languages for very dense abstractions. They just do a lot of work, which some folks choose to deride as magic.
Not sure you could satisfy the "open minded" part of that if you are coming from this close minded starting place!
Whenever I come across something I don't understand, I will try to figure it out. If it seems utterly weird, that's even more motivation to figure it out! I really can't imagine this mode of thought where you read something, do not immediately grasp it, and then feel that somehow it's wrong/bad/obscurantist. Like, how do you learn anything at all?
Side note but its funny people throw around "sophistic" in contexts like this. In Plato's time, sophists were precisely the ones to appeal to common intuitions, for money. It was Socrates who came along and said philosophy began with wonder, and demonstrated this by intentionally confusing people in order to break them out of modes of thought that were deeply embedded.
It's a matter of the tone, and also the fact that when I do read carefully and figure out what they're saying, I often think "wow, I could have put that in much simpler terms with no loss of information."
I don't feel this way about literally any other topic besides modern literary criticism (and stuff in that family like modern continental philosophy). Even analytic philosophy looking at similar topics doesn't normally feel willfully opaque in the same way, and I'm happy to dig in and learn the more difficult aspects of what they're saying.
Do you think this is due to being prejudiced about this exact area and nothing else?
Why not try? Seriously, that actually might be a good exercise in trying to cross into the "humanities brain" that you postulated.
In my other comment child comment in this thread, I also tried to revise it, and I think I showed that it wasn't very easy to do for me.
First of all, although it uses some precise vocabulary, this abstract does not seem to have the particular blandness of much academic writing (I definitely agree that poor writing is often easy to find in all branches of academy). One little proxy to look at is the overuse of nominalization (i.e. using a noun form where a verb form could work). And not all nominalization is bad. The word "nominalization" is actually self-describing.
For example, perhaps we could "clean" this passage (my quote is a fragment of a participle phrase at the end of a sentence)
>... , their thematic and formal interconnections enacting both the repetitions of trauma and the necessary revisions of historiography, identity, and recovery.
into a new independent clause:
> They formally and thematically interconnect, repeating and necessarily revising how one presents history,self-identifies, and recovers.
But this "fix" might blur the original meaning in critical ways. For example, who now is this "one" being spoken of? That seemed to me to be the best option, over the worse pronouns "you" and "we" (which would be speaking for someone else). The original phrases avoid this entity identification, focusing instead on the general action.
I also removed enact, but what if these texts really do "enact" a revision? This "creation upon creation" of the an action seems in-line with the concept of a palimpsest, which is a repurposed book (I'll speak more on the palimpsest after I dissect my awful revision). Then, I completely butchered the last concepts. To present history is only one aspect of the general practice of historiography. Revising an identity is not the same as self-identifying (and, again, who is this self?). To recover matches with the action of recovery more closely, but using the verb would destroy the sentence's parallelism. Hopefully, this example demonstrates the great difficulty of using precise language with heavy, complex concepts.
On to the subject itself, using the word "palimpsest" doesn't seem obscure. Perhaps the author's central thesis is that the works that she studies have repurposed old texts or old memories of trauma again and again. This seems like a suitable metaphor. Or, maybe palimpsest has a special technical meaning in her body of scholarship.
And the abstract does carefully lay out the scholarly tradition that the paper follows, going chapter by chapter. Readers familiar with the works she mentions will probably be happy for this guided summary. Readers not familiar, like me for almost all the names, may not even be part of the intended audience.
Lastly it seems like she uses two different authors to explore her own scholarly interests in trauma, gender, sexuality, and self. These seem like great things to study, and very complex indeed. Even if these themes were not on the minds of the authors who are the subject of this paper, these authors nevertheless do live in the world, and their work necessarily incorporates fragments of inherited thought (like how you and I speak English, whose development we had nothing to do with). Maybe this paper finds some unexpected connections.
> that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently
I don't know anything about nervous systems.
But in these kind of works, there are not any exact answers. You cannot say `gcc gender-paper.c` and find out if it compiles. Instead, these ideas have to be written about and discussed against a wider body of thought. And there's probably some element of judgement and metaphor required to think this way. And the ideas in these works in fact do slowly disseminate and affect society.
That's my spiel. I typed it up because I see these kind of comments often, and I wanted to put a good response on record.
----
I also don't believe there is zero obscurantism in the humanities, by the way. Shitty research happens everywhere. But, every time the humanities gets slammed as being particularly soft, it seems like the reader forgets all the articles on the front page about falsified scientific results, unreproducible research, political machinations to get tenure, outright grift, etc.
I also cannot say whether this paper is deliberately obscure, because I am not a literature professor and I don't know who the audience is. But, I tried to give some arguments for why the abstract looks reasonable. Are you a literature professor?
If that prose is written in a code that is only meant to be comprehensible to sociologists and postmodernists, I don't see the sense in publishing it (as in, making it public).
I mean, it was a doctoral dissertation, written exclusively for an audience of Literature PhDs[1]. Other times, these papers are published in specialized journals. Without publishing, how else would they disseminate their research?
And even if it's not for me, I'm always happy for open access to research. So I'm happy whenever postmodern thinkers make their work available to the public, in the same way I am when thinkers of abstract mathematics do. I personally will probably not be looking in either work, though :-).
[1] Cardoza-Kane, Karen M, "Trauma's palimpsests: The narrative cycles of Louise Erdrich and Richard Rodriguez" (2005). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI3193887.
By far the worst offenders of presumptuousness must be old physicists though, followed by old computer scientists. Thinking of Michio Kaku talk about philosophy still makes me physically cringe.
My experience is that the feedback provided by philosophers sounds good to the philosophers, but is actually useless to practitioners. And in technical subjects, like math, computer science and physics, it is important to develop a really good BS filter.
That said, I am also sympathetic to http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, so must admit some hostility to the current practice of philosophy.
If you’re a philosopher, you’re generally trying to look at things from a general enough perspective that you might argue for a radical shift in the way we do things and call out the assumptions that are otherwise taken as axioms of the field—the water we swim around in.
If you’re a practitioner, you’re focused on swimming. Core axioms and prevailing theory are your presuppositions—you’re just focused on getting things done within the confines of the prevailing theory/framework, perhaps nudging it every so often in particular directions based on new discoveries—its quite rare that a working scientist sparks an actual theoretic revision and becomes the next Einstein (see thomas Kuhn).
So yes, philosophers are totally useless when it comes to getting practical stuff done because that’s generally not the space they are attempting to help with or illuminate.
The problem is that philosophers believe that they know things from first principles which, in fact, have been falsified by science. Therefore the thing that they are saying is wrong.
See https://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helpe... for a famous such clash. Please be assured that legions of lesser philosophers have fallen into the same trap.
I don't know, this case is somewhat infamous, but it really speaks more to the Nobel committee's own biases than the field of philosophy. Bergson was prolific and influential, but also unpopular within many philosophical circles outside of the Francosphere, and also inside it by the time the post-structuralists came along.
Anyway, wait until you find out what the legions of lesser scientists have been up to since 1921...
This is laughable. Most of our culture was once philosophy, and I sure don't know whose. If you define philosophy as “that which has not escaped the realm of theoretical philosophy”, then sure. But we use practical philosophy every day!
So much of this, we just take for granted. Philosophy is either obvious or wrong.
reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/gjz24v
Which is totally dishonest. (I tried to counter that with this https://imgur.com/a/zwDhfxJ , but that's not memey enough.)
There's no inherent tension between science and philosophy; even Meermin's "shut up and calculate" is a philosophical position (instrumentalism), to say nothing of the philosophical, scientific and mathematical contributions of e.g. Poincaré, Helmholtz, Mach, Duhem, Peirce, Leibniz, Von Neumann, Jaynes etc. Even modern Anglo-American physicists contribute to and draw a lot from philosophy, e.g. Wheeler and Paul Anderson.
Philosophy itself, in fact, was born when people took the concepts used in geometry and started using them to build systems of ideas (quite the opposite of the widespread view of philosophy as the "origin" of science)
What? Philosophy and geometry both date to prehistory and we find them co-evolving in the west through many separate ideological movements. It's ridiculous to talk about which one came first. Moreover, when people talk of "concepts used in geometry" as a distinct thing they usually mean Euclidean or at oldest Pythagorean - earlier than that and geometry is considerably more numerical and difficult to distinguish from any other math or astronomy. But philosophy significantly predates that kind of geometric concept - "Know thyself" is hardly a mathematical directive!