I'm back, so here's why I think I was gone in case you cared.. and also here are some typically rambling thoughts on matters related to the recent 'Sokal Squared' thing
Just had to update my blog for the sake of all the weird girls who stalk me. As to why I've had (by my standards) a massive break in posting, I can identify the following factors: 'external': getting into cricket again, being a little socially busier, spending a lot of time writing a long and well-researched essay on the future of the planet for a writing competition on which I'll soon get feedback (meaning I can post this essay here), and, a little more recently, obsessively playing the classical guitar, after not playing at all for nearly four years straight (and I mean obsessively); 'internal': being extremely happy and mentally relaxed (connected: being socially busier than I was), reaching a tipping point of general disgust with the amount of dogmatic and dimwitted intellectual pollution on the internet and not wanting to contribute to it with a non-excellent, non-cogent post. I've thought for a while I need to write something at some point on the early history of mathematics (in particular, how long it took 'us' to develop the notation that makes 'simple' maths so much easier) and what it tells one about the Flynn Effect, about the role of cognition-externalisation, the importance of language and notation to thought, and on the secret theory-ladenness of many things we forget are theory-laden. I think I will do this eventually. I also keep wondering if I should write reviews of things, like the books and movies I've enjoyed recently (or even not so recently), because that might be fun. The reason I didn't do that in the past with books is because I had this major pathological aversion to summarising things that I read and liked, because I realised that summary always costs nuance and information that the author included for a reason - usually, I feel like almost nothing is indispensable in books I like, so I prefer to quote chapters out of whole cloth. But maybe I should start reviewing. On the other hand, I have this disposition against which I think is a perverse manifestation of the 'sunk-cost' fallacy: my brain secretes this weird thought like, It would be wrong to start reviewing things now, because that's not your thing; you could have reviewed books and movies that you liked years ago but you didn't so you can't just go back on that now.
Anyway, I did have something non-narcissistic to say, induced by the "Sokal Squared" Hoax that just happened. I'm not really going to comment on the Hoax per se (on the ethics or intellectual 'validity' of it, or on the perpetrators (the truth is I don't actually have a strong opinion on, like, the ethics of the Hoax - I think Boghossian and Lindsay seem like massive wankers but whatever)), but I wanted to say something on related matters.
Sturgeon's Law tells us that most of academia is total bullshit (what I mean is: that should be our default assumption). Most research, even in the harder sciences, goes absolutely nowhere, retreads old ground in a pointless way, or is unrigorous (I hesitate to write disjunctions like these, because one is wont to miss disjuncts (there are probably more failure modes)). Arguably, fundamental physics - that most reverent of scientific disciplines - has been little different from metaphysics for the last several decades (see Sabine Hossenfender's controversial new book (which I haven't actually read, I should admit, though I have read her blogposts, on her blogpost blog)). And, obviously, macroeconomics has some well-known issues with predicting shit, medical science has some serious issues with publication bias and corporate influence, and social scientists are, for the most part, fucking useless idiots who need to increase their n and stop p-hacking shit. (I could link to relevant articles but I'm happy to assume that the kind of people who read my blog are big intellectual playas who have already read such articles).
But in my humble opinion, if there's one kind of area of academia that's worse than all the others, it's specifically the unrigorous part of academia which is also completely obscurantist - the academia of long sentences and pollysyllabic verbiage (or, alternatively, as one can see, for example, in some parts of economics and probably some other disciplines, the academia of obscurantist mathematics - glyphs and runes included to dazzle rather than to give a rigorous structure to a problem). One commonly used shorthand for obscurantist academia is "Postmodern" academia. Whilst I don't really think it poses much of a problem for this term that Postmodern academics themselves think it's painfully simplistic and bigoted to use one term to encompass several decades of evolving scholarship (because I don't give a shit about obscurantist scholarship), I already implied in the preceding parenthetical interjection that there is one problem with using this term as a shorthand: namely, that obscurantist academia is bigger than the parts of academia where words/phrases like "Marx", "Foucault", "Derrida", "Barthes", "Kristeva", "Lacan", "Bourdieu", "Butler", "theory", "hermeneutics", "problematics", "hegemony", "towards a", "beyond the", "territorialisation", "post-structuralist", "meta-textual", and so on, are highly frequent, and an extraordinary degree of prolixity is commonplace (see Postmodernism Generator).
To be sure, Postmodern academia is definitely a major bastion of such obscurantism and it's probably deserved some of the specific critiques it has gotten (like these two I have linked before; http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf, http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html). Postmodern academia is the area to which the "X studies" fields (the main target of the Hoax) largely belong, along with English literature and (to a lesser extent) sociology and history (I am sure there are some gender, race-studies and English literature academics who are not so into abstruse verbiage and the French theoreticians who perfected it to an artform but prefer to write clearly (which does not necessarily mean their scholarship has merit, but I'm sure some of it is interesting and incisive and cogent and all those other nice things)).
However, one issue with the critique of Postmodernism that fails to link Postmodern writing with obscurantism generally is that it gives Postmodern critiques an opening to say either "You just don't understand our technical language and theoretical constructs" or "You just don't like our political conclusions". This is shitty, because, in my opinion, the important thing to point out is that Postmodern obscurantism is not really any different, from an epistemological perspective, from any other kind of obscurantism, e.g. religious obscurantism, the 'deepities' of pop-philosophy and self-help books, bureaucratese, Fascist mysticism, or the obscurantism of so much of the 'canon of philosophy' going back centuries (the part that one of a crude bent of mind might classify as "counter-Enlightenment" (e.g. the whole German Idealism thing)). It's not different, from an epistemological perspective, because it's all equally vague, non-naturalistic BS, or, as I prefer to say, bad poetry. As Chomsky points out, the difference between mathematics being used properly as part of a rigorous scientific theory and polysyllables being used in a prolix sentence is that mathematics, used properly, can allow one to give a rigorous testable structure to theories and to find precise solutions to very difficult problems that one couldn't even approach without the language (think of the analytic power and beauty of a matrix (or just think of trying to do physics problems without maths lmao)). But when you decode a typical sentence of Latinate polysyllables in the works of Derrida, Lacan or Butler, it turns out either to be a thought expressible more simply or just pure gobbledegook.
Why can't truth be found in long, turgid sentences populated with esoteric Latinate words? Well, for one thing, humans are really bad at even parsing long sentences from a memory point of view. (So, just as a kind of abstract theoretical point, supposing you did have something really deep to say, don't you think you'd want to make more of an effort?) For another thing, fuzzy words almost necessarily mean fuzzy thought and they definitely mean ambiguity; hence why a key development of the Enlightenment was this thing called a technical term (a term you explicitly define in the context of some kind of rigorous, self-contained usually mathematical framework). More to the point, I agree with the meta-philosophy and largely with the metaphysic explicated in Ladyman and Ross' magnum opus, Every Thing Must Go. I think that philosophers and theoreticians who don't practise metaphysics in the Quinean fashion, as simply a process of making rigorous the ontological commitments of our best scientific theories, are "neo-scholastics" talking nonsense for no humanly important end. Basically, the long and short of it is that science is hard, naturalistic metaphysics has to be a very humble enterprise which pays due fealty to science, and all scholarship which talks about matters of reality and existence without a serious connection to relevant scientific inquiry is BS.
Yes, ok, I admit it, I'm a "neo-positivist" (which is very different from "logical postivism", per se, because literally everyone agrees that that is a faulty doctrine for various, largely esoteric reasons I will not get into). Which, in truth, means I can't win with Pomo people, because if the other rebuttals don't stick, "Positivist" is the one they are bound to hurl. I mean, I should clarify that I don't actually like the label "neo-positivist", even though some people with similar views to mine call themselves that. What I prefer to call myself is a "neo-pragmatist structural realist", where "pragmatist" here refers to a pragmatist attitude to metaphysics, which says that we should avoid the idea that we can actually do metaphysics 'properly' and instead just accept that we should call real whatever is a projectible phenomenon or cluster of phenomena in the fully mind-independent world (a phenomenon whose postulation allows us to make systematic predictions that help us achieve goals in our navigation in the world as organisms), most of which phenomena just have to be 'read off' scientific theories, with fundamental physics taking priority simply because of its generality (see the book Every Thing Must Go(2007) for more). Basically, this means that I think a whole lot of analytic philosophy is useless, along with virtually all of Continental philosophy and X studies stuff. (Basically, what it means in practice is that when anyone ever tries to sound profound using fancy words, my reaction is "That's some nice poetry". Writing, to me, falls into one of the following categories: poetry, prose (as in prose fiction), science, failed science, or naturalistic philosophy.)
Now, I've been reading some history books lately, and I want to make clear: this is not to imply that, like, history is a waste of time if you're not going full Peter Turchin or some shit. Archival research and analysis would be necessary even for a hypothetical fully rigorous, scientific discipline of historical inquiry, and, in any case, narrativistic history is definitely at least partly distinct from mere story-telling (I don't know if Hayden White literally thought there was no difference at all, but he's definitely wrong if so; in fact, I would go so far as to say that there's a fact of the matter as to whether Inga Clendinnen's interpretation of the spearing of Arthur Phillip at Manly is more correct or scientific than the interpretation given by the English sources on which she relies (i.e. I don't take a super radical view on the epistemological constraints of conventional narrativistic historical inquiry, though I'm also no Geoffrey Elton)).
Now, I admit that much of what I just said, especially when I started using fancy analytic-philosophy terms, would be obscure, especially to people who don't know shit about philosophy, but in my defence, what I'm really doing is saying go read Every Thing Must Go to see why I think what I do. So go do that if you really care. Otherwise, fuck off.
Sturgeon's Law tells us that most of academia is total bullshit (what I mean is: that should be our default assumption). Most research, even in the harder sciences, goes absolutely nowhere, retreads old ground in a pointless way, or is unrigorous (I hesitate to write disjunctions like these, because one is wont to miss disjuncts (there are probably more failure modes)). Arguably, fundamental physics - that most reverent of scientific disciplines - has been little different from metaphysics for the last several decades (see Sabine Hossenfender's controversial new book (which I haven't actually read, I should admit, though I have read her blogposts, on her blogpost blog)). And, obviously, macroeconomics has some well-known issues with predicting shit, medical science has some serious issues with publication bias and corporate influence, and social scientists are, for the most part, fucking useless idiots who need to increase their n and stop p-hacking shit. (I could link to relevant articles but I'm happy to assume that the kind of people who read my blog are big intellectual playas who have already read such articles).
But in my humble opinion, if there's one kind of area of academia that's worse than all the others, it's specifically the unrigorous part of academia which is also completely obscurantist - the academia of long sentences and pollysyllabic verbiage (or, alternatively, as one can see, for example, in some parts of economics and probably some other disciplines, the academia of obscurantist mathematics - glyphs and runes included to dazzle rather than to give a rigorous structure to a problem). One commonly used shorthand for obscurantist academia is "Postmodern" academia. Whilst I don't really think it poses much of a problem for this term that Postmodern academics themselves think it's painfully simplistic and bigoted to use one term to encompass several decades of evolving scholarship (because I don't give a shit about obscurantist scholarship), I already implied in the preceding parenthetical interjection that there is one problem with using this term as a shorthand: namely, that obscurantist academia is bigger than the parts of academia where words/phrases like "Marx", "Foucault", "Derrida", "Barthes", "Kristeva", "Lacan", "Bourdieu", "Butler", "theory", "hermeneutics", "problematics", "hegemony", "towards a", "beyond the", "territorialisation", "post-structuralist", "meta-textual", and so on, are highly frequent, and an extraordinary degree of prolixity is commonplace (see Postmodernism Generator).
To be sure, Postmodern academia is definitely a major bastion of such obscurantism and it's probably deserved some of the specific critiques it has gotten (like these two I have linked before; http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf, http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html). Postmodern academia is the area to which the "X studies" fields (the main target of the Hoax) largely belong, along with English literature and (to a lesser extent) sociology and history (I am sure there are some gender, race-studies and English literature academics who are not so into abstruse verbiage and the French theoreticians who perfected it to an artform but prefer to write clearly (which does not necessarily mean their scholarship has merit, but I'm sure some of it is interesting and incisive and cogent and all those other nice things)).
However, one issue with the critique of Postmodernism that fails to link Postmodern writing with obscurantism generally is that it gives Postmodern critiques an opening to say either "You just don't understand our technical language and theoretical constructs" or "You just don't like our political conclusions". This is shitty, because, in my opinion, the important thing to point out is that Postmodern obscurantism is not really any different, from an epistemological perspective, from any other kind of obscurantism, e.g. religious obscurantism, the 'deepities' of pop-philosophy and self-help books, bureaucratese, Fascist mysticism, or the obscurantism of so much of the 'canon of philosophy' going back centuries (the part that one of a crude bent of mind might classify as "counter-Enlightenment" (e.g. the whole German Idealism thing)). It's not different, from an epistemological perspective, because it's all equally vague, non-naturalistic BS, or, as I prefer to say, bad poetry. As Chomsky points out, the difference between mathematics being used properly as part of a rigorous scientific theory and polysyllables being used in a prolix sentence is that mathematics, used properly, can allow one to give a rigorous testable structure to theories and to find precise solutions to very difficult problems that one couldn't even approach without the language (think of the analytic power and beauty of a matrix (or just think of trying to do physics problems without maths lmao)). But when you decode a typical sentence of Latinate polysyllables in the works of Derrida, Lacan or Butler, it turns out either to be a thought expressible more simply or just pure gobbledegook.
Why can't truth be found in long, turgid sentences populated with esoteric Latinate words? Well, for one thing, humans are really bad at even parsing long sentences from a memory point of view. (So, just as a kind of abstract theoretical point, supposing you did have something really deep to say, don't you think you'd want to make more of an effort?) For another thing, fuzzy words almost necessarily mean fuzzy thought and they definitely mean ambiguity; hence why a key development of the Enlightenment was this thing called a technical term (a term you explicitly define in the context of some kind of rigorous, self-contained usually mathematical framework). More to the point, I agree with the meta-philosophy and largely with the metaphysic explicated in Ladyman and Ross' magnum opus, Every Thing Must Go. I think that philosophers and theoreticians who don't practise metaphysics in the Quinean fashion, as simply a process of making rigorous the ontological commitments of our best scientific theories, are "neo-scholastics" talking nonsense for no humanly important end. Basically, the long and short of it is that science is hard, naturalistic metaphysics has to be a very humble enterprise which pays due fealty to science, and all scholarship which talks about matters of reality and existence without a serious connection to relevant scientific inquiry is BS.
Yes, ok, I admit it, I'm a "neo-positivist" (which is very different from "logical postivism", per se, because literally everyone agrees that that is a faulty doctrine for various, largely esoteric reasons I will not get into). Which, in truth, means I can't win with Pomo people, because if the other rebuttals don't stick, "Positivist" is the one they are bound to hurl. I mean, I should clarify that I don't actually like the label "neo-positivist", even though some people with similar views to mine call themselves that. What I prefer to call myself is a "neo-pragmatist structural realist", where "pragmatist" here refers to a pragmatist attitude to metaphysics, which says that we should avoid the idea that we can actually do metaphysics 'properly' and instead just accept that we should call real whatever is a projectible phenomenon or cluster of phenomena in the fully mind-independent world (a phenomenon whose postulation allows us to make systematic predictions that help us achieve goals in our navigation in the world as organisms), most of which phenomena just have to be 'read off' scientific theories, with fundamental physics taking priority simply because of its generality (see the book Every Thing Must Go(2007) for more). Basically, this means that I think a whole lot of analytic philosophy is useless, along with virtually all of Continental philosophy and X studies stuff. (Basically, what it means in practice is that when anyone ever tries to sound profound using fancy words, my reaction is "That's some nice poetry". Writing, to me, falls into one of the following categories: poetry, prose (as in prose fiction), science, failed science, or naturalistic philosophy.)
Now, I've been reading some history books lately, and I want to make clear: this is not to imply that, like, history is a waste of time if you're not going full Peter Turchin or some shit. Archival research and analysis would be necessary even for a hypothetical fully rigorous, scientific discipline of historical inquiry, and, in any case, narrativistic history is definitely at least partly distinct from mere story-telling (I don't know if Hayden White literally thought there was no difference at all, but he's definitely wrong if so; in fact, I would go so far as to say that there's a fact of the matter as to whether Inga Clendinnen's interpretation of the spearing of Arthur Phillip at Manly is more correct or scientific than the interpretation given by the English sources on which she relies (i.e. I don't take a super radical view on the epistemological constraints of conventional narrativistic historical inquiry, though I'm also no Geoffrey Elton)).
Now, I admit that much of what I just said, especially when I started using fancy analytic-philosophy terms, would be obscure, especially to people who don't know shit about philosophy, but in my defence, what I'm really doing is saying go read Every Thing Must Go to see why I think what I do. So go do that if you really care. Otherwise, fuck off.
No comments:
Post a Comment