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Author Topic: deconstructing academic jargon
Geneva
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posted 16 July 2003 11:55 AM      Profile for Geneva     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
a nice take by a skeptical journalist:

http://tinyurl.com/h3xy


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Mr. Magoo
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posted 16 July 2003 12:16 PM      Profile for Mr. Magoo   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Wanna clean up your act, real quick? Install Bullfighter!
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Tommy_Paine
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posted 17 July 2003 02:50 AM      Profile for Tommy_Paine     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Those type of acedemics have been wearing the emporer's new clothes for some time.
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lagatta
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posted 17 July 2003 04:56 AM      Profile for lagatta     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Mr Fulford will find many examples of no less egregious jargon in the business section of his own paper. There is some cant in his article too, alongside the oft-repeated call for "plain, clear language". Leftist "thought", in quotes, for one thing. And of course, the silly attack on "Parisian" ideas, without specifying why, or which ideas.
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Michelle
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posted 17 July 2003 07:55 AM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Aside from his implication that most or all "leftist humanities academics" write that way, I thoroughly enjoyed this article. And he is right - those examples of turgid prose he quotes are definitely NOT isolated.

It used to piss me off when we were assigned readings that were like that. I hated them. After a few pages of some of the worst offenders, I refused on principle to read them because that kind of writing is, as he says, a crime against language. I figured I wasn't paying through the nose to read that kind of crap. I'm as intelligent as the next person, with excellent reading comprehension skills - and I figure if I can't get through a sentence and figure out what the hell the person is trying to say, then it's just badly written.

And you know, it doesn't HAVE to be that way. The defense used is that you have to use jargon to get out ideas that people in specialized fields can understand. I still say it's bullshit. You don't have to write long, tortured, convoluted sentences in order to get your "specialized" ideas across. There are some philosophers I've read who are excellent writers (which is why I'm a little annoyed at his blanket generalization about "leftist academics") and who manage to get big ideas across in sentences and paragraphs you can understand.

I realize there has to be SOME "jargon". If you're taking Philosophy, you need to be grounded in the terminology. But the sentences this guy was quoting - the words in them that made them convoluted weren't specific to the field in order to get the point across. They were simply a case of stuffing as many large and unfamiliar (and in a couple of cases, made up) words in one sentence as humanly possible.

I don't necessarily think people who write that way do so in order to keep out the riff-raff. I think they just get used to writing badly and then it gets worse over time.

I had an awesome sociology TA. She was a big fan of simple writing, and of academic writers who write in a way that the average intelligent person can understand. I am too.


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zaphod
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posted 17 July 2003 09:49 AM      Profile for zaphod     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I agree that the jargon is a crime against lanuage. It is fun to confront the purpetrator if you are in conversation to ask what he/she means.
Often they can't explain, hence no meaning. If they can then I ask well why didn't you say that?

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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 11:00 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It now appears that the Notional Pest, like the Grope and Flail, has me on its radar and is determined to crash Young Ironsides whenever I try to link. Oh, Slim, we need to meet soon.

Happily, though, I don't think I need to read that column because, from what others have said above, I believe that I have read it many times before.

It is Fulford's annual rant against "leftist" academics in the humanities, isn't it?

My objection to Fulford's tired cheap shots is that they are tired cheap shots. Is academia -- like everywhere else -- full of hacks who learn a routine and then just do it in order to get by and earn a living? Well, duh. :rolleyes"

You can see the political target Fulford is always after, though, in that absurd reference (I'm getting this from lagatta's post) to "Parisian" thought. The critical theory that irritates Fulford (much of it dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, and little of it influential now) bothers him for political reasons.

The important, serious stuff constituted, among other things, a critique of the kind of "essentialism" that is so important to ideologues like Fulford. Fulford wants to be able to paint much of the world in black and white terms. He wants to be able to retail the "clash of civilizations" prejudice, eg. But he knows that as soon as he claims, eg, that there is something inherently, intrinsically, essentially anti-rational in Islamic culture (and he does want to claim that), he is going to have a lot of very smart people on his case.

So how does he defend himself? He picks on a few extreme cases of hack academic writing, sets them up as straw-targets, and then pretends that the whole of the humanities is intellectually risible in the same way.

Fulford is, in other words, our very own version of Lynn(e) Cheney. I think he is despicable. But decide for yourselves. Watch him over the course of a year, and see whether you don't see him flogging this dead horse regularly. He can write this column in his sleep. Read him for long, and you'll be able to do the same.


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Courage
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posted 17 July 2003 11:03 AM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Geneva:
a nice take by a skeptical journalist:

http://tinyurl.com/h3xy


There is 'jargon' and there is specialised language, and the two aren't always the same. Many neologisms are designed to connote and denote very specific combinations of ideas, and do not have analogues or perfect synonmyms. I think we can all strive to be clear and concise - Lord, knows I have trouble - but I personally don't believe that all messages have to be addressed to all comers. I don't think that having a certain amount of preparation and background in a topic or method of study before you come to it is a bad thing.

I find that too much of the offensive for 'plain simple talk' masks a political agenda - usually conservative. It also often masks a kind of anti-intellectualism which is characteristic of our media-ocrity. On the one hand, 'plain simple talkers' usually combine this idea with a desire for 'common sense'. However, no new action (or speech act) can be utterly common sense, because any 'new' idea must name what is missing from the current configuration of ideas. In short, it cannot, by definition be expressed in the 'plain simple' language of the situation. If we are to simply accept and repeat the linguistic platitudes of every day life, we block the way to seeing them, and perhaps exploding them, from other perspectives. In short we block the way to a real study of, say, ideology, or a nuanced programme for any real social or political change. These kinds of study are long and turgid if they are at all detailed because breaking through the layers of assumptions and delusions that are a big part of our everyday life is a long, detailed task. Unusual perspectives require unusual ideas, and unusual concepts to express them. Hence, the need for unusual language.

On the second matter, there is a danger that the call for 'plain simple talk' simply deteriorates into an offense against language and thinking, rather than a defense of it as is claimed. There is increasing pressure from our electronic media (which compress time itself) to shorten our language and expression into small, short, easily broadcastable bits (literally) of information. The 'soundbite' society is evident in everyday life simply by listening to conversations that take place in everyday situations. The amount of our speech and conversation that amounts to little more than the repitition of tiny tropes of information gleaned from a 20 second news cast, or a ridiculously abbreviated and contextless news 'report' from a news paper is astounding. The amount of falsehood and bad opinion-making produced by this phenomenon is no secret to anyone with watchful eyes and attuned ears.


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Courage
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posted 17 July 2003 11:09 AM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by skdadl:
It now appears that the Notional Pest, like the Grope and Flail, has me on its radar and is determined to crash Young Ironsides whenever I try to link. Oh, Slim, we need to meet soon.

Happily, though, I don't think I need to read that column because, from what others have said above, I believe that I have read it many times before.

It is Fulford's annual rant against "leftist" academics in the humanities, isn't it?

My objection to Fulford's tired cheap shots is that they are tired cheap shots. Is academia -- like everywhere else -- full of hacks who learn a routine and then just do it in order to get by and earn a living? Well, duh. :rolleyes"

You can see the political target Fulford is always after, though, in that absurd reference (I'm getting this from lagatta's post) to "Parisian" thought. The critical theory that irritates Fulford (much of it dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, and little of it influential now) bothers him for political reasons.

The important, serious stuff constituted, among other things, a critique of the kind of "essentialism" that is so important to ideologues like Fulford. Fulford wants to be able to paint much of the world in black and white terms. He wants to be able to retail the "clash of civilizations" prejudice, eg. But he knows that as soon as he claims, eg, that there is something inherently, intrinsically, essentially anti-rational in Islamic culture (and he does want to claim that), he is going to have a lot of very smart people on his case.

So how does he defend himself? He picks on a few extreme cases of hack academic writing, sets them up as straw-targets, and then pretends that the whole of the humanities is intellectually risible in the same way.

Fulford is, in other words, our very own version of Lynn(e) Cheney. I think he is despicable. But decide for yourselves. Watch him over the course of a year, and see whether you don't see him flogging this dead horse regularly. He can write this column in his sleep. Read him for long, and you'll be able to do the same.


What she said.

Fulford is perilously close to arguing style over substance. I would really love to see him take on - in simple language - any one of those dangerous 'Parisians' he loathes so much. My guess is he couldn't hold Foucault's jockstrap, let alone keep up with Derrida's play, or fully appreciate the import of Badiou's polemical thrusts against what is today known as 'Ethics'.

He never bothers, he just uses his soapbax to win a few 'plain talkers' over to a side they were already sitting on. And they call it the 'news' paper...

I would add one thing: has he ever read the convoluted stuff that comes out of some 'right' thinkers? You know, the Allan Blooms' of the world with their elegant defenses of tyranny. Or better yet, the Wolfowitzs' and Perles' with their discourse of brain-hindering Orwellian advertising slogans masking as politics. If there ever were an offense against language, those folks really know what they are doing.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]


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Mandos
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posted 17 July 2003 11:18 AM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Nevertheless, despite not even reading the Notional Pest, I do think that there is a point to the criticism, and that it can't be blamed merely on hackish exceptions. Some of the fault lies with an attempt to escape objectivity claims, it seems.

Fulford may have an agenda but he has an easy target too.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Mandos ]


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Courage
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posted 17 July 2003 11:22 AM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Mandos:
[QB]Some of the fault lies with an attempt to escape objectivity claims, it seems.

Can you elaborate - plainly and simply?


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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 11:39 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I can.

Mandos has certain pre-conceived notions about what writers like Foucault and Derrida did, in spite of the fact, I believe he has admitted, that he has never read the originals. He has read the hacks and hangers-on and disciples and the fan club. So sad.

Not that everyone has to read everything. But when one hasn't seriously attempted to engage serious stuff, I do think that a touch of modesty is in order. Whenever Mandos (friend) and Sisyphus (friend) have gone on one of their tears, mis-characterizing figures like Foucault and Derrida, modest students such as MK and I have been forced to sigh and roll eyes and shut up, since correcting their many errors, all the cliches and platitudes and oversimplications they come out with, would just take too bloody long and be too bloody much work.

I find this (clearly political) assault funniest of all when it is aimed at Foucault, who is actually a most straightforward writer, a fairly simple thinker, in my view -- in fact, quite a conservative thinker in some ways. If you know the curriculum of the old-style French classical education, you can see its assumptions poking through most of Foucault.


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Mandos
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posted 17 July 2003 11:39 AM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Let me put it this way: I have nothing against field-specific language. As you said, when there is a new idea, it is often useful to have a new word for it.

The problem occurs when we are trying to talk about human interaction with the world. Then, as I see it, we have two options:

1. View both humans and the world as material entities, and write as though we can understand these interactions as an external observer. Then the new concepts we invent can be discussed in the language of reason and objectivity, and we can hope for definitions that come from beyond individual experience--that is to say, we have new concepts whose existence is justified by external conditions.

2. Attempt to embed the interactions in the internal experience of the human being(s) doing the interacting.

In the latter case, human being experience the world in everyday concepts and the words used to represent them. So if one wants to talk about the world in a "nonscientific" way, one should use everyday words, because new concepts cannot be explicitly defined until words for them have entered everyday experience. Perhaps I am imagining things, but it appears to this amateur rationalist's eyes that there is an attempt to "have the cake and eat it too"---in other words, be both inside and outside everyday experience. Or perhaps, blur the line between subjectivity and objectivity. I think this produces nonsensical results that also sound nonsensical.

Was that plain language enough?


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Mandos
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posted 17 July 2003 11:42 AM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
skdadl: I usually avoid mentioning them, actually, unless challenged to do so. I just discuss what I have read, which is, in any case, exactly what you want. When Tres was posting, she herself provided sufficient ammunition in spades--I rarely had to mention Foucault or Derrida.

I have for a long time planned to start a thread on summaries, since it seems to be a point of major disagreement on both our parts. I guess the summaries they taught me in high school physics were lies too.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Mandos ]


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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 12:14 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Gee, I wish that people would read Northrop Frye. I mean, I really wish that people would.

Mandos, have you ever noticed that there are people walking around who can look at two guys standing side by side, one black, one white, and be instantly convinced that they are looking at two different orders of being? Strange but true, Mandos. At any given time, a majority, I should think, of the world's population think that way.

Then, of course, there are the troublesome souls who look at two apparently different things and immediately find solid appearances coming apart before their very eyes, who begin questioning all the certain labels and categories, who end up suspecting that we don't have two different orders of being here at all ...

And it gets worse! Mandos, guy. We find, if we look at written texts in historical order, that the progress from one state to the other is not non-stop, steady, straight, progressive, or for all time. Not at all. We seem to go in circles. Cultures that have become rigorously analytical at some point are still capable of returning to superstition -- in fact, they all do, sooner or later.

Now, should you run into the term "essentialism" in your travels in critical thought, just translate it as "fundamentalist" or "romantic" -- or look at my second para above. You may scorn people who think this way -- I don't, actually. In poetics, entire cultures that have worked that way have produced great legacies for humankind.

I will admit, though, that I don't think our culture is at its best in that mode, that I far prefer the later (perhaps end-stage) "ironic" mode we live with now.

Well, best of all is "comic" vision (not comedy-ha-ha, but comedy in the sense of Dante's Divine Comedy), a vision of the whole, of all the cycles of thought. Frye thought that way. He could see the importance of understanding many different ways of thinking. I hope that you will one day become less sectarian on the turf of forms of thought. Zen is much more fun.


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Mandos
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posted 17 July 2003 12:55 PM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Obviously, the connection between those characteristics and orders of being had no material effect except in their minds. What does that have to do with anything? It seemed a bit non sequitur.
quote:
And it gets worse! Mandos, guy. We find, if we look at written texts in historical order, that the progress from one state to the other is not non-stop, steady, straight, progressive, or for all time. Not at all. We seem to go in circles. Cultures that have become rigorously analytical at some point are still capable of returning to superstition -- in fact, they all do, sooner or later.
The question is, is there a tendency in these circles themselves? A second-order historical trend, if you will. I am still a clandestine fan of good old-fashioned goal-oriented progress.
quote:
Well, best of all is "comic" vision (not comedy-ha-ha, but comedy in the sense of Dante's Divine Comedy), a vision of the whole, of all the cycles of thought. Frye thought that way. He could see the importance of understanding many different ways of thinking. I hope that you will one day become less sectarian on the turf of forms of thought. Zen is much more fun.
My position on forms of thought is informed by my position on Truth. I am probably a rampant essentialist then...am I not?

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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 01:01 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Except when you argue politics, especially cultural politics (as in "the clash of civilizations").

Then you get downright subtle and beautiful.


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Sisyphus
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posted 17 July 2003 02:31 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I resisted the temptation to read this thread (in the Wildean sense ), and now that I have been mentioned by name will resist the temptation to reply in the same way.

Let me say at the outset, that I am sympathetic to the views expressed in Fulford's article (with a big BUT...but that will have to wait for the end ), though not necessarily to anything else he has ever written: a million monkeys, the works of Shakespeare and all that.

Courage has mentioned the poster-boy for ignorant erudition, Alan Bloom, and IMO, his assessment is dead white guy on.

I have never on this board maligned the work of either Foucault or Derrida, though I confess to have poked a little fun at the latter as the adopted champion of legions of the militant obscurantists that discredit intellectuals who use their talents to educate others inclusively.

On the other hand, Lacan, has produced riffs and riffs of bullshit pseudo-intellectualism like the following:

quote:
This diagram [the Möbius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject. This goes much further than you may think at first, because you can search for the sort of surface able to receive such inscriptions. You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable. A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut. And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease.

Granted, there is a certain ballsiness in proffering this as scholarship in academic circles, and, I suppose the absolute lack of content in this and, indeed all his writings that are not merely banal (read: comprehensible) explain the fact that one can rewd page after turgid page without coming upon anything so jejeune as an actual thesis.

What I have read of Luce Irigaray is the same, if not worse, for when she is comprehensible, she is nonsensical. Here's a pronouncement about the constancy of c in a vacuum as a symtom of "gendered" science:

quote:
What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation [E=MC^2] is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest...

Heaven forbid we shouild consider the possibility that it is true because it reflects an aspect of the structure of the physical universe

skdadl, crap like this has nothing to do with Zen, which, particularly in its Tibetan manifestations has produced aming the most rigorous and subtle schools of logic. Zen is about cutting through the pitfalls of language, not a celebration of them. True, it exposes mercilessly that areas in which the ratio-empirical programme is inadequate, but most of us "rationalists" see this as a case of not trying to perform the tasks of a sewing machine with a hammer.

I could go on (and on and on and on...), but I'll end by saying that a babbler whose prowess in literary matters has me in awe suggested in another thread that we should read this stuff as one reads poetry. Courage made reference to Derrida's legendary wordplay. All fine and good, but the latter is not scholarship and former does not distinguish randomly generated strings of words from the works of Northrop Frye.

Perhaps Ari Fleicher would like us to treat the mime's man-in-the-box as a text in the same way his press briefings constitute a text; this seems to me a sophomoric parlour-game.

BUT

You have to give it a chance and take it on a case-by-case basis. Some ideas are difficult, if not impossible to explain without complicated syntax and specialist vocabulary. As people who are lied to every day about things we have have the right to know, let us not let the charlatans baboozle us into thinking that complexity=bullshit and simplicity=truth.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]


From: Never Never Land | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
Mandos
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posted 17 July 2003 02:34 PM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
You're alive! You're alive!
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Sisyphus
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posted 17 July 2003 02:36 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 

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Mandos
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posted 17 July 2003 02:42 PM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
We have to get together sometime again, you know.
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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 02:44 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
You never got around to your "BUT" about Fulford, Sisyphus, schweetheart.

If you don't think that Derrida can write rings around any literary scholar you've ever read, then you haven't read the fascinating, isolated chapter in the centre of De la grammatologie in which Derrida dates Rousseau's essay On the Origin of Languages.

It takes a while to see what he's doing, but again, if you know how utterly oppressive and deadening the French classical curriculum had become by the 1960s, you slowly begin to see that Derrida is doing a "Look, Ma! No hands!" number on a century's worth of dry-as-dust predecessors. By the end of that chapter, he had me in stitches.

And he is, of course, right.

He doesn't spend his life arguing that sort of pedantry (how do we date this text?) -- but that is a neat little demonstration of how much better he can do it whenever he really wants to.


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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 02:45 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
PS: I have read too little of Lacan and remain of two minds about him. I have never read Irigaray.
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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 02:47 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
btw, Sisyphus: have you read The Forgetting?

I'm just reading it now, and I find it terribly disappointing. It is glib (also outdated in many places, and in only two years).

Almost made me long for some Lacan, y'know?


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Sisyphus
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posted 17 July 2003 02:51 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Ah, dearest skdadl, you have deigned to part with a Recommendation for Further Study. Thanks. I shall read it (I'll try the French first 'cause I don't think the wordplay'll come through in translation). We'll defer further discussion of this burr under our saddles 'til then, what?

Mandos, I'll e-mail you today.

The Forgetting? No.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]


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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 02:53 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
What about the Fulford "BUT"?
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Sisyphus
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posted 17 July 2003 03:03 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I agree, it's short, I mean pithy . It's after the BUT. Hit Reload or Refresh if you don't see it. I must confess that I am an uncomfortable bedfellow of those who get on anti-postmodernism benders for political reasons, but the world needs people like Mandos and myself who prevent our epistemology from sliding back into the Dark Ages . We have a lifeline for you well-meaning literary types .

I have Googled The Forgetting since I have a mother and I think the merry-go-round is about to start again -at least we are in line ...

I have to duck out, now. More about this last another time/place.


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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 03:13 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Hugs, Sisyphus.
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Courage
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posted 17 July 2003 04:14 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Mandos:
Let me put it this way: I have nothing against field-specific language. As you said, when there is a new idea, it is often useful to have a new word for it.

The problem occurs when we are trying to talk about human interaction with the world. Then, as I see it, we have two options:

1. View both humans and the world as material entities, and write as though we can understand these interactions as an external observer. Then the new concepts we invent can be discussed in the language of reason and objectivity, and we can hope for definitions that come from beyond individual experience--that is to say, we have new concepts whose existence is justified by external conditions.

2. Attempt to embed the interactions in the internal experience of the human being(s) doing the interacting.

In the latter case, human being experience the world in everyday concepts and the words used to represent them. So if one wants to talk about the world in a "nonscientific" way, one should use everyday words, because new concepts cannot be explicitly defined until words for them have entered everyday experience. Perhaps I am imagining things, but it appears to this amateur rationalist's eyes that there is an attempt to "have the cake and eat it too"---in other words, be both inside and outside everyday experience. Or perhaps, blur the line between subjectivity and objectivity. I think this produces nonsensical results that also sound nonsensical.

Was that plain language enough?



Not bad...


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Courage
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posted 17 July 2003 04:25 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Mandos:
Let me put it this way: I have nothing against field-specific language. As you said, when there is a new idea, it is often useful to have a new word for it.

The problem occurs when we are trying to talk about human interaction with the world. Then, as I see it, we have two options:

1. View both humans and the world as material entities, and write as though we can understand these interactions as an external observer. Then the new concepts we invent can be discussed in the language of reason and objectivity, and we can hope for definitions that come from beyond individual experience--that is to say, we have new concepts whose existence is justified by external conditions.

2. Attempt to embed the interactions in the internal experience of the human being(s) doing the interacting.

In the latter case, human being experience the world in everyday concepts and the words used to represent them. So if one wants to talk about the world in a "nonscientific" way, one should use everyday words, because new concepts cannot be explicitly defined until words for them have entered everyday experience. Perhaps I am imagining things, but it appears to this amateur rationalist's eyes that there is an attempt to "have the cake and eat it too"---in other words, be both inside and outside everyday experience. Or perhaps, blur the line between subjectivity and objectivity. I think this produces nonsensical results that also sound nonsensical.

Was that plain language enough?


I think I have some things to say to this dichotomy, but I can't get at them right now, I've got a lot going on today....

I will, at some point, intervene somewhere in the midst of this sentence: "View both humans and the world as material entities, and write as though we can understand these interactions as an external observer." The 'as though' would be an oppurtune point of entry.

I think there is another way out of this dichotomy that was/is understood by some of the early Western scientists, like Roger Bacon and others who were also versed in Sufic and Alchemist ways of thinking. There is a sort of materialism expressed by Gurdjieff and others in the modern era which tries to account for both these problems by setting man into a 'material' realm of vibrations and substances - including our perceptive apparati, which don't always work on the same substance/vibration from minute to minute - accounting for some of the varying degrees of objectivity/subjectivity in our lives...

I know, I know, what kind of kook is this 'Courage'? Bear with, I will try to elucidate this fact some other time.
Anyway, I really can't do this now...

&*%#@(#@!


[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]


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Mandos
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posted 17 July 2003 04:33 PM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I'm all about dichotomies. Dualist me.
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Tommy Shanks
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posted 17 July 2003 04:45 PM      Profile for Tommy Shanks     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Please forgive me as I don't mean to derail the little conversation going on. This is a real pet peeve for me because, as an architect, the following is what I typically see in books and magazines, rather then a discussion of what, duhhh, is actually going on in the industry.

"In this almost nothing resides the Universal -- a some-thing that is truly almost nothing. For Zizek, this almost nothing of the Universal is always-already contested. For contemporary Architecture, the Universal is almost always converted to an aesthetic of a minimalist sensibility -- or that which pervades architectural modernism and all forms of architectural neo-modernism. That this architectural aestheticism is also an abstract aestheticism explains the constantly-shifting recourse to formalism(s) -- and suprematism(s) and / or constructivism(s) -- with a periodic dive into functionalism(s) by way of an inverted, de-racinated re-deployment of Tafuri's caustic (toxic) critique of the 'ideology of the plan'."

I realize there are major phiosophical issues surrounding architecture and the built(and unbuilt!!!) environments. Hell, my thesis was about the possibility of a synthesis of existentialism and architecture, which, I know, I know, is twaddle. This still drives me up the wall......


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skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 05:18 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Yup.

I admit, ya gotta watch that sheer aestheticism, especially when it leads to Suprematism.

Like, whenever we get to Suprematism, I think we all gotta back up a bit and think things over.

But the odd dive into formalism(s) -- I think that's ok, if held in some ethical check.


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Mohamad Khan
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posted 17 July 2003 05:22 PM      Profile for Mohamad Khan   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
i'm going to write this post, and then i *will* come up with a thesis and argument for my Vic Lit essay. if i come back to this thread after this post, babblers are authorised to give me virtual beatings.

let me try to explain briefly to you and to myself why i try not to get into these, er...discussions.

first of all, criticism tends to be directed towards individual scholars such as Derrida, Irigaray, Lacan, etc., which is fine. the rationale behind it is perhaps that by problematising certain aspects of their ideas, one can convince their followers of their mendaciousness, falsity, or whatever. the problem here is that i feel that it's useless to defend "Derrida" or "Foucault" as such. i will defend myself and no one else. for instance, i have great respect for both Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, and in a respectful sense, i *might* say that i am their "student." however, i am extremely wary of hero-worship, which among other things makes people take attacks on their heroes as attacks on themselves. i respect Chomsky and Foucault. but i *am* not Chomsky and/or Foucault, and saying that i'm influenced by their thought is not the same as saying that i believe absolutely everything that they say. i take things away from them, and make them my own. when they become my own, Chomsky and Foucault (the scholars) may not agree with them at all. this is always painful for the authenticist (authenteo Gk. "to have full power over, to commit a murder"), but it is always joyful for the author (augere L. "to increase"). so i don't see much point in invoking Chomsky or Foucault at all. engage me and *my* ideas, and, as i am something of an "authenticist" myself, you might get a discussion from me.

more overreachingly, i'm increasingly certain that it is very wrong to set up "ratio-empiricism" as a hostile other just because some "ratio-empiricists" set up that which i believe as an other. this is a very negative emotional response that absolutely goes against what we're trying to do. man anaa ba`da layli al-Ghariiba?; "who am i after the night of the stranger?": thinking about this poem by Mahmoud Darwish and its implications for Israelis and Palestinians, for the reconquistador and the Moor, for the coloniser and the colonised, and for us, is enough to bring one to tears. but i'm afraid i don't have time to get into it. anyhow, what skdadl, Courage, and myself must remember is that, given the all-subsuming nature of that thing that we call by various names, we always limit ourselves and belie our own beliefs when we take up such positions. that's not to say that we absolutely shouldn't do so, but we should not forget it entirely, and we should try to allow the remembrance to affect the way in which we argue as far as possible.

anyhow, more specifically, i have not read much Lacan, and so i can't say anything about what i've taken away from him. i want to read Freud more substantially before i get to him. however, i understand that another of the Babblers in this thread is fond of Lacan. given this, i want to make a small point:

quote:
Lacan, has produced riffs and riffs of bullshit pseudo-intellectualism

i'm not entirely clear on what is (ever) meant by "pseudo-intellectualism," but no doubt it has a certain logic behind it. however, i don't think that "bullshit" really does. in other words, while i'm perhaps not a very good rationalist, i would venture to suggest that a reference to feces is not a marker of good "ratio-empiricist" argument--rather, i think that it is generally a marker of an emotional response, and it is usually not meant to provoke rational responses either, but rather to stir up more emotions that might not be too positive. i think that Courage and others have enough self-restraint to avoid responding in the way i've suggested. but i'm not sure what purpose it serves, and i'm not sure why a "ratio-empiricist" argument should need to have recourse to such irrational rhetoric. however, if anyone can give me a rationalist breakdown of the meaning of bullshit, i will certainly consider it. in the meantime...let's just not go there, please.

quote:
I'll end by saying that a babbler whose prowess in literary matters has me in awe suggested in another thread that we should read this stuff as one reads poetry. Courage made reference to Derrida's legendary wordplay. All fine and good, but the latter is not scholarship and former does not distinguish randomly generated strings of words from the works of Northrop Frye.

i have my own ideas about Derrida's wordplay, but i'll let Courage answer this since the reference is to him. as for the former, the problem here is that works of poetry and fiction are not randomly generated strings of words, as anyone who writes poetry or fiction knows. this is why i'm puzzled by comments such as "a lot of the Qur'an is just poetry, and there's nothing wrong with that." alright, but why "just" poetry? is it really so worthless?

as for dualist Mandos , i don't have time to decipher what he's written, but i'm still very interested to know where we diverge in our ideas of God.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

[ 18 July 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]


From: "Glorified Harlem": Morningside Heights, NYC | Registered: Nov 2001  |  IP: Logged
skdadl
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posted 17 July 2003 05:33 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
more overreachingly, i'm increasingly certain that it is very wrong to set up "ratio-empiricism" as a hostile other just because some "ratio-empiricists" set up that which i believe as an other. this is a very negative emotional response that absolutely goes against what we're trying to do. man anaa ba`du al-layli al-Ghariiba?; "who am i after the night of the stranger?": thinking about this poem by Mahmoud Darwish and its implications for Israelis and Palestinians, for the reconquistador and the Moor, for the coloniser and the colonised, and for us, is enough to bring one to tears. but i'm afraid i don't have time to get into it. anyhow, what skdadl, Courage, and myself must remember is that, given the all-subsuming nature of that thing that we call by various names, we always limit ourselves and belie our own beliefs when we take up such positions. that's not to say that we absolutely shouldn't do so, but we should not forget it entirely, and we should try to allow the remembrance to affect the way in which we argue as far as possible.

No question, MK. Thank you; I could never have put it so well.

(Except: you gotta let me have a little fun tweaking Mandos-guy's nose every once in a while.)

This is very beautiful and true:

quote:
when they become my own, Chomsky and Foucault (the scholars) may not agree with them at all. this is always painful for the authenticist (authenteo Gk. "to have full power over, to commit a murder"), but it is always joyful for the author (augere L. "to increase"). so i don't see much point in invoking Chomsky or Foucault at all. engage me and *my* ideas, and, as i am something of an "authenticist" myself, you might get a discussion from me.

I hope you don't mind if I save it privately. I would always credit it. But of course I expect to see it in print under your name anyway.


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Sisyphus
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posted 17 July 2003 06:36 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
i'm not entirely clear on what is (ever) meant by "pseudo-intellectualism," but no doubt it has a certain logic behind it. however, i don't think that "bullshit" really does. in other words, while i'm perhaps not a very good rationalist, i would venture to suggest that a reference to feces is not a marker of good "ratio-empiricist" argument--rather, i think that it is generally a marker of an emotional response, and it is usually not meant to provoke rational responses either, but rather to stir up more emotions that might not be too positive. i think that Courage and others have enough self-restraint to avoid responding in the way i've suggested. but i'm not sure what purpose it serves, and i'm not sure why a "ratio-empiricist" argument should need to have recourse to such irrational rhetoric. however, if anyone can give me a rationalist breakdown of the meaning of bullshit, i will certainly consider it. in the meantime...let's just not go there, please.

By "pseudo-intellectualism", I mean writing whose effect is to convey the appearance of serious thought and study, but whose semantic content ( and occasionally syntactic structure) is ambiguous because of (for example) juxtapositions of image (comparisons like similes and metaphors) or substantive and qualifier that seem to run counter to their generally-accepted denotations AND for which no justification is provided. Chomsky's "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is an illustration, but in the Lacan passage : "If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease."
we see that the metaphor of neuroses as analogous to topological structures is presented and (you'll have to take my word or do your own research) not only never justified in any writings I have searched, including those which he himself refers to as doing so, but even were it to be justified, there is no statement, not one, that expresses of what possible value such an obscure comparison could possibly be.

You are correct that the term "bullshit" is not a particularly sensitive, instructive nor high minded one. However, I felt that what it lacked in semantic precision over the word "nonsense", in gentility over the term "gobbledygook" or in philosophical precision over the expression "conflation of irreconcilable categorical structures", it more than made up for with its admirable brevity as well as its connotation of contempt and as correctly observed, emotive content.


quote:
the problem here is that works of poetry and fiction are not randomly generated strings of words, as anyone who writes poetry or fiction knows. this is why i'm puzzled by comments such as "a lot of the Qur'an is just poetry, and there's nothing wrong with that." alright, but why "just" poetry? is it really so worthless?

I cannot agree with you more as concerns your first sentence, but without engaging in discussion about the ir(relevance) of authourial intent, I would submit that its role is different in the realm of exposition than in the realm of poetry and I submit to the discussion that if a sentence of exposition can be shown to be irrevocably ambiguous because of an intrinsic characteristic of logical thought, or weakness of syntactic structure (langauge) generally for example, then there is no way to defend the assertion of your first sentence with respect to expostion, let alone poetry, where ambiguity can be embraced to yield images and insight that transcend the Euclidean constraints of the former.

As to the second part of the quote, the magnificent evocation of the power of poetry which precedes it only confirms that
"a lot of the Qur'an is just poetry, and there's nothing wrong with that."

is just "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" without instructive benefit.

I suspect that skdadl is right about Mr. Fulford. There is a smarty-pants tone to his sort of critique that rubs me the wrong way, even as I might slip into it for diametrically-opposed reasons. In his hands, I suspect it is a means to ridicule an academic tendency I believe he would like his audience to associate with "The Left".

There is a strong association with epistemic relativism, I think, meaning that if we allow that all viewpoints have equal authority because each if valid within its own cosmology, then all viewpoints are equal. Moral relativism clearly follows from this viewpoint and there are no tools of verification or validation with which to assert that any ideas, behaviours, laws or institutions are better (more desirable) or worse (less desirable) than any others.

Courage mentioned, astutely I think, that Fulford is trying to do a style-versus substance bait-and-switch, where, while trying to argue that his targets' style indicates a lack of substance; that a simple style necessarily produces substance.

In the authors that I explicitly criticise, I see a complete indifference, if not contempt for substance. It bothers me so much, I suppose, because from Ari Fleischer to Bill Clinton to Stephen Harper and Paul Martin, I see the same thing but with a different style.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]


From: Never Never Land | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
DrConway
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posted 17 July 2003 07:42 PM      Profile for DrConway     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I gotta come up with a new term for this phenomenon - thread erudition perhaps.

Being one who has done only the basics of philosophy, and being one acquainted with the sort of dense language scientists often use I nevertheless find it pretentious when philosophers attempt to (mis)appropriate scientific concepts (although I accept the quantum mechanics implication that reality is a product of the perceptions of the observer and all that follows from it) to achieve their own agenda - the classic example being the attempt to shoehorn the mass-energy relation E=mc^2 into some kind diatribe about gender.

That having been said I am also allergic, extremely allergic, to people who write with starch in their prose such as the examples given by Fulford.

I call myself a plain talker and so my writing style on message boards like this tends to be blunter and more direct than others'. However that does not mean I am incapable of appreciating the use of big words - but I believe as with many things that overuse simply ruins them.

I mean, if I wanted to sound very elite and most authoritative I could say things like:

"The bonding of atoms is governed by the Linear Combination of Atomic Orbitals as enumerated by the Schroedinger Wave Equation with characteristic eigenvalues and associated eigenfunctions."

That's just bafflegab for anyone who isn't a chemist, and is just stupid if I'm trying to explain chemical bonding in terms anyone can understand. What the above really says is that one way of treating chemical bonding is to set up equations which give the shapes of the electron clouds that are formed.

Boom. Full stop.

So the way I see it is people wouldn't like it if I quoted quantum mechanics texts at them outside of a sudden attack of doe snot, and similarly people using big words for the sake of it in a philosophy paper aren't going to get my unstinting praise either.


From: You shall not side with the great against the powerless. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Mohamad Khan
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posted 17 July 2003 08:00 PM      Profile for Mohamad Khan   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
just a very quick comment, because i have to get back to class in a few minutes:

quote:
As to the second part of the quote, the magnificent evocation of the power of poetry which precedes it only confirms that "a lot of the Qur'an is just poetry, and there's nothing wrong with that." is just "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" without instructive benefit.

thank you for the nice sentiment, but i have to disagree with your assessment, because this was an opinion expressed by a good Chomskian Muslim whom i like very much, and although i'm questioning it, i would not question his abilities so far as to say that his statement was mere nonsense. there's something rational behind it, no doubt; though i don't yet know what that is.


From: "Glorified Harlem": Morningside Heights, NYC | Registered: Nov 2001  |  IP: Logged
jeff house
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posted 17 July 2003 10:48 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Fulford's article reprises George Orwell, but with different targets. His idea that the "left" write poorly requires us to believe that the theorists he mentions, are leftists. Foucault supported many ultra-left causes, but also derided the idea of history, certainly a central element of any Marxian understanding of the world.

By the same token, right wing philosophers do not write any more clearly, as even passing acquaintance with Heidegger and Eric Voegelin would attest. Fulford forgot to mention them.

Myself, I think that lack of clarity in writing flows from a specific tradition; the Nietszchean. Once God is dead, and reason unseated from His throne, one is left with poetry. The idea of Der Dichter, who plums the depth of being with an aphorism leads to a tradition in which wordplay takes on an important role. Good philosophers become good poets, bad philosophers write gobbledy gook. You need essentialists to tell the difference.

Also, it is true, without doubt, that jargon and buzzwords can be used to set out professional boundaries, to prevent the presence of interlopers who might be overly critical. If you disagree, perhaps you have not read the concurring opinion of Wilson, J. in Singh v. M.E.I. (1985) 4 S.C.R. 357 (S.C.C,) @388.


From: toronto | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Michelle
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posted 17 July 2003 11:50 PM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 

From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 18 July 2003 07:49 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Sisyphus:

I cannot agree with you more as concerns your first sentence, but without engaging in discussion about the ir(relevance) of authourial intent, I would submit that its role is different in the realm of exposition than in the realm of poetry and I submit to the discussion that if a sentence of exposition can be shown to be irrevocably ambiguous because of an intrinsic characteristic of logical thought, or weakness of syntactic structure (langauge) generally for example, then there is no way to defend the assertion of your first sentence with respect to expostion, let alone poetry, where ambiguity can be embraced to yield images and insight that transcend the Euclidean constraints of the former.

As to the second part of the quote, the magnificent evocation of the power of poetry which precedes it only confirms that
"a lot of the Qur'an is just poetry, and there's nothing wrong with that."

is just "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" without instructive benefit.

I suspect that skdadl is right about Mr. Fulford. There is a smarty-pants tone to his sort of critique that rubs me the wrong way, even as I might slip into it for diametrically-opposed reasons. In his hands, I suspect it is a means to ridicule an academic tendency I believe he would like his audience to associate with "The Left".

There is a strong association with epistemic relativism, I think, meaning that if we allow that all viewpoints have equal authority because each if valid within its own cosmology, then all viewpoints are equal. Moral relativism clearly follows from this viewpoint and there are no tools of verification or validation with which to assert that any ideas, behaviours, laws or institutions are better (more desirable) or worse (less desirable) than any others.

Courage mentioned, astutely I think, that Fulford is trying to do a style-versus substance bait-and-switch, where, while trying to argue that his targets' style indicates a lack of substance; that a simple style necessarily produces substance.

In the authors that I explicitly criticise, I see a complete indifference, if not contempt for substance. It bothers me so much, I suppose, because from Ari Fleischer to Bill Clinton to Stephen Harper and Paul Martin, I see the same thing but with a different style.

[ 17 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]



Bullshit...


From: Earth | Registered: Apr 2003  |  IP: Logged
Sisyphus
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posted 21 July 2003 12:07 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Posted by Courage in response to a few paragraphs:

quote:
Bullshit...

quote:
I think there is another way out of this dichotomy that was/is understood by some of the early Western scientists, like Roger Bacon and others who were also versed in Sufic and Alchemist ways of thinking. There is a sort of materialism expressed by Gurdjieff and others in the modern era which tries to account for both these problems by setting man into a 'material' realm of vibrations and substances - including our perceptive apparati, which don't always work on the same substance/vibration from minute to minute - accounting for some of the varying degrees of objectivity/subjectivity in our lives...


I defer. You are the expert, Courage .

[ 21 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]


From: Never Never Land | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 21 July 2003 02:55 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Sisyphus:
Posted by Courage in response to a few paragraphs:

I defer. You are the expert, Courage .

[ 21 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]


Sorry, I should have added one of those 'grin' emoticons:


From: Earth | Registered: Apr 2003  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 21 July 2003 03:11 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
What I was speaking of (e.g. Bacon, Gurdjieff, etc.) was that our usual conceptions of the epistemological debate (empiro-rationalism v. relativism or some other related dichotomy) often doesn't take into account that 'Man' is not a unity, static in time, always perceiving in the precisely same way. The relativists do look at the problem of multiplicity (by way of psychoanalysis) but usually conclude that our subjectivity is an unbreakable cage conditioned by the slippage of meaning in the chain of signifiers, the incoherency of 'drives' etc. However, there is another way of seeing this, and that is that our usual notions of 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' are both quite true - they are stations along a greyscale of 'attention' which is not static in our usual day-to-day state, but that can be controlled through practice and an increase in the energy which is required to produce them. So while there is an 'objectivity' possible for man - it is not to be arrived at solely through external logical constructs and methodology (scientific methods) unless these methods of observation and study are applied to the inner-life (perception, emotion, bodily digestion/movement) observer as well with the goal being the 'transgression' of the boundaries of our usually subjective consiousness/perception. In other words, the scientist can only arrive at a greater 'objectivity' through study of his own subjectivity/individuality. The scientists' prime 'specimen' is his own body, intellect, and emotions. And he must subject this specimen to a rigorous examination to understand its various functions in order to better create methodologies for observation/measurements of external events.
From: Earth | Registered: Apr 2003  |  IP: Logged
Sisyphus
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posted 21 July 2003 04:13 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
empiro-rationalism v. relativism or some other related dichotomy) often doesn't take into account that 'Man' is not a unity, static in time, always perceiving in the precisely same way. The relativists do look at the problem of multiplicity (by way of psychoanalysis) but usually conclude that our subjectivity is an unbreakable cage conditioned by the slippage of meaning in the chain of signifiers, the incoherency of 'drives' etc.

There is no assumption, in any formulation of "empiro-rationalism" of which I'm aware, that 'Man' is static or constant in ANY sense. In fact, it's taken as given that humans are imperfect observers, suffering from limited sense-perceptions, a hopeless tendency to bias and misinterpretation, flawed logical capacity and a proud overestimation of the power of their own logical abilities.

The power of the 'scientific method' is that it ensures that any persons, regardless of the particular content of their own 'subjectivity' will perceive the 'objective' aspects of reality without significant differences. For example, starting from scratch, it follows that every individual (no matter how contrary to their intial assumptions) equipped with the right tools would find that massive objects are attracted to one another by a force inversely proportional to the square of their separation and that progeny of two different individuals will show a distribution of traits of each of the parents that is predictable on average, depending on how many factors are required to produce a recognizable trait.

The "cage" of subjectivity may exist for communication of the results in certain forms of language (I have never seen an example of this limitation with respect to mathematics), but the empirical findings are not ambiguous. In fact, the most commonly-used set of "signifiers" in scientific journals is the English language and I am unaware of any impediments to the communication of scientific results or theories that have taken place as the result of any 'slippage' of meaning with respect to scientific terminology, though I grant that all lexical systems risk some level of ambiguity and circularity.

The amazing thing about science and mathematics is that it is so powerful an epistemological tool despite us having to use them from within our isolated subjectivities.

quote:
However, there is another way of seeing this, and that is that our usual notions of 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity' are both quite true - they are stations along a greyscale of 'attention' which is not static in our usual day-to-day state, but that can be controlled through practice and an increase in the energy which is required to produce them. So while there is an 'objectivity' possible for man - it is not to be arrived at solely through external logical constructs and methodology (scientific methods) unless these methods of observation and study are applied to the inner-life (perception, emotion, bodily digestion/movement) observer as well with the goal being the 'transgression' of the boundaries of our usually subjective consiousness/perception.

Of course our knowledge of the 'objective' world is necessarily filtered through our 'subjectivity' just as a television image of a room is converted from reflected light to electromagnetic radiation, back to photons and finally to ion movements in bone-encased mush, yet the location of things in the room (among other things) can be agreed by me in Nassau and you in Alert using our respective mush, so the transduction of the 'reality' of the room can be seen as irrelevant for many questions.

I may think the room beautiful, and you may think it ugly, so our subjectivies are alive and well, but so what?

The rest, I think, is what I referred to in an earlier post as "using a hammer to do the job of a sewing machine."
Investigating the strcture of one's own subjectivity is a whole different ballgame. I agree that there are tried-and-true empirical methods for this venture, but it is my opinion that applying language and any formal logical systems to it would be like trying to write a movie review using the language of partial differential equations.

quote:
In other words, the scientist can only arrive at a greater 'objectivity' through study of his own subjectivity/individuality. The scientists' prime 'specimen' is his own body, intellect, and emotions. And he must subject this specimen to a rigorous examination to understand its various functions in order to better create methodologies for observation/measurements of external events

This last bit, with the exception, perhaps, of certain specialized areas of cognitive neuroscience and psychotherapy (to the extent that some elements of it are scientific), is nonsense to my ears.

The last sentence, in particular, asks the 'scientist' to consider what the scientific method has rendered completely irrelevant at best and hopelessly misleading at worst, but for the exceptions I described above (and the neoroscience bit would couple the intra-subjective stuff with PET or MRI or EEG or magnetoencephalography etc.

[ 21 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]


From: Never Never Land | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 21 July 2003 05:06 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
There is no assumption, in any formulation of "empiro-rationalism" of which I'm aware, that 'Man' is static or constant in ANY sense. In fact, it's taken as given that humans are imperfect observers, suffering from limited sense-perceptions, a hopeless tendency to bias and misinterpretation, flawed logical capacity and a proud overestimation of the power of their own logical abilities.

Agreed. On the one hand I overstated the case a bit. On the other, what I'm - rather imperfectly - trying to get at is the question of the 'nature' of these imperfections. These imperfections arise from a certain working of the human 'machine'. Where I'm trying to intervene is in the method used for studying (and the possibility of correcting) these imperfections as much as is possible. The assumption is the same as yours: man is imperfect, and scientific method can be used to transgress this imperfection. However, what I'm trying to point out is that the 'scientific method' in the hands of someone who is fully cognisent of the functioning of their machine as regards the quality and quantity of 'attention' brought to a certain task (say scientific observation) is different - more or less revealing, more or less accurate if you will - from that same method in the hands of someone who has done no work in this direction.

So the proposition is this: though science on the level of man's ordinary state of self-awareness and attention be one thing, there is the possibility of a better, greater 'science' which can only be operated from a different kind of being in the scientist. And this different being comes through a careful - positivist and scientific - study of the functions of the human machine, NOT with the aim of ONLY seeing it's limitations (logical problems, bias, etc.) but from the point of view of it's possibilities for a greater being which could transcend these deficiencies.


quote:
The power of the 'scientific method' is that it ensures that any persons, regardless of the particular content of their own 'subjectivity' will perceive the 'objective' aspects of reality without significant differences.

Only assuming 'man' in his current state. My suggestion is that there are other 'states' possible for man, including the actual possession of self-conciousness - which we barely have though ascribe to ourselves anyway - which would drastically alter the depth and scope of the understanding to be acheived through the scientifict method. In fact, a new method might be needed from this new place. In other words, an improvement of the human tool-maker (the scientific method-ist) could create the possibility of a new science which is deeper in it's possibilities of understanding and knowledge of the universe than that which currently goes under that name.

quote:
For example, starting from scratch, it follows that every individual (no matter how contrary to their intial assumptions) equipped with the right tools would find that massive objects are attracted to one another by a force inversely proportional to the square of their separation and that progeny of two different individuals will show a distribution of traits of each of the parents that is predictable on average, depending on how many factors are required to produce a recognizable trait.

No disagreement here.

quote:
The "cage" of subjectivity may exist for communication of the results in certain forms of language (I have never seen an example of this limitation with respect to mathematics), but the empirical findings are not ambiguous. In fact, the most commonly-used set of "signifiers" in scientific journals is the English language and I am unaware of any impediments to the communication of scientific results or theories that have taken place as the result of any 'slippage' of meaning with respect to scientific terminology, though I grant that all lexical systems risk some level of ambiguity and circularity.

Fine. I was never holding that there was such a deficiency.

quote:
The amazing thing about science and mathematics is that it is so powerful an epistemological tool despite us having to use them from within our isolated subjectivities.

What I am saying is that work to transgress these subjectivities makes the scientific method - indeed all methods of investigation - an even more powerful tool, or might create conditions for a better tool. That a scientist - or any investigator of an earthly phenomenon - can bring a different and more powerful type of attention to his perceptions and work than we currently do. And that an improvement of the state of being of the scientist necessarily denotes and improvement in the level of science he is practicing.


quote:
Of course our knowledge of the 'objective' world is necessarily filtered through our 'subjectivity'

This isn't the point. Let me see if I can clarify. The 'objective' reality that you speak of can never, for a human, be more than his particular set of perceptual abilities can make it. Regardless of scientific method. The instruments used (both internal to man and in the external world) will always constrain the results. 'Objectivity' in this sense is just the limit of man's - ultimately subjective - perception. What I am trying to suggest is that the state of perception that we normally take to be 'objective' (or at least close, by use of scientific procedures to reduce error) is actually limited by a CHANGEABLE factor, it is just that this factor is rarely thought of as changeable, or even existent in usual discussion of the matter. This factor is hidden by many misrecognitions common to our language and sense of ourselves. If these misrecognitions can be fixed so-to-speak, there is an even greater 'objectivity' available to us.

quote:
Investigating the strcture of one's own subjectivity is a whole different ballgame. I agree that there are tried-and-true empirical methods for this venture, but it is my opinion that applying language and any formal logical systems to it would be like trying to write a movie review using the language of partial differential equations.

Agreed, to a degree. It's not so much the 'formal logical systems' which are at issue, but the rigorousness and 'impartiality' of the method employed. We have the possibility of dividing ourselves against ourselves - of creating a dialectic conflict within ourselves which can produce a different state of consciousness, something more like the 'self-consciousness' which we mistakenly believe we have now.

quote:
The last sentence, in particular, asks the 'scientist' to consider what the scientific method has rendered completely irrelevant at best and hopelessly misleading at worst,

I disagree that it has rendered it irrelevent. All the 'success' of the scientific method shows is that there is *at least* a certain commonality to our perceptions of things. This commonality is predicated on the common structure of our human machines. Study of the machinery reveals that there are more efficient ways for it to run, which can increase the quality and quantity of it's output. It's the difference between running your car on terrible, very, very low octane gasoline, and burning a higher octane fuel, or even some better, more efficient, more powerful fuel. So the assumption that there is a commonality to our perceptions, which scientific method pares away the MORE 'subjective' aspects of ourselves to reveal, is not at all harmful to my position. That we are all less than we could be is the starting point, in fact. Further, scientific method cannot render 'irrelevent' the possibility that there is a way to improve our perceptions beyond the common level used for ordinary science. It is simply a different question altogether.

[ 21 July 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]


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Sisyphus
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posted 21 July 2003 05:26 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I can't find anything to disagree with in that last post, and would be very interested in what form improvements to human cognitive capacities might take and what the 'enhanced' objectivism/subjectivism might produce.

Edited to add:

Oh, except for this (which is where I run afoul of the thread titular "academics"):

quote:
This commonality is predicated on the common structure of our human machines.

Granted, we can never know which things we are incapable of knowing because of inherent limitations in our machines, but I think an underlying assumption of those of us who hew to empiro-rationalism is that the objective nature of physical reality is the truly predicating factor for this commonality. The common structure of our machines just increases the ease with which we can share it with each other.

[ 21 July 2003: Message edited by: Sisyphus ]


From: Never Never Land | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 21 July 2003 05:43 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Sisyphus:
I can't find anything to disagree with in that last post, and would be very interested in what form improvements to human cognitive capacities might take and what the 'enhanced' objectivism/subjectivism might produce.

Edited to add:

Oh, except for this (which is where I run afoul of the thread titular "academics"):

Granted, we can never know which things we are incapable of knowing because of inherent limitations in our machines, but I think an underlying assumption of those of us who hew to empiro-rationalism is that the objective nature of physical reality is the truly predicating factor for this commonality. The common structure of our machines just increases the ease with which we can share it with each other.


I would agree that this is because we and 'it' operate under the same rules - we are 'of it' right down to our 'psychology' And so a study of the self can reveal much of the 'objective' world around us. 'Know thyself' said the old Greek coot. However, where I think this sometimes goes wrong is in assuming that the 'mechanistic' paradigm that is currently in vogue to describe the 'objective' world is the 'reality' whereas all the subjective 'meaning' which we experience is in fact a delusion. Is it not also possible - on the assumption that 'we' and 'it' are cut of the same cloth, that the meaning we experience in the 'objective' universe is because it is actually there? That the supposedly 'subjective' states acheived by mystics and others which confer a feeling of wholeness, oneness and purpose to everything, are not delusions framed onto a 'mechanistic' cold, physical reality, but that this 'mechanistic' model is actually just the imprint of our own deficiencies to regularly percieve this meaning, one-ness, etc...

Just meandering a little...


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Sisyphus
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posted 21 July 2003 06:18 PM      Profile for Sisyphus     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It's funny you should ask that question, because if I'm not defending all that is good and noble from hordes of French intellectuals brandishing pictures of pipes , I find myself a strong defender of what I might call principled mysticism. I'm not sure I would agree with the idea that :
quote:
this 'mechanistic' model is actually just the imprint of our own deficiencies to regularly percieve this meaning, one-ness, etc...

but I agree that, in terms of perceiving meaning and the central existential fact of being concious (and aware of being an awareness that is concious...) at this point in the Now, there is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of...

We are indeed of Nature and therefore our minds reflect Nature if we can still them to see the image. Interestingly, I don't consider these glimpses "feelings"; rather, their memories stored in my "data" file...but, I'm meandering...


From: Never Never Land | Registered: Sep 2001  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 21 July 2003 08:02 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Sisyphus:
It's funny you should ask that question, because if I'm not defending all that is good and noble from hordes of French intellectuals brandishing pictures of pipes , I find myself a strong defender of what I might call principled mysticism. I'm not sure I would agree with the idea that :
but I agree that, in terms of perceiving meaning and the central existential fact of being concious (and aware of being an awareness that is concious...) at this point in the Now, there is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of...

We are indeed of Nature and therefore our minds reflect Nature if we can still them to see the image. Interestingly, I don't consider these glimpses "feelings"; rather, their memories stored in my "data" file...but, I'm meandering...


Reading what I wrote a second time, I think I missed my own intention using the word 'feeling'. I, too, would consider these glimpses not JUST feelings, though part of the experience is surely emotional. The emotional part of these glimpses that I have had is of a kind of emotional state, which being more fine (closer to'gold' as an alchemist might say) seems to defy our usual catagories of 'feelings'; which are usually quite subjective, and largely negative at their base. I do find that the most powerful (and usually [therefore?] more memorable) 'higher intellectual' experiences, when they do happen are nearly always accompanied by a very definite emotional state which is not in my usual repertoire. This returns me to the Gurdjieff system I spoke of before. In his way of looking at things, our emotional, intellectual, and physical products are all of a certain frequency or quality of energy particular to them. More refined - 'higher' - thoughts and emotions require a more forceful, though more refined kind of fuel. In his eyes, the glimpses that we speak of are moments when, by accident, or by deliberate work to create them, these more powerful energies are in play, and they allow us to shine a different, perhaps *brighter* light on the world around us.


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drgoodword
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posted 22 July 2003 09:23 AM      Profile for drgoodword   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
The infamous 1996 Sokal Hoax put a strong spotlight on some of the more flagrant intellectual abuses of post-modern critical theory and cultural studies. Interestingly, Sokal, a physicist, is a card-carrying member of the left and stated that he pulled his little intellectual prank as part of an attempt to return to the left what he believes is its native lucidity and rationality.

From Salon

quote:
Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for "advanced" thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ("hermeneutics," "transgressive," "Lacanian," "hegemony," to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted.

Well, as that discredited icon of phallocentrism, Gomer Pyle, might have said, "Surprise, surprise, surprise." Behind the shiny black cover of the current "Science Wars" issue of "Social Text," a prestigious journal devoted to cultural studies, those who rush to read will find an article by NYU physicist Alan Sokal titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."

Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the "real world"), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy) and reaches the usual "progressive" (whatever that word is supposed to mean) conclusion. And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit -- a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.

Oops.


An Interview With Sokal:

quote:
Dennis Healey once compared a verbal attack by one of his parliamentary colleagues to "being savaged by a dead sheep." I was reminded of this remark when I met the physicist Alan Sokal, the man who, along with mathematician Jean Bricmont, has caused outrage and indignation among the French intelligentsia first with his spoof post-modern article published in the journal Social Text, and then for his and Bricmont’s book Intellectual Impostures, which combines a catalogue of misuses of scientific terms by predominantly French thinkers with a stinging attack on what they call "sloppy relativism"

Given this history, you’d expect Sokal to be more lupine than lamb-like, but in fact, he is a friendly, chatty, effusive figure more interested in offering his guests his favourite blackcurrant tea from New York than character assassinations. You would have thought he and Healey’s sheep would be just about level in terms of terrifyingness, so how did this gentle man come to be the scourge of the rive gauche?

"My original motivation had to do with epistemic relativism," explains Sokal, "and what I saw as a rise in sloppily thought-out relativism, being the kind of unexamined zeitgeist of large areas of the American humanities and some parts of the social sciences. In particular I had political motivations because I was worried about the extent to which that relativism was identified with certain parts of the academic left and I also consider myself on the left and consider that to be a suicidal attitude for the American left."

Sokal’s intention was to write a parody of this kind of relativism and to see if an academic journal would publish it. The end result was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which was published in the journal Social Text in 1996. With extensive quotations from the thinkers Sokal was targeting, such as Lacan, Irigaray and Baudrillard, the article pulls off the powerful trick of constructing the parody almost entirely out of the parodied (something which, ironically, some of the post-modernists Sokal attacks would surely appreciate).

"It’s important not to exaggerate what the parody shows," stresses Sokal. "As an experiment it doesn’t prove very much. It just proves that one journal was very sloppy in its standards. I don’t know what other journals would have done. I suspect that a lot of other journals would have rejected it. As for the content of the parody, in some ways it’s a lot worse than a lot of stuff which is published, in some ways it’s a lot less bad. Steve Weinberg in his article in the New York Review of Books made, I think, a perceptive observation, that ‘contrary to what some people have said, I don’t think that Sokal’s article is incomprehensible. I find some of the views in it daffy. But I think that most of the time he expresses himself clearly and indeed I have the distinct impression that Sokal finds it difficult to write unclearly,’ which is absolutely true. I had to go through many revisions before the article reached the desired level of unclarity.


The Sokal Article Published In Social Text:

quote:
There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science -- among them, existence itself -- become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.



From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2002  |  IP: Logged
Geneva
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posted 23 July 2003 04:54 AM      Profile for Geneva     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
NO EXCUSES:

some of the most complicated, "paradigm-shifting", breakthrough thinking ever is written in lucid and even masterful prose, ex. Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Rousseau, sometimes Marx, Nietzsche, although very little in the 20th century


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Mandos
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posted 23 July 2003 10:54 AM      Profile for Mandos   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I'm going to change sides for a moment and ask whether it was lucid and masterful then when it was written, or only now that the experience has been compressed into modern intellectual culture?
From: There, there. | Registered: Jun 2001  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 23 July 2003 11:49 AM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Geneva:
NO EXCUSES:

some of the most complicated, "paradigm-shifting", breakthrough thinking ever is written in lucid and even masterful prose, ex. Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Rousseau, sometimes Marx, Nietzsche, although very little in the 20th century


Sure, but I offer Kant, Hegel as important as any of these. Neither could write a whit...

As for no clarity in the 20th Century? Arendt and her erstwhile foil, Adorno, were usually clear. Habermas is usually quite clear. Ayn Rand is quite clear, though I find her influence far outweighs the intelligence of her ideas. Bertrand Russel is quite clear. Popper, no problem.

I mean, only some of the most important, ground-breaking theory of the 20th Century...

[ 23 July 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]


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skdadl
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posted 23 July 2003 11:57 AM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Actually, although I consider all of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel to be accomplished writers, none of them is an easy read. Is that what people are considering "masterful writing" -- ie, the Hemingway/E.B. White model?

I can show you enormously long sentences of Rousseau's that you would have to parse (searching for the subject and active verb) before you'd know how to attach the subordinate clauses to the principal.

Again: the history of rhetoric, like everything else, is cyclical, or spiral-ical. There is a reason that the generation immediately following Voltaire did not write like Voltaire and Pascal (and they didn't, for sure). Think about it.


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Courage
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posted 23 July 2003 12:08 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Mandos:
I'm going to change sides for a moment and ask whether it was lucid and masterful then when it was written, or only now that the experience has been compressed into modern intellectual culture?

BINGO....If I may risk a New Testament allusion, a prophet is always hated most in his own village...

What I would like to ask is this: What of deliberate obfuscatory and even confusing writing which is consciously authored to force the reader to have to do certain things in order to glean the information? Mythological allegorical writing is often this way. Often it comes across as very clear on top, but the waters underneath are deep. Other times, it comes across as nonsensical, but once one does the required 'work' to make sense of it, they have actually done what the author intended for them to do, i.e. excercise certain associative or critical faculties...

In response to Geneva's mention of Neitzsche, I put his aphorisms in this catagory. Their 'clarity' is sometimes only surface-deep, if it is immediately apparent at all. But the 'digging' he calls you to do is what he is really getting at. In other words, the initial and most 'facial' meaning is not the meaning at all - so whether it is 'clear' or not, misses the entire point.

Doesn't the binary "clear or not clear" just omit all of this kind of writing, which is among some of our greatest literature?

If this is nonsense, please allow that I have yet to consume any caffeine this morning, and I'm a 3-a-day addict...


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skdadl
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posted 23 July 2003 12:15 PM      Profile for skdadl     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
I agree, Courage: the binary "clear or not-clear" is a deficient analytical standard, and is a main cause of the disagreements here.
From: gone | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Courage
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posted 23 July 2003 12:18 PM      Profile for Courage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Mandos:
I'm going to change sides for a moment and ask whether it was lucid and masterful then when it was written, or only now that the experience has been compressed into modern intellectual culture?

One more point before brekkie...

It is interesting that Geneva points out Plato as an example of lucid and clear prose, however, aren't the dialogues themselves largely concerned with how the ideas of the master can never quite be digested by ordinary folks? Heck, The Trial of Socrates is a perfect example. As are the early chapters of the Republic. Then again, if all his work was so 'clear' why are people still arguing about it 3000 years later?

Moreover, I think that some of the 'clarity' of Plato is due to his didactic style. He doesn't really offer up thorough rebuttals of the problems with his arguments, or even account for them, which is considered part of any modern philosophical writing: i.e. accounting for all that has come before in detail, and making sure one is wholly contextualised, etc. Plato just has some dramatic foils lob up huge argumentative softballs which Socrates hits out of the park every time with nary a rejoinder or further clarification....

Dialogues? Monologues, actually.


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Michelle
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posted 23 July 2003 07:06 PM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by skdadl:
I can show you enormously long sentences of Rousseau's that you would have to parse (searching for the subject and active verb) before you'd know how to attach the subordinate clauses to the principal.

Yeah, see, to me, that's bad writing if people have to do that in order to understand what you're trying to say.

It is unfortunate that some of the philosophers who thought some pretty groundbreaking thoughts were such horrid writers that they just could not express them clearly. (Not talking about Rousseau here - just thinking of some of the crap I had to drudge my way through the last few years in school.)


From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged

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