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Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. This

Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. This is a patently unfair test. Without a doubt, someone with infinite patience could take the time to explain all this to Chomsky-- but the fact that he lacks the inclination to actually study Continental Philosophy, and there aren't any volunteers willing to take the time to spoon-feed it to him isn't a reflection on the subject matter. As an analogy: imagine if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk.

three14 16y ago
I call strawman. It's not McCartney and Perelman, it's Chomsky and Continental Philosophy.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  The difference being? Genius in one field doesn't translate to another. And, the real strawman is Chomsky's claim that he can't understand Continental Philosophy. I guarantee that if he put in, say, 10-15 hours a week of study for, say, 2 years, he'd have a decent competence without any problem.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    He's not commenting on the lack of available tutors; he's observing that masters of e.g. topology and quantum physics are capable of rendering their fields comprehensible, because of an internal structure, consistency, truth, etc that postmodernism might lack.
    - michael_dorfman 16y ago
      Comprehensible to whom? Masters of continental philosophy have no problem rendering their fields comprehensible to, say, graduate students in the field. Some (easier) texts are comprehensible to undergrads. Any "lack of an internal structure, consistency, truth" is imagined by Chomsky. Really.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida: With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.
        michael_dorfman 16y ago
        John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice. Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable-- and then he has the balls to blame his sloppy reading on JD being obscure. But don't take my word for it: read the essays in questions. Derrida's "Signature Event Context" is a brief text, and not terribly difficult to read (if you have read Austin, as Searle has.) Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences", is a disaster. Searle somehow got it in his head that Derrida was attacking Austin (which he was not), and wrote a "defense" of Austin that misreads Derrida atrociously. (Searle has since refused to allow his piece to be anthologized, so you have to hunt it down in the original publication. I have.) Derrida rebutted with a piece called "Limited Inc a b c", which responds, patiently and at great length, to each of Searle's points. In fact, Derrida manages to quote every single sentence of Searle's piece within his own (which is not an accident, since the dispute is in large part about quotation and citationality in Austin.) The two Derrida works, along with a precis of Searle's piece, and an interview on the subject, has been published as "Limited Inc", and is a great introduction to Derrida for those coming from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Searle comes out of the debate looking foolish beyond belief, in my opinion.
        16y ago
  - jcromartie 16y ago
    The thing is, I don't think that any amount of study lets you understand lit crit. It just lets you produce it and nod in agreement at other regurgitations.
    - michael_dorfman 16y ago
      Speaking as one who actually understands it, I don't know what makes you think you are qualified to claim otherwise. I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day.
      - three14 16y ago
        That's spot on. I don't understand a lot of high-level physics or Continental Philosophy, but the same process that leads me to believe that the physicists aren't sitting around BSing all day leads me to believe that the philosophers are. (Which is to say, I read enough intro surface level articles that are supposed to give a hint of what you get into once you do begin to understand and talk to people about the same, and form an outsider's opinion. Same process, different results with the two fields.)
      - btilly 16y ago
        I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day. I'm guessing you aren't familiar with string theory then. :-P /duck
      - Retric 16y ago
        There is an easy test to see if a subject has inherent meaning or not. Just submit a randomly constructed article to the related journal and see if they publish it. PS: Guess which side won?
        michael_dorfman 16y ago
        Not the side you think. Sokal punked a minor journal that was not particularly well known in the field. His book with Bricmont, attacking "postmodernism", on the other hand, was published by a major publisher, even though large swaths of it had been thoroughly debunked.
Arun2009 16y ago
> if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk. Sure, it's possible that Chomsky hasn't taken the time to truly understand Continental Philosophy or lacks the technical training to understand it even if someone were to explain it all to him. But it's also possible that continental philosophy is just profound nonsense that thrives based on the following fallacy: 1. Profound stuff (general relativity, quantum mechanics, Poincare conjecture) is very often difficult to understand. 2. Continental philosophy is difficult to understand. 3. Hence, continental philosophy is profound stuff. Frankly, applying the "looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck" criteria, I feel it's more likely that continental philosophy doesn't qualify as a genuine area of human knowledge - it's all just nonsense. But it might serve some other important purpose (e.g., a form of harmless mental hashish that's genuinely pleasurable). At any rate, pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is always good in any field.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  As someone who has actually studies Continental Philosophy, I can tell you that it's not nonsense. Your "looks like a duck, walks like a duck" test would just as easily apply to nuclear physics or non-Euclidean geometry, if you are not already familiar with the terms of art of those fields. And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult.
  - shadowsun7 16y ago
    > And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value verboseness and unclarity above all else.
calibraxis 16y ago
Did you read Chomsky's full response at the provided link, rather than just the quoted snippet? If you have, do you disagree with his comments on Derrida's Grammatology, on Foucault's work, or his general comments on the other works he's at least tried to read? It appears he at least did some due diligence, and took the time to speak with some of the authors.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  I did read his comments back in '95, and I re-read the comments about Derrida now. (I am not particularly interested in Foucault, so I skipped his reading of him.) Chomsky claims to have found "Of Grammatology" full of "pathetic misreadings." Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to outline what these might be-- and oddly enough, neither does anybody else, to my knowledge. I know of only one publication claiming that Derrida misreads his sources in "OG", and that was in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement many years ago; several responses were published, and personally, I don't think Derrida misread Curtius as claimed. Now, although the subject matter of "Of Grammatology" is nominally linguistics, we have to remember that Derrida is not a linguist (nor pretending to be) and is interested, rather, in the philosophical implications of several arguments concerning linguistics made by Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Rousseau. And, to the best of my knowledge, Chomsky shows no interest in his published writings in the latter two, and isn't much enamored with the former. So, "Of Grammatology" is only tangentially related to Chomsky's field of interest. Which is fine, of course. But I suspect that this lead him to be more dismissive than necessary: I think he mistakes his lack of interest with Derrida's lack of a point. Derrida does make an important argument in OG, but it is largely aimed at a certain group of Structuralists, who were active in the French academy at the time it was published. In other words, Derrida's in the middle of a fight that Chomsky has nothing at all to do with, and I think his lack of skin in the game got in the way of an open-minded reading.
shadowsun7 16y ago
The fact remains that somebody can explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to Paul McCartney, if McCartney was so interested. Whereas you aren't likely to find people who're able to so explain deconstruction of something or the like in a manner that's clean and simple and easy to understand. This either suggest that a) the person doesn't understand it, fully, himself; or b) deconstruction/humanities is so difficult no human mind can fully understand it.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  I could explain deconstruction to an interested party, and I imagine I could do so in slightly less time than it would take to explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to McCartney. If the interested party is already well read in the philosophical works of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, I could probably do it in a weekend.
  - shadowsun7 16y ago
    Ooh, that would be interesting. Let's start with the first: what is the point of deconstruction? (Or as Chomsky argues - why is deconstruction necessary when the conclusions it reaches can be simply divined by ordinary laypersons, without all the verbosity and the pretentiousness of language?)
    - michael_dorfman 16y ago
      Let's not, actually. Let's start with you reading (and demonstrating to me a core competence of) the basic texts of philosophy leading up to deconstruction-- in this case, that would be Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas. When you have those six down, I'd be happy to explain deconstruction to you.
      - elblanco 16y ago
        Then you've already failed. Getting a layman's explanation of a topic should not require one to become the equivalent of an undergrad in that topic. What you should be saying is "Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is apparently founded and showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible" (courtesy wikipedia). And then the layman asks "how does this approach expose contradictions?" And you say "Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings of the text. Although deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple possible readings of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and undermining binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new)." and there we have it, good enough for the layman to realize it's a line of thinking he's probably not interested in pursuing anymore. And then...if they keep on that, you say, "this is getting a bit into the deep end for me to make it simple and explainable, if you are really interested, start by reading these books first."

three14 16y ago

I call strawman. It's not McCartney and Perelman, it's Chomsky and Continental Philosophy.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
The difference being? Genius in one field doesn't translate to another. And, the real strawman is Chomsky's claim that he can't understand Continental Philosophy. I guarantee that if he put in, say, 10-15 hours a week of study for, say, 2 years, he'd have a decent competence without any problem.
- tptacek 16y ago
  He's not commenting on the lack of available tutors; he's observing that masters of e.g. topology and quantum physics are capable of rendering their fields comprehensible, because of an internal structure, consistency, truth, etc that postmodernism might lack.
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    Comprehensible to whom? Masters of continental philosophy have no problem rendering their fields comprehensible to, say, graduate students in the field. Some (easier) texts are comprehensible to undergrads. Any "lack of an internal structure, consistency, truth" is imagined by Chomsky. Really.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida: With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.
      - michael_dorfman 16y ago
        John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice. Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable-- and then he has the balls to blame his sloppy reading on JD being obscure. But don't take my word for it: read the essays in questions. Derrida's "Signature Event Context" is a brief text, and not terribly difficult to read (if you have read Austin, as Searle has.) Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences", is a disaster. Searle somehow got it in his head that Derrida was attacking Austin (which he was not), and wrote a "defense" of Austin that misreads Derrida atrociously. (Searle has since refused to allow his piece to be anthologized, so you have to hunt it down in the original publication. I have.) Derrida rebutted with a piece called "Limited Inc a b c", which responds, patiently and at great length, to each of Searle's points. In fact, Derrida manages to quote every single sentence of Searle's piece within his own (which is not an accident, since the dispute is in large part about quotation and citationality in Austin.) The two Derrida works, along with a precis of Searle's piece, and an interview on the subject, has been published as "Limited Inc", and is a great introduction to Derrida for those coming from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Searle comes out of the debate looking foolish beyond belief, in my opinion.
        16y ago
- jcromartie 16y ago
  The thing is, I don't think that any amount of study lets you understand lit crit. It just lets you produce it and nod in agreement at other regurgitations.
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    Speaking as one who actually understands it, I don't know what makes you think you are qualified to claim otherwise. I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day.
    - three14 16y ago
      That's spot on. I don't understand a lot of high-level physics or Continental Philosophy, but the same process that leads me to believe that the physicists aren't sitting around BSing all day leads me to believe that the philosophers are. (Which is to say, I read enough intro surface level articles that are supposed to give a hint of what you get into once you do begin to understand and talk to people about the same, and form an outsider's opinion. Same process, different results with the two fields.)
    - btilly 16y ago
      I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day. I'm guessing you aren't familiar with string theory then. :-P /duck
    - Retric 16y ago
      There is an easy test to see if a subject has inherent meaning or not. Just submit a randomly constructed article to the related journal and see if they publish it. PS: Guess which side won?
      - michael_dorfman 16y ago
        Not the side you think. Sokal punked a minor journal that was not particularly well known in the field. His book with Bricmont, attacking "postmodernism", on the other hand, was published by a major publisher, even though large swaths of it had been thoroughly debunked.

Arun2009 16y ago

> if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk. Sure, it's possible that Chomsky hasn't taken the time to truly understand Continental Philosophy or lacks the technical training to understand it even if someone were to explain it all to him. But it's also possible that continental philosophy is just profound nonsense that thrives based on the following fallacy: 1. Profound stuff (general relativity, quantum mechanics, Poincare conjecture) is very often difficult to understand. 2. Continental philosophy is difficult to understand. 3. Hence, continental philosophy is profound stuff. Frankly, applying the "looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck" criteria, I feel it's more likely that continental philosophy doesn't qualify as a genuine area of human knowledge - it's all just nonsense. But it might serve some other important purpose (e.g., a form of harmless mental hashish that's genuinely pleasurable). At any rate, pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is always good in any field.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
As someone who has actually studies Continental Philosophy, I can tell you that it's not nonsense. Your "looks like a duck, walks like a duck" test would just as easily apply to nuclear physics or non-Euclidean geometry, if you are not already familiar with the terms of art of those fields. And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult.
- shadowsun7 16y ago
  > And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value verboseness and unclarity above all else.

calibraxis 16y ago

Did you read Chomsky's full response at the provided link, rather than just the quoted snippet? If you have, do you disagree with his comments on Derrida's Grammatology, on Foucault's work, or his general comments on the other works he's at least tried to read? It appears he at least did some due diligence, and took the time to speak with some of the authors.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
I did read his comments back in '95, and I re-read the comments about Derrida now. (I am not particularly interested in Foucault, so I skipped his reading of him.) Chomsky claims to have found "Of Grammatology" full of "pathetic misreadings." Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to outline what these might be-- and oddly enough, neither does anybody else, to my knowledge. I know of only one publication claiming that Derrida misreads his sources in "OG", and that was in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement many years ago; several responses were published, and personally, I don't think Derrida misread Curtius as claimed. Now, although the subject matter of "Of Grammatology" is nominally linguistics, we have to remember that Derrida is not a linguist (nor pretending to be) and is interested, rather, in the philosophical implications of several arguments concerning linguistics made by Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Rousseau. And, to the best of my knowledge, Chomsky shows no interest in his published writings in the latter two, and isn't much enamored with the former. So, "Of Grammatology" is only tangentially related to Chomsky's field of interest. Which is fine, of course. But I suspect that this lead him to be more dismissive than necessary: I think he mistakes his lack of interest with Derrida's lack of a point. Derrida does make an important argument in OG, but it is largely aimed at a certain group of Structuralists, who were active in the French academy at the time it was published. In other words, Derrida's in the middle of a fight that Chomsky has nothing at all to do with, and I think his lack of skin in the game got in the way of an open-minded reading.

shadowsun7 16y ago

The fact remains that somebody can explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to Paul McCartney, if McCartney was so interested. Whereas you aren't likely to find people who're able to so explain deconstruction of something or the like in a manner that's clean and simple and easy to understand. This either suggest that a) the person doesn't understand it, fully, himself; or b) deconstruction/humanities is so difficult no human mind can fully understand it.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
I could explain deconstruction to an interested party, and I imagine I could do so in slightly less time than it would take to explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to McCartney. If the interested party is already well read in the philosophical works of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, I could probably do it in a weekend.
- shadowsun7 16y ago
  Ooh, that would be interesting. Let's start with the first: what is the point of deconstruction? (Or as Chomsky argues - why is deconstruction necessary when the conclusions it reaches can be simply divined by ordinary laypersons, without all the verbosity and the pretentiousness of language?)
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    Let's not, actually. Let's start with you reading (and demonstrating to me a core competence of) the basic texts of philosophy leading up to deconstruction-- in this case, that would be Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas. When you have those six down, I'd be happy to explain deconstruction to you.
    - elblanco 16y ago
      Then you've already failed. Getting a layman's explanation of a topic should not require one to become the equivalent of an undergrad in that topic. What you should be saying is "Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is apparently founded and showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible" (courtesy wikipedia). And then the layman asks "how does this approach expose contradictions?" And you say "Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings of the text. Although deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple possible readings of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and undermining binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new)." and there we have it, good enough for the layman to realize it's a line of thinking he's probably not interested in pursuing anymore. And then...if they keep on that, you say, "this is getting a bit into the deep end for me to make it simple and explainable, if you are really interested, start by reading these books first."