12 ms·

The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (2005) [pdf]

71 points by pls2halp 9y ago

daptaq 9y ago
Why was this posted on HN? Edit: this was not meant in a pejorative way, it was a sincere question. I thought it was Off-topic.
- taspeotis 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
  - daptaq 9y ago
    Oh, my bad then, I thought posts had to be related to Technology in some sense, this just appeared to me to be one of those PM rants, all over again
    - joering2 9y ago
      When you spend some time here you will find patterns about stuff totally unrelated to technology that gets both down and upvotes. For example basically anything posted about musicians will get you downvoted... hooowever, posting anything interesting about Leonard Cohen will most likely get upvoted.
- telesilla 9y ago
  At first glance without a thorough read it appears to me to be a discourse on constructed meaning, relevant to the zeitgeist concept we might know as "truthiness". An easier read on the topic: http://theconversation.com/truthiness-and-alternative-facts-meaning-is-a-moveable-feast-71900 http://theconversation.com/truthiness-and-alternative-facts-... Pertinent text from the submitted article: “But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knockdown argument,’” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
  - pls2halp 9y ago
    I felt like the paper’s concept of a ‘Troll’s Truism’[1] would be particularly relevant to here. I also remember seeing a similarly structured paper on Scientism here. [1]“A Troll’s Truism is a mildly ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may trade on a trivial truth.”
    - Hasknewbie 9y ago
      So it's what Daniel Dennett refers to as a 'deepity' then? Source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity
  - Confusion 9y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1860/ https://xkcd.com/1860/
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Argggh. Professors! You could nitpick the absolute shit out of any non-trivial work in the humanities--even the great ones--but most people have enough sense not to. BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!
- edco 9y ago
  >Foucault is actually readable well that's just not true
- paganel 9y ago
  > BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?! He is, indeed, even though I've read him in Romanian translation and the translator seems to have done a very good job, because when I skimmed through the English translations of his works the flow of words (or whatever the English term is for that) seemed a lot more complicated and convoluted. It also helps that both Romanian and French are Romance languages, so that maybe helped. What is indeed really tough to process is anything written by Deleuze and Guattari. I've read Deleuze's "Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement" and "Cinéma II: L'image-temps" in original French and at many points while reading it I was feeling like I was riding a boat on a river, I was just going with the words/phrases without really processing what they meant, if they were really meaning anything. Though "Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?" (written by Deleuze and Guattari) is a lot more readable.
- Emma_Goldman 9y ago
  "BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!" This suggests that you have never bothered to read Foucault. He is extremely readable.
  - igravious 9y ago
    Come on Emma_Goldman. Don't do that. Why possibly alienate a potential reader of Foucault? You don't know what path jstewartmobile took to get them to this point. Though it may not be universally true – and it certainly might be unjustified – the Continentals (Derrida & co.) aren't exactly known for their lucid crystalline prose.
conatus 9y ago
As I said on this forum before hearing people talk about postmodernism as if it is the current "thing" within continental philosophy circles is really odd. It hasn't been for a decade or more. The backlash against these methodologies has been pretty severe within continental philosophy itself. For example, Meillassoux's critique of correlationism pretty much says that the whole epistemological manoeuvres, perhaps vulgarised by postmodern turn, by which it is claimed there is nothing "real" without a human correlated to it and that "reality" cannot be truly accessed, only reality as it appears to human beings, distorted by power, ideology etc etc. There is a good description here though might be pretty high level. https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract-from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/ https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-e...
- pls2halp 9y ago
  The paper is from 2005, so not exactly current philosophy(I fixed the title to reflect that). I just saw this elsewhere and thought it's exploration of "five favourite rhetorical manoeuvres: Troll’s Truisms, Motte and Bailey Doctrines, Equivocating Fulcra, the Postmodernist Fox-trot and Rankly Relativising Fields" would hold true in regards to the sophistry that dominates the site and industry, even out of it's philosophical context. The Troll's Truism in particular is seen a lot in tech.
- Wintamute 9y ago
  Whether its a thing within current academic philosophy is by-the-by though isn't it? The issue under discussion is to what extent has postmodernism entered and undermined current popular understanding of cultural issues as well as lets say less, ah, rigorous disciplines within the humanities. Perhaps the modern exponents of continental philosophy should be doing more to export their evolved criticisms of postmodernism to the rest of the academy and wider society?
- nkoren 9y ago
  I don't get the impression that its relevance is due to any particular currency within actual philosophy circles, but rather because postmodernism is the motte to which the more academic strains intersectional feminism retreat when pressed -- and that very much is a "thing" in contemporary left-wing activism and internet flame wars. On the street and in less academic varietals of intersectionalism, this just consists of "you should shut the fuck up, because you are male / white / heterosexual / cisgendered / wealthy / neurotypical / had good parents / some other form of privileged that I just thought up". In more respectable garb, this gets dressed up as "your arguments have no validity, because <insert postmodernist gloss on ad hominem dismissal here>". Which is no less toxic to having any kind of rational and inclusive dialogue, and deserves to be taken down on its own terms. (Note: this is coming from someone who is firmly left-wing and even has considerable respect for many aspects of intersectional feminism when applied in a philosophical / analytical context; I just despise what it has done to the tone of left-wing activism over the last 10 years.)
superpope99 9y ago
Found this interesting after recently listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson talks - especially the latest Joe Rogan Experience episode #1006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI
- etplayer 9y ago
  I've found that Peterson has the habit to confuse postmodernism with "neo Marxism" (itself a term reminiscent of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory) while they could not be further from each other, except as being originated from conitental philosophy. I've written about one such instance here[0] and as far as I can tell it applies to this video too. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077128
  - mnglkhn2 9y ago
    > has the habit to confuse postmodernism with "neo Marxism" (itself a term reminiscent of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory) Because that is the most prominent application of postmodernism: to push forward neo-Marxist ideology.
    - etplayer 9y ago
      That's actually not true. What is "neo Marxism"? As I understand it, it is the application of Marixist class theory to other non-class power structures. However I have seen nor have been able to find any evidence that this is an actually existing group that has grown out of Marxism. Furthermore, postmodernism denies the very structures in the materialist understanding of history which is essential to Marxism. So how are they compatible? These and other issues are discussed in my post and in the article I linked therein. There's simply no evidence for it; Peterson's confusion is his own and I hope that others do not follow him on this and instead choose to do their own research into philosophy.
      - SuoDuanDao 9y ago
        They are not compatible - Peterson's argument is not that neomarxism and postmodernism are natural bedfellows, but that people espousing postmodernist positions nearly always reveal a belief structure based in neomarxism when challenged by an intellectual equal. His evidence is presumably his own conversations with postmodernists, and his theory as to why this is seems based more in a psychological than philosophical framework.
paulajohnson 9y ago
Postmodernist thought has merely moved down the food chain. It is now to be found on the Trumpian Right, with its "alternative facts" and its belief that perception = reality. See in particular Scott Adams (yes, of Dilbert fame) and his narrative of Trump as a "master persuader". http://blog.dilbert.com/post/139541975641/the-trump-master-persuader-index-and-reading-list http://blog.dilbert.com/post/139541975641/the-trump-master-p...
Emma_Goldman 9y ago
This is embarrassing and supercilious. The alarm-bells began to ring from the point at which I realised that the author thought too much of himself to bother to actually engage with any post-modernist. It's easy to impute a series of highly contrived 'rhetorical manoeuvres' to someone if you don't do the hard work of unpacking their thought. As for the substantive first-order claims, it's hard to know where to even start. The author describes the 'troll's truism' as an equivocal statement that rides on a truism to make wild claims that it cannot in fact support. When the wild claim is pushed, the proponent retreats to the truism. The truism here is social constructivism, and the wild claim that illicitly rides on this truism is the denial of a mind-independent world. First of all, I don't know in what possible sense social constructivism is a 'truism'. It only rose to any kind of institutional prominence during the 'linguistic turns' of the 20th century. And it probably remains - in philosophy departments, certainly - a minority position. I suppose that perhaps depends on what one takes to be social constructivism; but the brevity of the author's treatment does not allow for this kind of basic detail. The statement quoted from Fish is not 'trivial' in the least. Second, the real question is the one that Wittgenstein struggled with between his early and late works: is language a device with a single veracious use for the naming of objects in the world, or is it something that is defined by its use as a protean tool of social communication among humans groups through historical time. I have never since any convincing response to Wittgenstein's defence of the latter in the Philosophical Investigations. And if that follows then, whether one has the ontological view that a mind-independent world exists, one is nevertheless committed to a form of linguistic contextualism, i.e. a given statement only has force relative to the criteria of language-use that prevails in the particular social context in which one is speaking. But the author simply collapses the ontological admission of a mind-independent world into an admission that linguistic contextualism has no epistemological purchase - which is completely not the case. I can't be bothered to sift through the rest of the paper. The treatment of Foucault is especially vacuous. P.S. I am not a post-modernist.
- specialist 9y ago
  I so wish I understood what you've written. I've tried to grok philosophy a few times. The reading makes me anxious. Just like when I try to understand poetry and complicated software. I hate knowing that I'm missing something. On the plus side, I have deep empathy for people who don't grok stuff that seems to come easily to me. Why I'm writing: I think my core mental defect is impaired short-term memory. Most people can keep 7 things (+/- 2) in their head at once. Allegedly geniuses can keep 10 (+/- 2). I suspect that my capacity is 5, or maybe 4, though I'm afraid to check. In both philosophy and complicated software, the levels of indirection, the nested subclauses, quickly leave me behind. I'm more a Gettysburg Address kinda thinker. So. If in your travels you find any kind of clue about short-term memory, or IQ in general, and ability to understand philosophy, poetry, code, please show some extra patience for people like me who are struggling to keep up. --- I'm totally on board with the abstract of that SHATVO paper. If I wasn't overly, unreasonably optimistic, I wouldn't get out of bed every day. Whatever the paper's logical failings, denial is what keeps me going.
raldu 9y ago
As long as analytical tradition keeps reducing philosophy into "logical programming," it'll always fail to appreciate the meaning and value of interesting continental ideas such as postmodernism. This paper is just a very typical example of that failure. Getting buried under `P and Q, therefore R` statements, nitpicking individual examples, missing the whole, thinking mechanically and all... For example, the author confuses Foucualt's notion of "truth" with basic "truth conditions" and refers to Tarski's "material adequacy condition" to "debunk" Foucualt's reasoning as "false theory." The author also mechanically replaces the word "truth" in Foucault's quoted writing with Foucault's so-called "definition" of truth and expects a fairly reasonable reading to come out as if English semantics was as mechanical as Lisp. Sorry, the paper has failed to pass the facepalm test while attempting to "expose" the most cited author in the whole field of Humanities as "false." This kind of mechanical, logic based reasoning ignores the poetic style, metaphors, and most importantly, the whole context of writing by focusing on the details and missing the whole. It's like teaching an AI to understand Shakespeare's poems but AI constantly finding "contradictions" that "does not compile." Foucault's philosophy is mostly "political philosophy" and has nothing to do with truth conditions. He also deliberately does not ground his arguments on definitions after definitions. Rather, it is more like an ongoing, deep, open reflection on power, truth and subjectivity in general. As to "social construction" of truth, you would be amazed at how beautifully Foucault traces back the emergence of "free market" as a "site of veridiction" for "truth" starting from 18th century and how that interacts with "power," "governance" and "subjectivity," all constructing a "regime of truth," covering multitude of implications that a "syntactic analysis of English grammar" cannot explain. I think there are more things to be found that would interest a hacker in postmodern thought yet gone missed.
- vslira 9y ago
  >He also deliberately does not ground his arguments on definitions after definitions. Isn't that intentional? Words that have no fixed meaning can't be refuted by logic.
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TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Jordan Peterson has made a few great videos on postmodernism. If anyone is interested, "Postmodernism: How and why it must be fought" [0] is fairly short and to the point. I try to apply the scientific method to my internal beliefs. I've changed my mind many times when presented with a sufficiently strong argument and evidence to back it up. I'm wrong about stuff all the time, and one of the main ways to find out and fix it is to talk about it! This is a large part of why I'm opposed to silencing people, instead of letting them talk and honestly engaging with them. Righteous indignation might make you feel good, but it probably won't convince anyone to change their views. You can change someone's mind by being polite, doing your research, and chatting with em. Daryl Davis shows us a prime example of this: How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc [1] http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convince...
- paulpauper 9y ago
  hmm Peterson's analysis of postmodernism may be reductionist. It's only a single facet of postmodernism, but postmodernism is more like a 'condition' that can affect both the 'left' and the 'right' . For example, both the left and the right question whether modernity is always an unalloyed 'good' http://greyenlightenment.com/defending-postmodernism/ http://greyenlightenment.com/defending-postmodernism/ Likewise, many on the far-right oppose ‘Whig history’, a historical narrative that posits the inevitability and desirability of liberty and enlightenment values, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. The same for Francis Fukuyama and the inevitability of liberal democracy, what he called ‘the end of history’. Peterson says postmodernists don't engage in debate but that is also false. There is footage of Foucault debating Noam Chomsky.
  - danielam 9y ago
    Petereson appears to be confused about the subject matter (e.g., I don't understand how he relates Marxism to postmodernism). Furthermore, he himself draws on postmodernist ideas. I don't think he's a good source for philosophical insight, even if we can broadly agree with him about what are the worrying trends, e.g., on campuses, in politics, etc, even if for reasons other than his. Also, agree w.r.t. the right/left distinction being meaningless where this phenomenon is concerned. For example, the whole "post-truth" condition is now very pervasive across the political spectrum. Someone who remembers their Socrates and his spat with the sophists will recall that bullshitting (understood in the Frankfurtian sense as not really caring if something is true or false as long as it brings about the desired result) to get your way is not really something new. Therefore, to make postmodernism the ultimate source of such activity is wrong. If postmodernism did anything in this regard, it was to contribute to making sophistry respectable again. It is important to note that a rejection of (at least part of) modernism does not imply an embrace of postmodernism. Much of our modern, liberal sensibilities draw on Locke and Locke himself had difficulty in reconciling liberty with knowledge.
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d--b 9y ago
Wow, looking at all the comments here, I am amazed by all the negativity around post modern theories. It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind. Post-modernism is first and foremost a realization that modernism was a failure. In modern times, people thought that we could find some universal mechanism that describes nature, and that from there we could find a logical language (or structure) that could explain the way everything works. Great. But then we realized that things were way more complex than they appeared. We found that combining a large number of simple rules quickly resulted in a mess that was nearly impossible to describe. Take for instance the double-rod pendulum or 3-body problem. Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc. Nature is not neat and tidy, and neither is the human brain or human societies. That's mostly what postmodernism is about. I don't really see what the problem is with that...
- titzer 9y ago
  > It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind. Citation needed.
- titzer 9y ago
  > Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc. People love to throw around junk like this, and it's maddening to try to argue against such vague statements. Which physicists? Have you interviewed all of them? How many material science PhDs do you know? What properties of glass are not well understood? Is it not possible to engineer structures and objects out of glass? When in fact, physicists know tons about glass. What is made of, how its crystalline structure looks, its tensile strength, shatter resistance, acoustic and thermal properties, molecular weights, melting points, optical properties. I could go on and on and on, and it'd eventually be clear that physicists know a hell of a lot more about glass than /you/ do, and then you could still make that vague statement with a derisive smile. It's just absurd argumentation to say some group doesn't /really/ understand something. What is memory, what is an atom /really/? For that matter, what is language? Art? Feeling? Love? Hackernews?
samirillian 9y ago
These straw man arguments always annoy the hell out of me. Please give me some textual evidence that postmodernists and co are anti-rationalists! How does Deleuze, the postmodernist philosopher par excellence, undermine rationality? He wrote two worshipful books on Leibniz and Spinoza, who were both rationalists. These "takedowns" always read like someone who has never attempted to grasp postmodernism either philosophically or sociologically, and someone who certainly has never attempted to grasp Leibniz! People seem to talk around the simplest postmodernist theses, usually by knowing nothing about postmodernism. In my mind, there are two: 1) Doubting the truth of all knowledge, and 2) an incredulity towards all metanarratives. Now, please, please recognize, that disbelieving the truth of knowledge is not the same as disbelieving truth! The Popperian concept of verisimilitude could easily be construed as an extremely rational form of this doubt. Is any scientific theory, strictly speaking, true? Or are they all models that approximate a reality we can never ultimately reach? If you think I'm being too kind towards the postmodernists with this interpretation, then you don't understand postmodernism. With respect to 2), incredulity towards metanarratives was not an assertion in Lyotard's essay, but an observation about the state of our society. And is this not, obvjectively, what we observe? Don't kill the messenger! Certainly not when the messenger is Lyotard, a man who was extremely politically engaged in the Algerian revolution and whose disillusionment ultimately led him to question all grand ideologies. tldr; these essays are strongman arguments that show they don't understand postmodernism or even their own terms.
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dalbasal 9y ago
TBH, I've never been able to form a coherent picture of "postmedernism," I don't really understand what either proponents or oponents mean when refering to it. That said, I think the place where postmodernism enters normal (non academic) human thought is not disimilar to funkier parts enlightenment era philosophy. Take Des Cartes famous meditations, remembered mostly for his "stage 1" of rejecting all knowledge of anything but ones existence. He then attempts (IMO fails) to rebuild a foundation of knowledge based on pure reason, without any faulty assumptions. What impact did des cartes have on normal people's thought? Almost no one is convinced by his proof of god. No one is convinced to reject all knowledge and stop there. People are still better for going through the exercise. Challenging assumptions & knowledge authorities. Aknowledging knowledge dependencies, how do I know this. Des Carte's solipsism doesn't end anywhere concrete, but it opens the door to less ambituous but much more practical epistimology like Karl Popper's. Likewise, I don't think that enlightement (and subsequent) ethics goes anywhere concrete. Utilitarianism, deontology or whatnot all lead to their own little absurd conclusions if you go down the rabbit hole. Very few people "adopt" them. But, the process does sometimes result in usable ethical frames for situations that do not involve a fat man in a cart. So that's essentially (oops, no essences!), a lot of modern philosophy in a nutshell (are nutshells structures?). Reject earlier thoughts. Attempt to rebuild with mixed success. Meanwhile, get a better understanding of the limits of knowledge. So... postmodernism... Like I said, fuzzy on what postmodern means...... But....I think it's a similar contribution. Reject existing frames. Criticize traditional systems. Try to find alternatives. Hopefully evolve in the process. I think postmodernism opens up some doors to ideas like Yuval Noah Harari's description of human history. A big part of his ideas start with recognizing "fictions," all the things which aren't really real. Things that were made up by people. Tribes, nations, corporations, named places, kingships.... He then asks what are these for? When were they invented? What role do they play.. Postmodernism probably contributed something towards this way of thinking, or the public interest in it. As to the methods used by postmodernist academics.... I've got no idea.
igravious 9y ago
It is a shame this fell off the front page so quickly. I'll tell you my problem with this paper. It's not that it doesn't seem, to a certain extent, well reasoned. That it does. My problem is that it does not correlate with what meagre bits of Foucault and Rorty I've encountered. (I've, uh, never heard of Bloor and to this day I haven't read Lyotard) I've come away from these encounters enriched. Certainly I get a sense of the respect that they have for the millennia-hulking colossus that is the history of ideas. I want to say to Shackel, yes, you may be correct but so what? Here is Rorty on Truth, 1m:41s long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY I dare anyone not to be seduced by that. Whatever could he mean? What could he be getting at? There goes five years of your life. These interrelated issues are not as simple as Shackel make them out to be. The game is not to pick out crappy definitions of Truth or Knowledge from your opponent's texts and to shred them into little pieces, douse them in gasoline, and then set fire to them. That's not the game. That game is boring. Speaking of Truth and Power, and speaking Truth to Power, here is Shackel on Wikileaks: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29/wikileaks-free-speech-discretion-bearing-witness https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29... “There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on.” I'd say we have a good idea whose side Shackel would be on if push came to shove. Does that make his philosophical arguments about t/Truth invalid? No. But if one doesn't want to rock the boat then the kind of t/Truth you're going to like is a very apolitical asocial truth thank you very much. And that's not the kind of t/Truth a lot of Continentals and Post-modernists are interested in.

71 points by pls2halp 9y ago

Why was this posted on HN? Edit: this was not meant in a pejorative way, it was a sincere question. I thought it was Off-topic.

taspeotis 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- daptaq 9y ago
  Oh, my bad then, I thought posts had to be related to Technology in some sense, this just appeared to me to be one of those PM rants, all over again
  - joering2 9y ago
    When you spend some time here you will find patterns about stuff totally unrelated to technology that gets both down and upvotes. For example basically anything posted about musicians will get you downvoted... hooowever, posting anything interesting about Leonard Cohen will most likely get upvoted.
telesilla 9y ago
At first glance without a thorough read it appears to me to be a discourse on constructed meaning, relevant to the zeitgeist concept we might know as "truthiness". An easier read on the topic: http://theconversation.com/truthiness-and-alternative-facts-meaning-is-a-moveable-feast-71900 http://theconversation.com/truthiness-and-alternative-facts-... Pertinent text from the submitted article: “But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knockdown argument,’” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
- pls2halp 9y ago
  I felt like the paper’s concept of a ‘Troll’s Truism’[1] would be particularly relevant to here. I also remember seeing a similarly structured paper on Scientism here. [1]“A Troll’s Truism is a mildly ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may trade on a trivial truth.”
  - Hasknewbie 9y ago
    So it's what Daniel Dennett refers to as a 'deepity' then? Source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Deepity
- Confusion 9y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1860/ https://xkcd.com/1860/

jstewartmobile 9y ago

Argggh. Professors! You could nitpick the absolute shit out of any non-trivial work in the humanities--even the great ones--but most people have enough sense not to. BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!

edco 9y ago
>Foucault is actually readable well that's just not true
paganel 9y ago
> BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?! He is, indeed, even though I've read him in Romanian translation and the translator seems to have done a very good job, because when I skimmed through the English translations of his works the flow of words (or whatever the English term is for that) seemed a lot more complicated and convoluted. It also helps that both Romanian and French are Romance languages, so that maybe helped. What is indeed really tough to process is anything written by Deleuze and Guattari. I've read Deleuze's "Cinéma I: L'image-mouvement" and "Cinéma II: L'image-temps" in original French and at many points while reading it I was feeling like I was riding a boat on a river, I was just going with the words/phrases without really processing what they meant, if they were really meaning anything. Though "Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?" (written by Deleuze and Guattari) is a lot more readable.
Emma_Goldman 9y ago
"BTW, Foucault is actually readable. Who knew?!" This suggests that you have never bothered to read Foucault. He is extremely readable.
- igravious 9y ago
  Come on Emma_Goldman. Don't do that. Why possibly alienate a potential reader of Foucault? You don't know what path jstewartmobile took to get them to this point. Though it may not be universally true – and it certainly might be unjustified – the Continentals (Derrida & co.) aren't exactly known for their lucid crystalline prose.

conatus 9y ago

As I said on this forum before hearing people talk about postmodernism as if it is the current "thing" within continental philosophy circles is really odd. It hasn't been for a decade or more. The backlash against these methodologies has been pretty severe within continental philosophy itself. For example, Meillassoux's critique of correlationism pretty much says that the whole epistemological manoeuvres, perhaps vulgarised by postmodern turn, by which it is claimed there is nothing "real" without a human correlated to it and that "reality" cannot be truly accessed, only reality as it appears to human beings, distorted by power, ideology etc etc. There is a good description here though might be pretty high level. https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-extract-from-the-meillassoux-dictionary/ https://euppublishingblog.com/2014/12/12/correlationism-an-e...

pls2halp 9y ago
The paper is from 2005, so not exactly current philosophy(I fixed the title to reflect that). I just saw this elsewhere and thought it's exploration of "five favourite rhetorical manoeuvres: Troll’s Truisms, Motte and Bailey Doctrines, Equivocating Fulcra, the Postmodernist Fox-trot and Rankly Relativising Fields" would hold true in regards to the sophistry that dominates the site and industry, even out of it's philosophical context. The Troll's Truism in particular is seen a lot in tech.
Wintamute 9y ago
Whether its a thing within current academic philosophy is by-the-by though isn't it? The issue under discussion is to what extent has postmodernism entered and undermined current popular understanding of cultural issues as well as lets say less, ah, rigorous disciplines within the humanities. Perhaps the modern exponents of continental philosophy should be doing more to export their evolved criticisms of postmodernism to the rest of the academy and wider society?
nkoren 9y ago
I don't get the impression that its relevance is due to any particular currency within actual philosophy circles, but rather because postmodernism is the motte to which the more academic strains intersectional feminism retreat when pressed -- and that very much is a "thing" in contemporary left-wing activism and internet flame wars. On the street and in less academic varietals of intersectionalism, this just consists of "you should shut the fuck up, because you are male / white / heterosexual / cisgendered / wealthy / neurotypical / had good parents / some other form of privileged that I just thought up". In more respectable garb, this gets dressed up as "your arguments have no validity, because <insert postmodernist gloss on ad hominem dismissal here>". Which is no less toxic to having any kind of rational and inclusive dialogue, and deserves to be taken down on its own terms. (Note: this is coming from someone who is firmly left-wing and even has considerable respect for many aspects of intersectional feminism when applied in a philosophical / analytical context; I just despise what it has done to the tone of left-wing activism over the last 10 years.)

superpope99 9y ago

Found this interesting after recently listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson talks - especially the latest Joe Rogan Experience episode #1006 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G59zsjM2UI

etplayer 9y ago
I've found that Peterson has the habit to confuse postmodernism with "neo Marxism" (itself a term reminiscent of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory) while they could not be further from each other, except as being originated from conitental philosophy. I've written about one such instance here[0] and as far as I can tell it applies to this video too. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077128
- mnglkhn2 9y ago
  > has the habit to confuse postmodernism with "neo Marxism" (itself a term reminiscent of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory) Because that is the most prominent application of postmodernism: to push forward neo-Marxist ideology.
  - etplayer 9y ago
    That's actually not true. What is "neo Marxism"? As I understand it, it is the application of Marixist class theory to other non-class power structures. However I have seen nor have been able to find any evidence that this is an actually existing group that has grown out of Marxism. Furthermore, postmodernism denies the very structures in the materialist understanding of history which is essential to Marxism. So how are they compatible? These and other issues are discussed in my post and in the article I linked therein. There's simply no evidence for it; Peterson's confusion is his own and I hope that others do not follow him on this and instead choose to do their own research into philosophy.
    - SuoDuanDao 9y ago
      They are not compatible - Peterson's argument is not that neomarxism and postmodernism are natural bedfellows, but that people espousing postmodernist positions nearly always reveal a belief structure based in neomarxism when challenged by an intellectual equal. His evidence is presumably his own conversations with postmodernists, and his theory as to why this is seems based more in a psychological than philosophical framework.

paulajohnson 9y ago

Postmodernist thought has merely moved down the food chain. It is now to be found on the Trumpian Right, with its "alternative facts" and its belief that perception = reality. See in particular Scott Adams (yes, of Dilbert fame) and his narrative of Trump as a "master persuader". http://blog.dilbert.com/post/139541975641/the-trump-master-persuader-index-and-reading-list http://blog.dilbert.com/post/139541975641/the-trump-master-p...

Emma_Goldman 9y ago

This is embarrassing and supercilious. The alarm-bells began to ring from the point at which I realised that the author thought too much of himself to bother to actually engage with any post-modernist. It's easy to impute a series of highly contrived 'rhetorical manoeuvres' to someone if you don't do the hard work of unpacking their thought. As for the substantive first-order claims, it's hard to know where to even start. The author describes the 'troll's truism' as an equivocal statement that rides on a truism to make wild claims that it cannot in fact support. When the wild claim is pushed, the proponent retreats to the truism. The truism here is social constructivism, and the wild claim that illicitly rides on this truism is the denial of a mind-independent world. First of all, I don't know in what possible sense social constructivism is a 'truism'. It only rose to any kind of institutional prominence during the 'linguistic turns' of the 20th century. And it probably remains - in philosophy departments, certainly - a minority position. I suppose that perhaps depends on what one takes to be social constructivism; but the brevity of the author's treatment does not allow for this kind of basic detail. The statement quoted from Fish is not 'trivial' in the least. Second, the real question is the one that Wittgenstein struggled with between his early and late works: is language a device with a single veracious use for the naming of objects in the world, or is it something that is defined by its use as a protean tool of social communication among humans groups through historical time. I have never since any convincing response to Wittgenstein's defence of the latter in the Philosophical Investigations. And if that follows then, whether one has the ontological view that a mind-independent world exists, one is nevertheless committed to a form of linguistic contextualism, i.e. a given statement only has force relative to the criteria of language-use that prevails in the particular social context in which one is speaking. But the author simply collapses the ontological admission of a mind-independent world into an admission that linguistic contextualism has no epistemological purchase - which is completely not the case. I can't be bothered to sift through the rest of the paper. The treatment of Foucault is especially vacuous. P.S. I am not a post-modernist.

specialist 9y ago
I so wish I understood what you've written. I've tried to grok philosophy a few times. The reading makes me anxious. Just like when I try to understand poetry and complicated software. I hate knowing that I'm missing something. On the plus side, I have deep empathy for people who don't grok stuff that seems to come easily to me. Why I'm writing: I think my core mental defect is impaired short-term memory. Most people can keep 7 things (+/- 2) in their head at once. Allegedly geniuses can keep 10 (+/- 2). I suspect that my capacity is 5, or maybe 4, though I'm afraid to check. In both philosophy and complicated software, the levels of indirection, the nested subclauses, quickly leave me behind. I'm more a Gettysburg Address kinda thinker. So. If in your travels you find any kind of clue about short-term memory, or IQ in general, and ability to understand philosophy, poetry, code, please show some extra patience for people like me who are struggling to keep up. --- I'm totally on board with the abstract of that SHATVO paper. If I wasn't overly, unreasonably optimistic, I wouldn't get out of bed every day. Whatever the paper's logical failings, denial is what keeps me going.

raldu 9y ago

As long as analytical tradition keeps reducing philosophy into "logical programming," it'll always fail to appreciate the meaning and value of interesting continental ideas such as postmodernism. This paper is just a very typical example of that failure. Getting buried under `P and Q, therefore R` statements, nitpicking individual examples, missing the whole, thinking mechanically and all... For example, the author confuses Foucualt's notion of "truth" with basic "truth conditions" and refers to Tarski's "material adequacy condition" to "debunk" Foucualt's reasoning as "false theory." The author also mechanically replaces the word "truth" in Foucault's quoted writing with Foucault's so-called "definition" of truth and expects a fairly reasonable reading to come out as if English semantics was as mechanical as Lisp. Sorry, the paper has failed to pass the facepalm test while attempting to "expose" the most cited author in the whole field of Humanities as "false." This kind of mechanical, logic based reasoning ignores the poetic style, metaphors, and most importantly, the whole context of writing by focusing on the details and missing the whole. It's like teaching an AI to understand Shakespeare's poems but AI constantly finding "contradictions" that "does not compile." Foucault's philosophy is mostly "political philosophy" and has nothing to do with truth conditions. He also deliberately does not ground his arguments on definitions after definitions. Rather, it is more like an ongoing, deep, open reflection on power, truth and subjectivity in general. As to "social construction" of truth, you would be amazed at how beautifully Foucault traces back the emergence of "free market" as a "site of veridiction" for "truth" starting from 18th century and how that interacts with "power," "governance" and "subjectivity," all constructing a "regime of truth," covering multitude of implications that a "syntactic analysis of English grammar" cannot explain. I think there are more things to be found that would interest a hacker in postmodern thought yet gone missed.

vslira 9y ago
>He also deliberately does not ground his arguments on definitions after definitions. Isn't that intentional? Words that have no fixed meaning can't be refuted by logic.
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TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

Jordan Peterson has made a few great videos on postmodernism. If anyone is interested, "Postmodernism: How and why it must be fought" [0] is fairly short and to the point. I try to apply the scientific method to my internal beliefs. I've changed my mind many times when presented with a sufficiently strong argument and evidence to back it up. I'm wrong about stuff all the time, and one of the main ways to find out and fix it is to talk about it! This is a large part of why I'm opposed to silencing people, instead of letting them talk and honestly engaging with them. Righteous indignation might make you feel good, but it probably won't convince anyone to change their views. You can change someone's mind by being polite, doing your research, and chatting with em. Daryl Davis shows us a prime example of this: How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf2nqmQIfxc [1] http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes http://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convince...

paulpauper 9y ago
hmm Peterson's analysis of postmodernism may be reductionist. It's only a single facet of postmodernism, but postmodernism is more like a 'condition' that can affect both the 'left' and the 'right' . For example, both the left and the right question whether modernity is always an unalloyed 'good' http://greyenlightenment.com/defending-postmodernism/ http://greyenlightenment.com/defending-postmodernism/ Likewise, many on the far-right oppose ‘Whig history’, a historical narrative that posits the inevitability and desirability of liberty and enlightenment values, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. The same for Francis Fukuyama and the inevitability of liberal democracy, what he called ‘the end of history’. Peterson says postmodernists don't engage in debate but that is also false. There is footage of Foucault debating Noam Chomsky.
- danielam 9y ago
  Petereson appears to be confused about the subject matter (e.g., I don't understand how he relates Marxism to postmodernism). Furthermore, he himself draws on postmodernist ideas. I don't think he's a good source for philosophical insight, even if we can broadly agree with him about what are the worrying trends, e.g., on campuses, in politics, etc, even if for reasons other than his. Also, agree w.r.t. the right/left distinction being meaningless where this phenomenon is concerned. For example, the whole "post-truth" condition is now very pervasive across the political spectrum. Someone who remembers their Socrates and his spat with the sophists will recall that bullshitting (understood in the Frankfurtian sense as not really caring if something is true or false as long as it brings about the desired result) to get your way is not really something new. Therefore, to make postmodernism the ultimate source of such activity is wrong. If postmodernism did anything in this regard, it was to contribute to making sophistry respectable again. It is important to note that a rejection of (at least part of) modernism does not imply an embrace of postmodernism. Much of our modern, liberal sensibilities draw on Locke and Locke himself had difficulty in reconciling liberty with knowledge.

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d--b 9y ago

Wow, looking at all the comments here, I am amazed by all the negativity around post modern theories. It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind. Post-modernism is first and foremost a realization that modernism was a failure. In modern times, people thought that we could find some universal mechanism that describes nature, and that from there we could find a logical language (or structure) that could explain the way everything works. Great. But then we realized that things were way more complex than they appeared. We found that combining a large number of simple rules quickly resulted in a mess that was nearly impossible to describe. Take for instance the double-rod pendulum or 3-body problem. Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc. Nature is not neat and tidy, and neither is the human brain or human societies. That's mostly what postmodernism is about. I don't really see what the problem is with that...

titzer 9y ago
> It's strange to me to see this on hacker news, especially since we as computer scientists, do understand much better than anyone else the complexity of the human mind. Citation needed.
titzer 9y ago
> Physicist admit they don't fully understand what glass is, let alone playdoh, etc. People love to throw around junk like this, and it's maddening to try to argue against such vague statements. Which physicists? Have you interviewed all of them? How many material science PhDs do you know? What properties of glass are not well understood? Is it not possible to engineer structures and objects out of glass? When in fact, physicists know tons about glass. What is made of, how its crystalline structure looks, its tensile strength, shatter resistance, acoustic and thermal properties, molecular weights, melting points, optical properties. I could go on and on and on, and it'd eventually be clear that physicists know a hell of a lot more about glass than /you/ do, and then you could still make that vague statement with a derisive smile. It's just absurd argumentation to say some group doesn't /really/ understand something. What is memory, what is an atom /really/? For that matter, what is language? Art? Feeling? Love? Hackernews?

samirillian 9y ago

These straw man arguments always annoy the hell out of me. Please give me some textual evidence that postmodernists and co are anti-rationalists! How does Deleuze, the postmodernist philosopher par excellence, undermine rationality? He wrote two worshipful books on Leibniz and Spinoza, who were both rationalists. These "takedowns" always read like someone who has never attempted to grasp postmodernism either philosophically or sociologically, and someone who certainly has never attempted to grasp Leibniz! People seem to talk around the simplest postmodernist theses, usually by knowing nothing about postmodernism. In my mind, there are two: 1) Doubting the truth of all knowledge, and 2) an incredulity towards all metanarratives. Now, please, please recognize, that disbelieving the truth of knowledge is not the same as disbelieving truth! The Popperian concept of verisimilitude could easily be construed as an extremely rational form of this doubt. Is any scientific theory, strictly speaking, true? Or are they all models that approximate a reality we can never ultimately reach? If you think I'm being too kind towards the postmodernists with this interpretation, then you don't understand postmodernism. With respect to 2), incredulity towards metanarratives was not an assertion in Lyotard's essay, but an observation about the state of our society. And is this not, obvjectively, what we observe? Don't kill the messenger! Certainly not when the messenger is Lyotard, a man who was extremely politically engaged in the Algerian revolution and whose disillusionment ultimately led him to question all grand ideologies. tldr; these essays are strongman arguments that show they don't understand postmodernism or even their own terms.

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dalbasal 9y ago

TBH, I've never been able to form a coherent picture of "postmedernism," I don't really understand what either proponents or oponents mean when refering to it. That said, I think the place where postmodernism enters normal (non academic) human thought is not disimilar to funkier parts enlightenment era philosophy. Take Des Cartes famous meditations, remembered mostly for his "stage 1" of rejecting all knowledge of anything but ones existence. He then attempts (IMO fails) to rebuild a foundation of knowledge based on pure reason, without any faulty assumptions. What impact did des cartes have on normal people's thought? Almost no one is convinced by his proof of god. No one is convinced to reject all knowledge and stop there. People are still better for going through the exercise. Challenging assumptions & knowledge authorities. Aknowledging knowledge dependencies, how do I know this. Des Carte's solipsism doesn't end anywhere concrete, but it opens the door to less ambituous but much more practical epistimology like Karl Popper's. Likewise, I don't think that enlightement (and subsequent) ethics goes anywhere concrete. Utilitarianism, deontology or whatnot all lead to their own little absurd conclusions if you go down the rabbit hole. Very few people "adopt" them. But, the process does sometimes result in usable ethical frames for situations that do not involve a fat man in a cart. So that's essentially (oops, no essences!), a lot of modern philosophy in a nutshell (are nutshells structures?). Reject earlier thoughts. Attempt to rebuild with mixed success. Meanwhile, get a better understanding of the limits of knowledge. So... postmodernism... Like I said, fuzzy on what postmodern means...... But....I think it's a similar contribution. Reject existing frames. Criticize traditional systems. Try to find alternatives. Hopefully evolve in the process. I think postmodernism opens up some doors to ideas like Yuval Noah Harari's description of human history. A big part of his ideas start with recognizing "fictions," all the things which aren't really real. Things that were made up by people. Tribes, nations, corporations, named places, kingships.... He then asks what are these for? When were they invented? What role do they play.. Postmodernism probably contributed something towards this way of thinking, or the public interest in it. As to the methods used by postmodernist academics.... I've got no idea.

igravious 9y ago

It is a shame this fell off the front page so quickly. I'll tell you my problem with this paper. It's not that it doesn't seem, to a certain extent, well reasoned. That it does. My problem is that it does not correlate with what meagre bits of Foucault and Rorty I've encountered. (I've, uh, never heard of Bloor and to this day I haven't read Lyotard) I've come away from these encounters enriched. Certainly I get a sense of the respect that they have for the millennia-hulking colossus that is the history of ideas. I want to say to Shackel, yes, you may be correct but so what? Here is Rorty on Truth, 1m:41s long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY I dare anyone not to be seduced by that. Whatever could he mean? What could he be getting at? There goes five years of your life. These interrelated issues are not as simple as Shackel make them out to be. The game is not to pick out crappy definitions of Truth or Knowledge from your opponent's texts and to shred them into little pieces, douse them in gasoline, and then set fire to them. That's not the game. That game is boring. Speaking of Truth and Power, and speaking Truth to Power, here is Shackel on Wikileaks: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29/wikileaks-free-speech-discretion-bearing-witness https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/29... “There is no precedence between them and in this case how they balance is heavily influenced by questions over who is our neighbour and how close they are. Whose side are you on? How much discretion do you owe? How much indiscretion must we tolerate? The answers to these questions matter a lot and are hard to agree on.” I'd say we have a good idea whose side Shackel would be on if push came to shove. Does that make his philosophical arguments about t/Truth invalid? No. But if one doesn't want to rock the boat then the kind of t/Truth you're going to like is a very apolitical asocial truth thank you very much. And that's not the kind of t/Truth a lot of Continentals and Post-modernists are interested in.