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> The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. In other fields the o

> The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. In other fields the obscurity is a side effect. In the humanities it’s the point, to try to make the sky-castle ideas sound more Important and Scientific than they actually are. A big part of postmodern theory is the notion that there basically is no truth, just texts with varying degrees of authority. The field unironically describes itself.

keiferski 6y ago
> In the humanities it’s the point, No, it really isn't, and virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that.
- pbourke 6y ago
  > virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that. I “earnestly engaged” with it by doing a humanities degree 20 years ago when this stuff was taking root. The only field that seems resistant to being overwhelmed by it is history, possibly because the scholarship must be grounded in original sources.
  - philosopher1234 6y ago
    What have you read in the humanities recently?
- haberman 6y ago
  I think the classic essay "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" from 1993 is a counterexample: https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
zemo 6y ago
no that's ... really not true. Those terms all have precise meanings and express new concepts more succinctly. In programming, we call this abstraction. Yes, there are obviously people in academia that are full of crap: other people in academia -also- think they are full of crap. The problem for outsiders is that they're largely incapable of discerning between the earnest deep thinkers and the self-promoting charlatans. Charlatans are always louder, so without stopping to understand the topic at hand, you're almost certainly giving the most of your attention to those who least deserve it.
dan-robertson 6y ago
If you want to try to read something from the humanities that doesn’t use any specialised words, you could try Plato. But note that it will be very hard to understand and talk about and Plato himself was likely limited by the lack of suitable language to express his ideas. It seems pretty contemptuous to suggest that people in the fields you don’t really know about are trying to obscure some secret bad opinion so that it can become accepted. Maybe these people are actually trying to express something complex and nuanced? I think there are a lot of issues with academic writing being obscure but I don’t think these are unique to the humanities. Indeed I think you’ll probably find many people in humanities fields are better writers than those in the academic areas you may be more familiar with.

keiferski 6y ago

> In the humanities it’s the point, No, it really isn't, and virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that.

pbourke 6y ago
> virtually no one who earnestly engages with the thinkers in question would come away thinking that. I “earnestly engaged” with it by doing a humanities degree 20 years ago when this stuff was taking root. The only field that seems resistant to being overwhelmed by it is history, possibly because the scholarship must be grounded in original sources.
- philosopher1234 6y ago
  What have you read in the humanities recently?
haberman 6y ago
I think the classic essay "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" from 1993 is a counterexample: https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

zemo 6y ago

no that's ... really not true. Those terms all have precise meanings and express new concepts more succinctly. In programming, we call this abstraction. Yes, there are obviously people in academia that are full of crap: other people in academia -also- think they are full of crap. The problem for outsiders is that they're largely incapable of discerning between the earnest deep thinkers and the self-promoting charlatans. Charlatans are always louder, so without stopping to understand the topic at hand, you're almost certainly giving the most of your attention to those who least deserve it.

dan-robertson 6y ago

If you want to try to read something from the humanities that doesn’t use any specialised words, you could try Plato. But note that it will be very hard to understand and talk about and Plato himself was likely limited by the lack of suitable language to express his ideas. It seems pretty contemptuous to suggest that people in the fields you don’t really know about are trying to obscure some secret bad opinion so that it can become accepted. Maybe these people are actually trying to express something complex and nuanced? I think there are a lot of issues with academic writing being obscure but I don’t think these are unique to the humanities. Indeed I think you’ll probably find many people in humanities fields are better writers than those in the academic areas you may be more familiar with.