Baroque Specialization and the Irresponsibility of Analytical Philosophers.

While I fully agree with the notion that there is a strong synergy between work aimed at colleagues in a discipline, and work that fosters a better public discussion, I am leary of blaming analytic philosophers for the popularity of Derrida. There was plenty of criticism of Derrida, and that criticism didn’t require any great depth.

I would posit something different. Academia has its own fads and politics whose forces sometimes override the purely intellectual arguments. Derrida fomented and rode such a fad. That some departments and schools succombed to that fad than others wasn’t due to the intellectual arguments then available, but in spite of them.

“I pursued paths that seemed to me to hold some promise of leading to what I was after.”

Nothing wrong with that. At some point, though, don’t events in the outside world impose on us a duty to set aside our own affairs and act for the greater good? An earlier generation was conscripted to fight Tojo and Hitler–would it have been too much to ask you to take on Butler and Derrida? :)

John Searle took on Derrida, and what did he get for his pains? A text by Derrida composed without one row of the keyboard!
Philosophy outside the analytical tradition is no more likely to be worthless than work inside it is to be worthy. In tourism through the latest modiste miasma shrouded in Gauloises smoke, we should hold our noses and open our ears. But if “analytics” (as I have heard Thomists say) are going to stay home and Speak English, Damn It, I’d steal Ronald Dworkin’s phrase: we should stick to our knitting. If the wider culture needs therapy, modest, piecemeal, meticulous work is indispensable — all the more when it is untendentious and does not engage the pressing issues of a tendentious age.

Nothing wrong with that. At some point, though, don’t events in the outside world impose on us a duty to set aside our own affairs and act for the greater good?

Sure. First, once I got out of graduate school and started teaching, it quickly became obvious to me that my job wasn’t just to pursue my own desires, but to do some sort of good for my students. I took that responsibility seriously, and I think I eventually became a pretty good teacher. But strange though it may sound, it had hardly even occured to me during my entire time in graduate school that I was preparing myself for a career in teaching. I went to graduate school because that’s where people were studying and talking about the things I loved to study and talk about. The pursuit of my own pleasure evolved into a career. I was rather carefree in those days.

Then after 9/11 I got all political, and started to feel that I had an obligation to use my brain to influence political discussion in what seemed to me a positive direction – even though I had no real expertise in political affairs. As a concrete example of what was influencing me, about three days after 9/11 an Army recruiting van pulled up and parked itself right in front of the building in which I taught. Since some of the guys in class were quite fired up and thinking of signing up, I thought that we should really discuss some of the relevant political issues in class before they made that decision. That began a major change in intellectual direction and pretty much wrecked my ability to devote my mind to the kind of philosophy I most prefer doing. I don’t really regret this, becuase the times called for it. But I can tell you that I look forward to a time when I can just go back to doing what I love, and leave the political world in the hands of others.

But I also tend to agree with russell in comment #1 that taking up arms against Derrida and Butler would have been futile. I once had a conversation with another graduate student who was studying Nietzsche and a variety of 20th century continental thinkers. At some point I thought that he had contradicted something he had said a few moments later. When I mentioned this, he said “You see … ? You see how the dialectic turns back on itself?!!” I realized that that person was simply in an intellectual place that was inaccessible to any persuasive tools I had at my disposal. No matter what difficulties I purported to uncover in his views, he would have been determined to view those difficulties as expressions of the self-negating majesty of the Dialectic, and would have gloried in them. His outlook was impervious to improvement through argument.

Dan, your final sentence is incomplete. What you meant to say was “…impervious to improvement through arguments that I find persuasive.” My guess is that he would say the same of you, in French, of course. Plato would say it in Greek. Nietzsche would say it in German. (I believe he’d have far and away the most entertaining comment, but it wouldn’t be written to satisfy the disciplinary strictures of an American philosophy department’s dissertation requirements.)

One of the problems with this whole line is the facile way in which opposing Butler and Derrida can be likened to opposing Tojo and Hitler. I would submit that anyone who can do that does not understand Butler, Derrida, Tojo, Hitler, and, most important for this particular discussion, analogy and metaphor. (One example: Judith Butler and Derrida proceed in different ways, out of different traditions, with different methods, to different ends. If the use of philosophical rigor is to make rigorous meaningful distinctions for the purpose of sustained, engaged analysis, then analytic philosophy’s engagement with deconstruction, gender studies, queer theory, post-colonialism, Foucault and Lacanian psychoanalysis can only be described as pathetic philosophy.)

When I took my BA in Philosophy and English, and decided to go to grad school in literary studies, one of the reasons that I decided to go with literature is that literary study opens itself up to the world in ways that philosophy programmatically (and at least partly out of professional self-interest and institutional turf building) closes itself off. Grad students in literary theory say deeply stupid, shallow, callow things. So do grad students in philsophy. (As the logic text used to say, “I will leave the rest of the proof as an exercise for the reader.”) So what? Just because Nietzsche is a more interesting writer than 99% of American philosophy grad students doesn’t mean that he’s right and John Searle is wrong.

Personally, I don’t think that American philosophers–as professional philosophers–have any obligation to say anything about Derrida and other continental theorists except maybe, “Those guys call it philosophy. We do something different. We don’t call what they do philosophy.” And the rest of us don’t have any obligation to take that statement as a good reason not to read Derrida, or Lacan, or Butler, engage their ideas, try to make sense out what they’re trying to do, and maybe deploy productive ideas to do what we’re trying to do.

How come no one has mentioned Richard Rorty?

Joel

If the English professors were doing plain old literary criticism it wouldn’t be a job for philosophers to point out contradictions, absurdities and non sequiturs in their work but they are not, they are trying to do philosophy.

The absurdity of analytic philosophy as philosophical act is that it operates under the illusion that one can analyze language and experience seemingly from outside of both. It may be possible for computers to describe computation, but consciousness can not describe consciousness apart from acting it. We are creatures of sense before logic, and we must try each day, without ever succeeding, to pick one apart from the other. Analytic philosophy does not teach self-awareness, claiming it is unnecessary. It is the philosophy of autism.

Derrida wanted to argue the primacy of craft and of description- as a novelist would- while maintaining the authorial certainty of the man of ideas. His works fail as philosphy because they fail as literature (and “do as I say not as I do” is no longer accepted as a valid argument) Judith Butler is a student of the moral success of his intellectual failure, but she doesn’t get the point. Still, to say that a university “should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige” either now or in the future sounds so ridiculously anti-modern that I don’t know what anyone has to complain about with either of them.

We separate science and law. We defend the rule of law over the rule of ideas [without thinking!] and then turn around and defend the rule of “truth” and science over the absurdity of “fiction”.
Derrida’s mistake was clumsiness, but what he represented in his clumsy way was a return [in the academy, and years behind the culture at large] to premodern now post-modern acceptance of the primacy of description.

The rule of law is the rule of language not of truth; and narrative is the order of the day, and will be for the forseable future.

Seth… it’s a bad joke, but “what do you mean?” Do you really assert that analytic philosophers on the whole are incapable of distinguishing first-order from second-order statements? Or that one must take into account all aspects of the former to talk sensibly about the latter? If so, how is it possible to talk at all?

For that matter, several prominent analytic (I’m using this in its broadest “20th century anglophone philosophy” sense) philosophers have taken the psychologically rich descriptions of literature very seriously: Cavell, Nussbaum, and Williams being the three most prominent.

radek —

I meant basic idea (with Condorcet as introduction), but even a fairly sophisticated presentation (such as this) isn’t beyond someone who can get through Jeffrey’s text (a standard accomplishment for a Philosophy freshman/sophomore).

This is an altogether different question from that of whether or not they (or I!) can get their heads around its full implications/restrictions. But then: much as with Arrow you’d have to deal with Sen’s limitations to Arrow, etcetera, with Godel you’d have to do with the exclusions for, e.g., arithmetic without multiplication–but in both cases, the basic result can be understood in the context of an undergraduate education in philosophy where logic is taught & meantime much nonsense ensues from lack of basic exposure.

Moreover, I would argue that both these cases (Arrow/Godel and their various complications) only point up the gist of my post: there are tremendous difficulties in saying what we mean/understanding what follows from what we say–and teaching that should be the focus of undergraduate philosophy education (as this was, to a great extent, the purpose behind Socrates’ aporetic dialogues). That was, at any rate, the way I was taught & I’d like to think I’ve made a fair hash of it (started and sold a software company; published a successful book).

John Quiggin makes a real point. Claims of the irrelevancy of analytic philosophy to things other than analytic philosophy are often seen as truisms even by analytic philosophers. But when we reflect on 20th century psychology, on battles over intelligent design, on computer science, on disputes over abortion, personhood and the nature of mind, on fundamentalism, on disputes over methodology in the social sciences, on the philosophy of law, on the history of mathematics in the 20th century, on the interpretation of quantum physics, on the debates over knowledge which are so central to modern times, on determinism and responsibility and so on and on and on and on I think a very strong case can be made that analytic philosophy is of all styles the most relevant to external intellectual and cultural concerns. And with analytic philosophies growing attachment to the sciences it’s only going to get more so. I think computer science and bio-technology especially will make it more and more relevant.

“the facile way in which opposing Butler and Derrida can be likened to opposing Tojo and Hitler.”

Dude, my point was that they were NOT the same . . .

One thing that’s funny about Judith Butler is that she’s completly capable of writing perfectly straight-forward and more or less normal prose when she wants to. I first encountered this when she wrote some article for The Nation several years ago. For some time I was sure it could not be the same person, but it was. She does this from time to time when she doesn’t see her self as addressing her specifically “academic” audience. I’m told that she’s perfectly clear and straight forward in personal disucssion, too, though I can’t say if that’s true from experience. When accussed by Martha Nussbaum of wilful obscurantism some years ago Butler appealed to Adorno, claiming that one had to use obscure language to subvert the dominant paradigm of thinking or something like that. This seems like an unlikely method to me, but who knows? As for Derrida, it’s worth recalling that it was Foucault that said that Derrida was the sort of philosopher who gave bull-shit a bad name. (This is often attributed to Searle, but Searle attributes it to Foucault in a review of a book on deconstruction.) Foucault, apparently, got along quite well with the philosophers at Berkeley in the late 70’s. So, it’s overly facile to say that analytic philsophers just blow off “continental” types. Some do, but some just find Derrida to be a bad philosopher.

Harry B: “With some very honorable exceptions, my sense was that we kept our heads down, identified ourselves in some way with the hard sciences and mathematics, and allowed those ideas to do their worst; all the time maintaining a sense of our own superiority because we weren’t fooled by that nonsense.”

Joel, those honorable exceptions would include Nussbaum, right? But I don’t think of her as a major intellectual figure, I think of her as a respected academic and a humanist (no more no less) and not an ‘analytic’ philosopher (and I no longer associate science with humanism.)

Derrida was trying to “perform” language while analyzing it.
If my lawyer ever tried to be a legal philsopher while defending my case, I’d fire him. You can’t be an actor and a theater critic at the same time. Given the faiure of modern criticism, theatrical, literary, political, philosophical etc. it’s no wonder he field has thinned out.

Literarature (as practice, as philosophical act, as description!) now trumps philosophy just as law (as practice, as philosophy)
trumps the academic philosophy of law.

Seth, if Nussbaum is not an ‘analytic’ philosopher (among other identities), then what is she? How should we understand her work on Rawls, her work on the capabilities approach? As journalism? As work in the humanities (or the social sciences??) outside philosophy?

I agree with those who see analytical philosophy as having a spectrum from the most ‘pure’ to the most ‘applied’ – and while Nussbaum does indeed write much more on ‘applied’ issues, that doesn’t mean she should no longer qualify as an analytical philosopher.
The problem with looking at scholarly work in terms of ‘pure’ versus ‘applied’ is that the ‘pure’ always wins out in terms of prestige etc., while in fact to do the applied work *well* might perhaps be much harder.

Paul Boghossian ( his Sokal Hoax paper )makes a good point about analytic philosophers being affraid to get too heavy with the bullshitification of social sciences : they are afraid to be perceived as too right wing .

The idea is that since most postmodernist aproaches are perceived as emancipatory and involve ‘criticism’ of the hegemony of the status quo and analytic philosophers are simply too intimidated and affraid to be called fascists.( think of Roger Scruton ok he goes lot futher but he is essentially hounded out of his teaching position ).

I admire the catholicity of many of these perspectives, one of the many things that make these discussions so pleasant to read.

doctor slack– the connection I was thinking of is the general desire of the progressive thought to find intellectual resourses for showing that oppresed cultures do not hold false beliefs. Post modernism supplies just such tools : relativism ( starting with Huhn and Feyerabend perhaps ), claim that there is nothing outside language and so on.

This seems also to link nicely with the old Marxist view of ideology. That is postmodernism extends the Marxist idea that morality is just rationalization of class interest to science and reason in general. Reason ( central to west’s self identity the story goes ) can now be unmasked and exposed.
The point is challange this and you are defending the hegemonic fascist forces and so on down the line.

Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty owe their fame not to their arguments ( No interesting new powerful arguments we see in Plato , Hume or Kant for example )but the fact that they give their authority to the rejection of authority. Each tells us that truth , value , objectivity are illusions .
Therefore it should be obvious that one cannot *argue* with such “philosophers” because they put their faith in kind of religious faith viz.faith in the relativity of all opinions including this one.

ja well I would say that that is why Rorty is not interesting ( it has been done before ). Observe that Rorty takes literary criticism to be a paradigm example of intellectual enterprise.

According to this uninteresting line of thought ( uninteresting because it is obviously incoherent ) there is never a right way to read a particular text ; meaning is made up by particular readers as they go along . Note that he is saying that physics or chemistry or philosophy is essentially like literary criticism .

Observe that on this view the notion of discovery makes no sense and this an obvious reductio of this thought.

Foucault, possibly the most influential philosopher ever, at least in social science

All right, without wading any deeper into this thread, I sure want to single this claim out for disagreement. The list of most-influential philosophers overall surely starts with, y’know, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hume. The list of most-influential in the social sciences (as currently demarcated) might not include Kant but would probably icnlude the other three, plus, say, Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Bentham, Hegel, Marx… Within the social sciences, as distinct from the humanities, I’d be hard-pressed to say that Foucault had been more influential than, say, Habermas…

And I say this as someone who finds a lot to learn from in Foucault.

commenter,

maybe I’m wrong, but my sense is that whatever the benefits of derrida et al for literary critics in doing their literary criticism, they have led them to endorse quite mistaken beliefs about the nature of reality and to veer into, as many commenters have said, doing “theory” or “philosophy” with mistaken views about what counts as a good argument. These filter into the student population and beyond. I believe that they have had particularly unfortunate consequences for the terms of political debate on and around university campuses too (but, of course, I am only citing one among many factors, but one which philosophers are particularly well suited to addressing). Telling people they are wrong and explaining why is not “smacking some sense” into them: these are often smart people, and it is far more disrespectful to snootily disengage. And, anyone who enters a debate with the assumption they have nothing to learn will be met with a cold reception. I’m entirely willing to believe that the analytic philosophers would have learned soemthing valuable from the experience; as I have learned a great deal from people in education whose philosophical presuppositions I believe are entirely wrong. It would be wrong to suggest, by the way, that the contempt anayltical philosophers sometimes evince for some of what goes on elsewhere is all one way; I have frequently heard the work of analytical philosophers dismissed by people elsewhere in the academy who have not taken any time to read or think about what they are dismissing.

Oh, if I were criticising literature, I’d read Grice, over and over again. And (but not over and over again) Williams. And Nagel. And Anscombe. And Davidson (is that who you meant by Davison?). And Foot.

the connection I was thinking of is the general desire of the progressive thought to find intellectual resourses for showing that oppresed cultures do not hold false beliefs.

And you would like to connect this simplified construction of a “general desire of progressive thought” both to “postmodernists” and to Marxism in virtually the same step, via the bromide of “relativism.” Well, that might be of interest if we accept your definition of “relativism” and your claims that this or that thinker subscribes to it, your characterizations of “post-modernism,” your claims about the “general desires of progressive thought,” your speculations about how this supposed “general desire” ties into Marxism and, for that matter, your apparent belief that Marxism per se remains particularly relevant in lit or cult stud theoretical circles. You’re asking for quite a few leaps, there, especially since your initial claim runs foul of the simple fact that many of “post-modernism’s” bitterest opponents were and are on the very same progressive left that you imagine to be so dedicated to the “relativist” project of “post-modernism.”

And that sort of thing is exactly why the whole polemic is beyond tiresome.

And, anyone who enters a debate with the assumption they have nothing to learn will be met with a cold reception.

No doubt. Yet experience teaches us that this has often not stopped Derrida’s avowed opponents, in particular, and polemicists contra “post-modernism” / post-structuralism / Continental philosophy more generally, from proceeding precisely as though they had nothing to learn. The idea that this or that Continental thinker might be both flawed and interesting, worth reading as long as you don’t make a religion out of them, has a way of quickly getting lost in the acrimonious assumption that one is rescuing the very pillars of Western civilization from the intellectual equivalent of the Visigoths. (Historians are arguably just as bad for this as philosophers, cf. Keith Windschuttle.) I’ve seen little in analytical philosophy’s sporadic attempts to engage with post-structuralism more generally that leads me to believe anything different would have happened, on the whole, had the analytics been more “responsible.” (And yes, the reverse is often also true; one half of the generally uninteresting “post-modernism” polemic is the often-clueless acolytes.)

polphil graduate student,

well, its some 15 or so years since I read them, but what came across very strongly was that derrida was entirely uninterested in responding to Searle’s arguments; he willfully misreads and makes fun of Searle, but in an embarrassingly discourteous way. So, unless you already buy into the view you are left thinking that he is a very clever jerk.

I witnessed him doing exactly the same to Marshall Cohen at an “event” where Cohen engaged with him (from the audience) on some of the issues Searle raised. About 300 people were packed into the room almost all of them apparently fans, and Cohen’s questions were accompanied by dark and insulting mutterings from all round the room; Derrida responded by ridiculing Cohen and showing off; but failed to provide anything that was recognisable as a reason or argument in favour of his own positions. A sort of dance. Clearly understood the questions, clearly clever enough to see their significance, but more fun to try and humiliate the interlocutor in front of one’s fans than to present arguments or reasons. Of course, if you reject the basic tenets of conversation (see Grice) this is fine. To the rest of us it seems deeply direspectful, complacent, and downright rude. That experience is one very strong piece of evidence in support of my critics like doctor slack who think it that what I recommend would have made no difference. We’ll never know now.

Start of rant.

Quine can’t really inform discussions of lyric poetry but if he think he can’t inform discussions of literary criticism your not using your imagination. The indeterminacy of translation, the inscrutability of reference and the whole program of naturalism are all relevant to criticism. The thing about analytic philosophy is that it can be made relevant to literature but there are no short cuts, you have to think, hard. Unlike a lot of ( but not all) continental philosophy ( especially the bastardised kind that’s often used by literary theorists) analytic philosophy isn’t a mail order hermuntic with a free set of politically relevant steak knives included, if you want it to be relevant to the interpretation of literature, politics and society you have to do an awful lot of conceptual legwork. Analytic philosophy isn’t irrelevant, it takes effort and in today’s academic marketplace not everyone is willing to put that in.

End of rant.

To both Harry and scrivener —

Fair enough. I like analytic philosophy. Seriously. I even spelled Davidson’s name correctly (unless I didn’t and it was corrected after the fact). Scrivener, I would actually agree with you that Quine can (and in fact has been) made applicable to lit. crit. I shouldn’t have worded my above post in the way I did. What I wanted to get at was the fact that people in literary studies didn’t turn to Derrida out of some faddish need to be cool and cutting edge, as so many seem to think, but rather because he’s saying stuff about literary language and interpretation that’s important to their field. So, yes, Quine is applicable, but, again yes, you need to apply him. But, here’s the strange thing: “indeterminacy of translation” … “inscrubality of reference” … this sounds exactly like the kind of stuff that Derrida and co. have being going on about (cf. Benjamin, de Man, etc., also check out this for more Davidson-centric stuff if you want: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804737533/qid=1145499984/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-5206444-4176636?s=books&v=glance&n=283155). Now, surely, they’re not saying the same thing, right? I mean, unless Rorty’s right, and Derrida is just a post-Wittgenstein, Quinean who’s having some fun at the expense of Hegel’s and Heidegger’s ghosts. If that’s the case, then what are we arguing about? Argumentative style? Nothing?

That’s where I get off the agreeing-with-you train though, Scrivener, because all this stuff about not having to think hard about continental philosophy and it being a pre-packaged “hermuntic” [sic] is just a bunch of tendentious crap, worded in such a way as to raise the ire of the other side without actually moving along the conversation in any way (and you know it, too).

Harry, yes, you’re right too. Derrida has led some to say batshit crazy things about reality in batshit crazy prose, but that’s easily cured with some Strunk & White and a more careful reading of what Derrida is actually saying. Anyway, I think the risks are worth the reward, and I’d be willing to argue that position further. I also think that the world would be a better place if everybody calmed down and had a conversation, as you noted. And, yes, both “sides” are guilty of this. Derrida got catty with Cohen? Fine. But, hell, I can cite examples of Searle acting dismissive toward Derrida-ites. Anyway, my original post was as much an example of this cattiness as anything else, and for that I’m sorry. Maybe you’d consider going back to Limited Inc. and having another look. I too haven’t read it in a while, but remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t Derrida at his best, although he made some good points. I did just read this though, and thought it made some good points: http://www.e-anglais.com/thesis.html#chap6

Seth:

“Woran man nicht sprechen kann, muess man schweigen.” But does that mean one can’t whistle it either?

All this opposition between Analytic philosophy and continental is old news, indeed. Newsflash: Hegel contradicts himself! But then his very notion of contradiction is based on an ultimate “identity”, a teleology of non-contradiction. (He was attempting/claiming to generate the very categories upon with the claims of any formal logic must be based, but which it can not provide of itself.) Analytic philosophy bases itself on the project of a complete determinacy, which it is ever progressing toward. (And not just Analytic philosophy, but most of the philosophical tradition, including Hegel.) But what if that is not how language, meaning and communication actually work? And if every claim is embedded in the projection/differentiation of a perspective, including scientific ones, then how is communication between perspectives to be established and conducted, if not through a questioning/digging out of their presuppositions to see what lies beneath them and what needs and interests accompany them? I fail to see why reflection on the needs and interests of human beings (and their materially and socially embedded circumstances) and their claims to “truth” need be contradictory concerns. Equally, I fail to see how a “complete” clarification of concepts and procedures would, of itself, amount to a “complete” attainment of reality. And why should such an illusion of “progress” be identified with socio-political progress, if, indeed, any such thing is at all likely? It’s not a question of abandoning or certifying reference, but rather of recognizing the complexity of reference and the differences between more or less complex referential frameworks. It seems to me that much of the brouhaha between Analytics and continentals involves a failure to assess different philosophical and explanatory purposes.

But a pre-packaged interpretative scheme is a pre-packaged interpretative scheme is a… you get the point. Anyway, seems to me you can find these schemes just about anywhere. For a while before continental philosophy even rolled around, a fair amount of literary critics spent their tenure hunting down ever elusive ambiguities and ironies in metaphysical poetry. Today the bad ones spend their time ferreting out gender/race inequalities.

My problem with your post was that you were letting analytical philosophy off easy in this respect. Certainly the use of tired interpretative paradigms applies to both sides, indeed to any academic discipline? Here, I’ll make a deal with you, for every “here’s a binary, let’s deconstruct it” argument you can dig up, I’ll trade you a “let’s imagine a twin earth exactly like our own, but water is purple.” It doesn’t seem fair to judge any discipline by its weakest links.

The descrption of the lamentable Cohen-Derrida encounter in #42 reminds me in a perverse way of a story about Gabriel Marcel’s visit to Oxford, recounted IIRC in George Pitcher’s memoir in the J.L. Austin volume edited by Isaiah Berlin. Marcel, usually tagged as a Christian existentialist, needed translation even in English, and Austin questioned him politely and patiently to clarify his views, eventually drawing out an acceptable paraphrase. As the memoirist put it (again IIRC), “many of Marcel’s darker sayings were revealed to be platitudinous,” as when Marcel had begun by saying “Freedom is the ontological counterweight to death,” but finally assented to Austin’s reformulation that although we know we are all doomed to die and that can make everything of ours seem worthless, we nevertheless invest some things with value as an act of free will. Platitudinous or not, it strikes me as worth saying (though what Marcel made of it in his original idiom I don’t know, having nver read Marcel.) If Continental philsophy could be rewritten in prose like Ryle’s or Quine’s, we would be better able to appreciate and argue with it. OTOH, if analytic philosophy relied more on prose and less on formalism and apparatus, it might gain in its own way in intelligibilty.

Alex, it’s a little over the top to assign continental philosophy to the flames like you did isn’t it? I’m no fan but even I find it hard to believe that there is not something in there. It’s hard to take the M&E seriously but the best of continental philosophy gives us conceptual tools to examine life.

polphil grad student –

please note that I am talking about Rorty and not Derrida ( ‘no right way to read the text’ view ). On the reading question yes I have read some of Derrida’s work including the Searle exchange ( plus some interviews as most people in philosophy would ). What struck me was the philosophical crudity and unoriginality of his more philosophical writings . I always thought that they had a sort of undergraduate feel about them.

Add to this his misreading of texts ( leaving bits out and adding bits in ,lifting passages out of context , misunderstanding philosophical arguments etc.)and unwillingness to take his intellocutor seriouly and you have a picture of an intellectual wichdoctor and worse because what we see is bad scholarship *concealed* by theoretical framework.

Surely this comes pretty close to Harry Frankfurt’s definition of a bullshiter : someone who is disinterested in truth ( and hence is not interested in inquiry ) ?

(What a great conversation this is!)

part of the problem may be that in both Continental and Analytic circles there are great-to-read articles, and there are more slog-through-the-details-and-jargon ones. We’re not so good at identifying the ones from the other camp that would be most helpful to read, and we’re even worse at recommending some of our own to the other camp. We need the equivalent of good review articles, or good generalist ones. I wouldn’t hand “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme” to a student without ensuring a companion discussion (because I needed that once). “What it is like to be a bat” is both evocative and accessible, but not current.

Maybe a seminar or conference, something to bring both groups to the same table, talking about common interests but different approaches.

I never, never thought I would see Derrida juxtapositioned with Strunk & White, except perhaps on my bookshelf, in purposeful humor. Commenter writes that “Derrida has led some to say batshit crazy things about reality in batshit crazy prose, but that’s easily cured with some Strunk & White and a more careful reading of what Derrida is actually saying.”

But if Derrida intends to do anything as an author, it seems to be an end-run around the kind of writing that Strunk & White prescribe. One of the common forms of dialogue about Derrida between the analytics and the continentals begins when the former ask, “what precisely is Derrida trying to say here?” It is the wide variety of answers from his defenders, including meta-answers about play vis-a-vis elucidation, that partly leads the analytics to conclude that really there isn’t much in Derrida that has to do with philosophy.

Given an essay by Quine, I can distill it into a few terse points, expand on what they mean, teach them to a class. The exercise is partly redundant, since Quine, who wrote in the spirit of Strunk & White, already did this in the essay itself, likely explaining his own ideas more clearly than can I. Of course, not fully redundant, indeterminacy and all that. Still and all, if for some reason I were forbidden from using Quine’s own work, I could teach from my own restatement of them, and the students having learned the ideas, could proceed to other academic venues where they could intelligently discuss those ideas and their origin and their implication. Quine’s essays, like Euclid’s geometry and Einstein’s physics, have content that can be lifted from their original expression, if not with perfect fidelity, still well enough.

Dare anyone here say the same for Derrida? Does anyone here think they can rewrite Derrida’s views, a la Strunk and White?

I never, never thought I would see Derrida juxtapositioned with Strunk & White, except perhaps on my bookshelf, in purposeful humor.

First of all, before you ascend the high horse of prose clarity and correctness, try to remember that the past tense of “juxtapose” is “juxtaposed,” not “juxtapositioned” — “juxtaposition” is a noun, not a verb.

Second: Perhaps this wasn’t clear but I had intended to say that Strunk & White should be used as a cure for those who would too closely emulate Derrida’s prose style. In other words, I agree with you that Derrida’s writing can be dense, allusive, difficult. Others — i.e., Seth Edenbaum — have already talked a little bit about the purpose of this style. I assume you’ve ignored them just as I assume you’ll ignore me if I more or less repeat what they’ve already said, so I won’t bother.

As far as your challenge goes: needless to say there are countless books, papers, comic books, interviews, etc., all aimed to elucidate Derrida’s thought in clear, straightforward terms. If you’re looking for a more local example, Brian Artese in comment 58 seems to have given a good summary of Derrida’s side of the Searle/Derrida debate, although I don’t think Derrida’s victory is as cut and dry as he makes it out to be. Moreover, in my last post, I gave a link to a paper that also explained Derrida’s side of the debate in straightforward, clear prose.

R.F. puts it very well, above.

I would add that, as a point in favour of lit and cultural studies, it’s quite mistaken to imagine that students of either have not necessarily been exposed to thinkers like Quine — though of course the degree to which this is true will very widely between departments.

56. whereas analytic philosophers aspire to clarity, continentals aspire to looking intellectually superior.

Meh. The accusation of merely trying to “look intellectually superior” is routinely levelled at all forms of philosophy — and academic philosophy in general — from one quarter or another. Obviously there will be cases in which it is true, but acknowledging this is a far cry from complacently dismissing a whole range of philosophers with that complaint. And you’re going to miss out on a hell of a lot if you’re only willing to wade through those texts that seem “clear” to you — Peirce, for example, is easily as difficult and dense a read as any of the “continentals” but well repays the effort.

I disagreed with Harry’s argument as formulated only because it seemed to assume that the analytical philosophers he had in mind were equipped to do what he was suggesting. It’s the common complaints that “the continentals are too hard to read” and “I have better things to do with my time” that suggest to me that isn’t the case — that, in short, the people who were supposed to “take the field” against the pernicious ideas of Derrida would be reacting more to that time they saw him be rude to someone instead of providing a competent dissection of his ideas. In the larger sense, I do think it befits philosophers to engage with ideas that are exerting significant influence in their day, even if they don’t like the ideas in question and even if it means reading stuff they wouldn’t normally read.

doctor slack– I think you misunderstand the problem we have with work of people like Derrida. It is not that his ideas like that there is nothing outside the text or the various relativist consequences follow from his views on epistemology. It is normal for philosophers to advance contraversial views about the nature of truth , meaning etc.( Berkeley for instance argues for similar position that Derrida does ). So Derrida is welcomed to do the same .

The problem is that he offers either no argument or patently bad arguments unlike philosophers like Plato , Berkeley or Kant. So it is the ‘bad scholarship ‘ problem that people fret about and not the claims the guy advances.

commenter– two ways to understand this idea ( ‘Il n’y a pas de hors texte ‘)
1) he is making a point about meaning more specifically it is a sceptical view obout the possibility of stable reference
2) point about truth viz that correspondence theory of truth is false, roughly.
Both though I take Derrida to use to argue against realism ( that there is an independent world outside our minds which can be known and which we can talk about meaningfully ). Part of the background we take for granted ( common sense presupposition which is a sort of default position ) is that words like ‘dog ‘ have clear meaning and because of this reasonably clear meaning such words can be used to talk about real items in the world in this case dogs. I take it that Derrida wants to call this into question .

Zdenek: No, actually, my problem is that I’m constantly being told that [X continental philosopher] “has no arguments” by people whose objections to them involve strawman arguments, enormous leaps in logic (from “instability of reference” to “total uselessness of reference” or “denial of an external world,” for example) and question-begging bromides (“relativism,” “nihilism” etc). This rather calls into question such people’s sweeping claims about what a terrible crude, “undergraduate” thinker [X philosopher] is supposed to be. But it’s all par for the course in the “postmodernism” polemic, as I’ve already noted.

Zdenek, I think Derrida is very much a realist, probably more of the old medieval style. As to what “nothing outside of the text” means, Derrida himself answered this in the interview at the end of Limited Inc..

as I understand it (and I have explained why), the text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference– to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible. (ibid)

This idea of “nothing outside the text” or nothing outside context is essentially this idea that form always is immanent in a world. Signs aren’t preceded by a transcendent meaning but rather signs constitute meaning and transcendence.

As others have said, one can see this sort of thing (albeit not quite the same way) in Davidson and also in the pragmatists. (I think there parallels to Peirce in some ways, for instance)

Clark — I think you’re probably right, and to Derrida it would certainly have worked its way through Heidegger if nothing else. If Derrida were to use a concept of Externalism, of course, he would have to end up mounting the term with a line through it, lest the false internal/external dichotomy escape intact…

It’s been a while, but I’m pretty sure both Quine and Davidson, two preeminent figures of analytic philosophy, were semantic holists. Well, so was Hegel – so there. Anybody trying to paint analytic philosophy as some kind of clear-cut, down-to-earth, no-funny-stuff enterprise might have missed a few important points here and there. And a little knowledge of “continental philosophy” makes the Two Dogmas seem a lot less earth-shattering.

Seth:

Wittgenstein was making something of the point that you seem to wish to convey, even in his early “positivistic” phase. To state the facts and only the facts (a la Joe Friday), to say only and precisely what one can say and no more, amounts, from a certain modernistic, if rather positivistic, point-of-view, to a form of authenticity. But that does not mean that such concerns can be said otherwise: the arts “mean” modally rather than propositionally. (Derrida would seem to want to indicate that the “propositional” claims of philosophy “suffer” a similar dependency).

The very idea of philosophy has always involved estrangement. Even Poor Richard Rorty, in some of his more blathering pronouncements, seems to want to convey such an effect. Why is this forgotten? Is such estrangement intolerably elitist or a violation of commom sense? Or is it (an exploration of) what we all have in common?

Coming very late to this stimulating discussion, I’d like to look back at russell’s #63:
But if Derrida intends to do anything as an author, it seems to be an end-run around the kind of writing that Strunk & White prescribe. One of the common forms of dialogue about Derrida between the analytics and the continentals begins when the former ask, “what precisely is Derrida trying to say here?”
Perhaps this will just be another unsatisfactory answer, but Derrida’s work is very much about the violence demanded by such a question. (The still more common example of a “simple” question the “answers” to which drive interlocutors round the bend is “What is deconstruction?”) Derrida says what he says and his utterance has whatever meaning can be gleaned from it. The demand to know “what precisely” he is “trying to say” is really a demand to know which of the meanings that might be taken from his utterance is not the meaning of that text. It is patently false that a text, even the most Strunked and Whited text, can have no more than one meaning. Unless we can distinguish the real or primary or intended or true meaning(s) from the other possibilities, however, we cannot “understand” the text so as to make use of it, so we must ignore some of the meanings a text will support and exclude others as accidental or “wrong.” But the crucial question for Derrida is: by what what authority are meanings to be ruled out of order, wrong, frivolous? Derrida’s most absurd “misreadings” of texts are all rigorously supported by the arrangement of words on the page: they are “misreadings” only because Derrida refuses to assume the legitimacy of the authority that rules them out. That is not to say that such rules do not exist, or that we can do without them, but that nothing in the text itself authorizes their use (and, of course, the text has no outside). When we must decide what a text means, we must take responsibility for our choice to disregard some of its meanings, and not pretend that either the text or some accessible truth beyond it is dictating this choice.
I am a law professor and former litigator. For me, Derrida’s work has great practical significance as an attitude toward common law adjudication–the reduction of a unique dispute into an exemplar of a more general rule so as to pronounce judgment on it. That judgment, like the choice of which meanings to exclude, is ultimately an exercise of power, not logic or law, for which the judge must take responsibility.

#74- “relativism that people like Zdenek would like to think Derrida is writing about”.
As I said above I ( and people I know in phil.) dont have a problem with the doctrines ( ralativism , nihilism , that there is no truth or value etc )themselves . It is perfectly normal in philosophy to put forward strong contraversial views ( sophists, Plato, Berkeley, Kant , Wittgenstein etc.) . So this is a red herring.
The problem with Derrida is that he offers either no argument or bad arguments for his views. And connectedly he is a sort of bad reader par excellence who has the nerve to disguise his recklessness with theory. So the problem is his sharlatanism and not his doctrines as such.

doctor slack–
you make two points : goodish one and a bad one . The bad point is to harp on the fact that my posts dont measure up to proper scholarship etc. This involves overlooking that posts of necessity will be sketches because we are involved in a conversation really and it is innapropriate ( its silly ) to apply standards designed for published work to a chat.
Your good point is that I should reply to brian .

#58– brian artese advances argument against speech act theory that he seems to think is a knock-down argument against Searle : speech act theory relies on an assumption which is implausible viz. that intentions (mental states that confer intentionality on words ) could be specified as he puts it “determined”. And of course they cannot be determined the claim goes and moreover ralying on such an assumption involves phantasy world etc.
He goes on to explain that Derrida by repudiating such problematic entities is merely repudiating unnecessary metaphysics.
Two observations about this. First it is not clear why we are supposed to accept that intentions cannot be ‘determined’ since intentions are mental entities with mental properties which can be characterised by appropriate theory.

Second even if we grant that such a characterization is not available right now it does not follow that we cannot come up with one in near future. So as it stands the scepticism about intentions that the argument is
advancing does not stand up.

In reference to an earlier post (sorry, don’t recall where): I find analytic philosophy to be very hard to read; I sit down and try to read Quine and I have many problems. However, if I sit down and read Heidegger (even his more enigmatic ‘later’ works) I find it much easier to read. Why? Because his style/approach is what I’m used to reading: I’ve been literally ‘struggling’ with Heidegger’s thought for the last 3 years, taking an immense amount of time to understand what he is trying to say, his terminology, his exact disagreements with more ‘established’ views, etc. I’ve consulted numerous of his other works, commentaries, attempted to write some things on my own (which has helped immensely). In short, I’ve invested much into my attempts to understand Heidegger and I feel I’ve gained immensely from it.

I guess my point is this: the ‘ease’ with which we can understand a text–whether analytic or continental–is at least partially proportional with which style of philosophy we deal with on a consistent basis. This, of course, extends to other diciplines: I couldn’t give a ‘good’ reading of a text on political philosophy because 1) I’m not used to reading them and 2) I find it incredibly boring (sorry, it’s just not my thing). While I’m willing to grant that some texts are easier than others (within both traditions), it mostly depends on where you spend your time. If an analytic philosopher would spend as much time on Being and Time as they would, say, on anything by Quine (as I’m assuming that such philosophers require more than one reading), then perhaps it would start to make sense.

Here’s my two cents: I am so sick of the Analytic-Continental Feud

April,

What do we say, then, for inductive arguments that are not reducible to logical constructs? Most of philosophy is done through inductive arguments where ambiguity is almost certain (or, if Derrida is right, some ambiguity is certain).

kevin winters – yes we should not forget inductive arguments but I am not sure there is much use for them in philosophy ;you must be thinking science ?

Correction: “numerous disagreements on that very matter for various arguments.”

Thinko: But admitting this would of course mean admitting

S/b

“But talking about this would of course mean admitting”

Thanks. I’d just note that Derrida explicitly appeals to Peirce’s conception of signs and says Peirce comes closest to what Derrida calls deconstruction. There may be some differences between the two over repetition in type-token relations. But that’s a more technical discussion.

I’d also add that both Peirce and Derrida were influenced by the semiotics of the early neo-Platonists. (Thus the term “trace” – the logic of which in Derrida isn’t that far removed from the logic in the major schools in the ancient world) Now obviously neither are exactly neoPlatonists (although for both there is no shortage of papers going through the parallels). And this gets at your point about them not being that original.

One certainly can see certain trends in so-called post-modernism as not really post as in after modernism but as kinds of critiques of modernist assumptions in terms of what came before (whether scholasticism, the pre-socratics, or even Aristotle) So yes, one could argue that the basic stances aren’t that original. But that isn’t really much of a criticism. That’s akin to saying we should discount Davidson because he uses Plato’s third man argument in the context of his truth semantics.

Every generation must have its proper J. S. Mill, or in other words, its public intellectual. Actually in comtemporary philosophy the place is efficently occupied by people like D. C. Dennett (and not only locally in America), but as time goes by and knowledge (of distinct sorts) is multiplied and growth exponentially as the world becomes more interconected, that means that the combinatorial explosion of information is too vast to be managed by a single person. “Standing in the shoulders of giants” is no more a motto. Each activity of human enterprise for the quest of knoweledge is done by huge teams of research people doing a fair and well division of labor. Just take a look in any scientifc journal on topics such as genomics… you will see columns of co-authors (Perhaps in philosophy by tradition this always have been left out to the powress of philospher´s own reason and reasoning faculty, but now is impossible for one single person dominate all areas). Philosophy needs to challenge many issues, but know, i don´t think that one of those is its own identity. To clarify the things and not worrie us too much about the future of philosophy, we shall to think that philosophy is science, but with other means and other pace in achieving discoveries and findings than institutionally concieve “science”. We have not to dividing conceptually nor terminologically, science on one side and philosophy on the other. All we know that science emerge from philosophy. Although now institutionally, academicaly, administratively and socially speaking science and philosophy are distinct entities. But because philosophy is the repudiated mother´s science always will be philosophers talking about sicientific topics or working hand with hand with institutionals sicentists of diverse persuasions or viceversa (just think in the contemporary agenda in philosophy of mind or allied areas and other areas of philosophy. To be serious, actually i can´t imagine any area of philosophy that in one or other form not include science in their reflections, even ancient philosophy is fed by archeology!).
But what about with specialitation or generalization in knowledge, know about just one thing fantastically or know about too many things but poorly?. The solution is, create, yes create, a public intellectual. Philosophers must create,invent or launch a person for that purpose or in marketing terms “hype” someone with the required talents ( charisma, communicative skills, with philosphical knowledge of course…) but without being necessarely a giant or a baroque specialist nor loosely generalist. Becuase a Nobel Prize in phisiology or medicine is not give to the total of a lab, staff, technicians, collaborators during years, assistants, secretaries, postgraduates doing monkey job… but only to “one person”, the lead or principal investigator, (although probably the staff, technicians, colaborators… are worthy of it); in the philosophical community the respect and appreciation by the public opinion must to rely on one single person as well, but a person free of pressures characteristic of the commnity to gain acknowledgement to make a name. The problem is that that person probably never will be like Mill or Dennett anymore, but if each very expert peer and very general inclined peer and colleagues support him and the entire philosophical community confidentially would give him in advance the progress in their respective work; he could talk about societal and cultural relevant issues with rigor and deeply. How to do it? well, that is another story.

Brian, it might be better to simply say Derrida argues against reifying meanings. The way that say Locke, Russell or Frege did. But of course he’s not alone in this. Davidson was, as I mentioned, a big proponent of this. Of course Derrida’s project is much broader than just meanings of sentences but is primarily about phenomenological meanings in Husserl.

I remain convinced that anyone reading Derrida who isn’t reasonably familiar with the positions and arguments of Husserl and Heidegger doesn’t understand Derrida.

brian #106–if explaining meaning of a passage say involves ‘iteration’ and nothing else then how do we distinguish between good and bad interpretations ? Clearly at the common sense level we rely on the notions of accuracy of interpretation all the time and any decent theory should preserve this fact . It seems to me that if you cannot make sense of notions like ‘accuracy’ , ‘discovery’ then this counts heavily against Derrida’s approach.

What is going on, more broadly is that Derrida is a reductionist and an eliminatist about meaning. Observe that this is driven by specific view about what proper scientific explanation looks like and Derrida is clealy helping himself to that ( I am going to assume argumendo that there is no problem with metaphisical naturalism that Derrida is relying on ).

But secondly if you are going to reduce meaning to ‘iteration ‘ it must make sense and I am not sure it does . There are three problems :
1) it seems that Derrida is confusing semantic issues with epistemological issues.
2) the activity of interpretting language or texts is left without intelligible notion of normativity.
3) intentionality is not explained .

#108—no, one does not need Platonism in order to defend position Searl defends. Meaning of language ( both speaker and conventional meaning )is derived intentionality which comes from intentionality of mental states .These have content that can be captured as truth conditions and this is transferred to sentences principally as ‘speaker meaning’. No “whacko metaphysics” involved here
Posted by zdenek · April 22nd, 2006 at 5:21 am

No, only a brute appeal to a concept (intentionality) which provides no explanatory value whatsoever. Sentences are about things in the world because thoughts are about things in the world – how does this tell us anything more about how this link between thought/language and the world actually works? It’s precisely this (question-begging) appeal to an external ‘signified/meaning’ which Derrida (along with many other philosophers) attempts to undermine.
Nonetheless, I’d like to take issue with the idea mentioned several times above that Derrida rejects any appeal to anything ‘outside the text/language’. I’m not sure this is true – it’s quite a contentious issue among Derrida scholars (or so I’m told) as to whether differance is simply a function of language (making Derrida some sort of linguistic idealist/relativist), or rather some sort of more general ‘metaphysical’ process. As I see it, part of the reason Derrida (and others; Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, etc) are termed ‘post-structuralists’ is that they all reject precisely the sort of total linguistic idealism (allegedly) found in earlier structuralists like Saussure in favour of an understanding of the way in which sub- and un-conscious processes affect language in both its development and its use. Of course, Derrida would reject any brute appeal to these processes as a normative authority (like the appeal to ‘intentionality’).

benjamin– two points about intentionality: first even if we grant that the concept cannot at present ( because we lack fully developed theory of mind ; but also note that Searle does have theory involving conditions of satisfaction which aims to flesh it out )be characterised more precisely it is simply false that it has no explanatory value : methodological naturalism only demands that explanans be natural phenomena that can be characterised by some testable theory. Intentionality certaily meets that requirement.
Second and connected remark I would make is that intentionality can be conceived of along the lines of theoretical entities/properties such as ‘spin’, ‘colour’ or ‘flavour’ that are ascribed to elementary particles. No problem with explanatory power here.

Finally if you want to replace intentionality with something more plausible be my guest. Of course there is no broadly acceptable ,coherent account that works . What we get is poststructuralism with seriuos problems : how do you explain normativity for instance on your account ?

zdenek writes

Meaning of language ( both speaker and conventional meaning )is derived intentionality which comes from intentionality of mental states.

Ah… so “meaning” exists as a “mental state” which is beyond iteration. Well, good luck with that. What is the actual, physical nature of this “mental state”? What is the mechanism, exactly, by which it holds in suspense this spiritual thing that gives birth to iteration, but is not iteration itself? This is fun: I feel like I’m conversing with a real alchemist or something!

Take the following scenario. Let’s say I have a computer program that randomly assembles words together in a series. Every day I walk into my favorite coffee shop and post a product of this computer program on the bulletin board. It’s usually nonsense: “cat mortage glisten,” or ” porky might friend,” etc. But let’s say that one day my computer spits out the phrase “charity never fails.” I go post that in the coffee shop; and then some new costomers come in, read that sentence posted on the bulletin board — and it fills them with hope and gladness. “Charity never fails!” How true! The phrase is clearly meaningful to these people, and it changes their lives. It strikes them as a very profound and meaningful truth.

Now: are we going to say that they’re wrong? That the phrase is actually “meaningless” simply because there was no “intention” that produced the sentence? It is clearly ridiculous to say that the exact same sentence suddenly does have meaning if we change the scenario to say that I wrote the phrase myself and then posted it on the bulletin board.

Clearly, “meaning” only exists as an effect of iteration. It is as pointless to worry about some pre-iterative “intent” when you’re studying how language works for exactly the same reason that it is pointless to worry about whether the universe was created by a God when you’re studying how nature works.

if explaining meaning of a passage say involves ‘iteration’ and nothing else then how do we distinguish between good and bad interpretations ?

Well, you do this exactly as it has been done for thousands of years: You produce more text that argues for this or that interpretation. It is a fond idea of the anti-Derrideans (who usually haven’t read any of his work) to claim that Derrida says that there is no way to adjudicate among interpretations. Of course you can adjudicate among interpretations: we tend to prefer, for good reasons, the interpretations that pay more rather than less attention to the peculiar features of the original iteration. If we’re interpreting the “to be or not to be speech,” we prefer the written interpretation that it’s a meditation about suicide over the written interpretation that it’s a screed against Tudor rule. Why? Because the objective textual features of the speech contains language that is more associatively relevant to the terms of the former interpretation than to the terms of the latter. The network of linguistic associations produced by the speech seems to have more points of contact with the network of linguistic associations produced by the text that articulates the suicide interpretation than with the text that produces the Tudor interpretation.

Now: does this mean that we will never encounter another written interpretation that will seem to have even more, and more relevant, points of contact with the original speech? Maybe, maybe not. Is the measure of a “point of contact” a purely objective one that is beyond debate? Probably not. You have to simply get used to the fact that there is no “meaning” God that could ever “fix” or “finally answer” those subtle local questions about whether this or that iteration is more “relevant” to the original text. But that doesn’t mean we can’t see the difference between that which is very relevant and that which is hardly relevant at all.

This whole thing reminds me of debates over constitutional interpretation. Scalia will argue that the constitution is dead and all you have to do to refute him is to point to the argument that he’s in the middle of. If we’re arguing about something, then the argument itself is part of the defintion of the thing.
What’s the form of mathematical argument?

That Donald Davidson could be so caught up in self-supporting abstraction that he could make the argument he did amazes me. It’s like constructing a perfect mathematical logic that can’t accomidate fractions. And this is supposed to model the world?
Is there any justification for such stupidity? Perhaps that things should be neat, rather than sloppy. He should talk to Nino.

“Baroque Specialization: Opus Dei, Scholasticism and Constitutional interpretation.” coming next month in First Things.
go read a novel.
I’m reading Elizabeth Bishop.

out

Zdenek:

I’m not terribly familiar with Derrida, nor a big fan. (I’m more familiar with Heidegger and tend toward Wittgenstein). But it seems to me that what you are failing or refusing to grasp is that Derrida is not doing what you think philosophy should be doing, namely, to provide a foundation for rational normativity by means of careful logical argument,- (leaving aside that norms are a matter of enactment or application, such that having a theory of norms might be rather beside the point),- but something altogether different, whereby he does not have any affirmative philosophical “positions”, such as you wish to ascribe to him, (although he does pretty clearly hold the negative position that a logical foundation for normativity is not possible or a fulfillable project, nor an adequate conception of rationality, its scope, and its stakes). It’s doubtful that Derrida has or seeks to provide any theory of meaning or of the meaning of meaning. It also seems that to do what he does, he must presuppose at least some minimal intelligibility of meaning and does not necessarily deny semantic meaning, only the idealization of such meaning. Whatever else “deconstruction” might be, it is clearly parasitical on the text/position it interpretes/analyses. The close scrutiny of the text in its own terms to uncover its “hidden” inconsistencies aims to bring to light the unacknowledged presuppositions and blindspots entailed in the closure of establishing or projecting a “logocentric” position. The point is decidedly not the logic and rationality are reducible to rhetoric and the “play” of words. (Derrida does not so much “play” with words, but rather with aporias, such as, e.g. idealism vs. materialism, which is why his work seems so caught up in aporetic oscillations. Wittgenstein, by contrast, sought to dissolve aporias. He actually once said,” Enough with this transcentental twaddle, when everything is really as plain as a sock in the jaw”.) The claim the Derrida repeatedly makes rather is that any philosophical position contructed through the logical deployment of concepts will “secretly” and inevitably rely on rhetorical “strategies” that fill in its gaps and constitute its interiority and self-presence, the completeness and closure that render it, as it were, persuasive to itself. And those rhetorical moves will involve, in particular, the binary opposition and hierarchical subordination of concepts. In tracing out the rhetorical moves in the text and arriving at points of “undecidability”, of an unmastered and disavowed excess of meaning in the text that contradicts its ostensible claims, the point is not to simply invert the hierarchy or undo the opposition and thereby to proclaim one’s “liberation” from “logocentric” reason. Rather the point is that it is the rhetorical “supplement” itself that renders possible (“quasi-transcendentally”) the operations and self-regulations of the philosophical text/position, that render it successful. Hence after drawing out the rhetorical implications of the text, the next step in deconstructing it is to draw out the logical implications of that rhetoric. (That is presumably what you identify as bad argument, since the implications seem perverse, especially when “measured” against the self-mastering intentions of the author, but it’s really a parodic mode of criticism, based on a radicalized conception of mimesis that goes back, I think, to Nietzsche.)

The Saussurean notion of the sign, (which I’m no fan of), and its materiality is really not all that central to what Derrida is doing rather than something that was current in his initial environment. Its main function, I think, is to bring out the specificity of the contexts in which meaning is always deployed, just as his tremendously extended notion of the “text”, which has no “outside”, is making the point that any text is not an autonomous, self-constituting “object” that disposes sovereignly over the interiority of its meaning, but rather is always already something in the world. That is, Derrida is trying to get at and highlight the “external” pressures that any thinking/writing is subject to, which inflects and infects its “meaning”. But Derrida clearly can not be an “eliminationist” with respect to “meaning”, since that would render his whole project absolutely nonsensical, not just incoherent. Rather his basic point about the iterability of signs is that there can be no final and complete meaning, since other meaning will always be possible. Far from eliminating meaning, Derrida’s point is that there will always be an uneliminable excess in meaning, which can never be gathered together into the self-present interiority and closure of a philosophical system. To the contrary, “logocentric” or foundational philosophical reason, he claims, is itself founded upon this excess, such that it will always be founded and founder on something unthinkable that “grounds” thought, (e.g. Aristotle’s god as pure actuality in thought thinking itself, the final end of the cosmos, or Kant’s pure rational will which always wills itself). Further, it will always “complete” itself through appealing dogmatically to something that (dis)appears outside of its framework and the field of vision and conception that it allows, (such as “God” or “a complete theory of mind”). Derrida is concerned not so much with the history as the historicity of philosophy, (which would also involve its differentiation/delimitation from other formal-rational discourses, which is also its relation to them), and that historicity is always something embedded in and mediated by the world, not something purely autonomous and immanent. Hence the emphasis on the iterability and difference of signs is a focus on the differentiation, redifferentiation, and transformation of meanings/categories, since obviously meanings/categories do, in fact, change historically, (in ways which can’t be captured by an appeal to a timeless logical normativity), and, still more to the point, they are what “give” us the things of the world, in the sense that they render their perceptibility, intelligibility and recognizability possible, (not least, how human beings are recognizable to each other). And, of course, if they permit us to “see” things and distinguish them from each other, just as well, they might blind us to things, to the possibilities of seeing things otherwise. The upshot is that the process by which human beings are delivered up to the world and the things of the world are delivered up to them and the changes in it, as registered in categorial meanings, does not have a center and can not be metaphysically controlled for and mastered.

But the famously proclaimed absence of any center is not really the main point that Derrida is making. Rather, though there is no ultimate center, the desire for a center is inevitable, and thus “necessary”; in other words, the centering of our thinking is a necessary illusion, which renders it possible, a transcendental illusion. Which is why logocentric reason can not simply be done away with, but, so Derrida would seem to claim, can only be deconstructed endlessly from within. Derrida here is clearly in line with the progressive critique of metaphysics initiated by Kant, which, I think, has been the main line of post-Kantian continental philosophy since. (Since the dominant British tradition of logical empiricism sees itself as non-metaphysical, its adherents see themselves as immune from such criticism. But the continentals tend to detect the traits and traces of metaphysics there nonetheless, which accounts for the heatedness of the dispute. The exemplary case here would perhaps be that of the tense relation between Wittgenstein and the surrounding Analytics, since I see Wittgenstein as very much tied to the Kantian line of descent.) Derrida, in his later years, always insisted that he fully respected the standards, canons and logical rigor of philosophical rationality and that his work was aligned with the continuation of the Enlightenment tradition, and was not some sort of irrationalistic/nihilistic abandonment of reason. I think you can see something of what he was getting at, if you see his work as concerned with the relations and tensions between inclusion and exclusion underlying the workings of rational discourses, since there can be no completely inclusive disourse, open to all, nor are the boundaries, relations and applicabilities of rational discourses set once and for all. In that light what his mode of criticism is aimed at is, not crudely the deployment of rationality as a means of oppression, but the defensive (self-)repressions of rationality in the face of its exposure to and complicity with the world. Derrida’s work seems to be very much the opposite of Habermas’ conception of communicative rationality, with its formal-procedural “discourse ethics”, heavily indebted to Analytic philosophy, and obsessed with securing the “transparency” required for rational consensus, for political reasons. But perhaps, in its very rebarbativeness to communication, it amounts to the obverse side of the same aspirations, if not quite the same project. You might not like Derrida’s work, finding it irritating, tedious, noxious, polemically over-aggressive, obscurantistic, and/or overblown, but to simply dismiss it as irrational and/or incompetent is to simultaneously miss and make his point entirely.

# 115–
Brian to try to make sense of our practice of distinguishing bad interpretations from good once *only8 in terms of contextual considerations will obviosly not do . To see this suppose I use opportunity to make a speech at the wedding to make a political statement completely on the spur of the moment and I am not particularly politically active ; completely at odds with my useal behaviour.

And most important I disguise my political statement in such a way that I do not offend the guests. I dont tell anyone about my intention to do that nor does the introduction mention what I am about to do . The context is completely wedding.

Is my attack on the war in Iraq to be interpreted as my making remarks about the groom etc. ? Why because the context supports that interpretation best ? Yes it does but on this occasion it leads astray . The point I want to make is that you cannot make this distinction without bringing in speaker’s meaning which in this case grounds the claim that the interpretation which invokes speaker’s meaning is the correct interpretation.

Ps the point is not that reiteration is irrelevant or that context is irrelevant that would be too strong . I am making a weaker claim viz. that reiteration is not sufficient condition.

John C Halasz– look if Derrida holds a view about how rationality cannot have a foundation and so on then this is a specific philosophical position. If he is a real philosopher as opposed to some sort of guru then he has to defend his position and he should do so in intelligible way.

You seem to think that all that a philosopher needs to do is to make few remarks on a topic like ‘meaning’ or ‘rationality’ and then he can just sit back .

It doesnt work like that, philosophy is not literature we do not rest content with figuring out what someone says because that is on its own irrelevant. We want to know whether some account of something like knowledge or justice is true ( i.e. can be defended; argument is a proxy for testing hypotheses ); whether our understanding of those concepts is deepened.

So thanks for your insightful exposition of Derrida’s views but I want to know why people think they are true ( I mean how well they can stand up to philosophical scrutiny ).

Jason Stanley in comments on his post at Leiter:
“…even for those philosophers who hoped for broader impact (e.g. Descartes), I would claim that the philosophical impact of their work on subsequent generations of philosophers (and the evaluation of its quality) is independent of its original reception and intent.”
Outside of the hard sciences knowledge is historicized.
Dream on z.
—

And the only dualism in question is the dualism of knowledge as rationality and awareness as sense perception (and conditioned response). Qualia are the manifestations as shadows of the conflict between two mechanisms.