I don’t mind who writes the laws of the future, if I can write and sing the theme tune

I’m confused, probably merely because of my own ignorance. It sounds to me like you’re not a relativist, in so far as you are happy to say some interpretations are better than others. I guess I don’t understand how you’re using the word. And while “recognising that the choice of “mood music” is at least as important as the physical facts of what happened” sounds like wisdom to me, many of the things I encountered under the auspices of postmodernism (and I’m referring to a dimly remembered Eng. Lit and Philosophy degree in the distant past) didn’t seem to be doing anything as sophisticated as that, and just seemed to be denying that some interpretations are better than others. I guess I was either a bad student, had bad teachers or just didn’t encounter the right postmodern thinkers.

But who was naughty and who was nice? (Don’t change the subject on me, Daniel. And don’t just whistle the same subject to a different tune!)

More seriously:

“the whole point about postmodernism is not that all interpretations are as good as any others, it’s about recognising that the choice of “mood music” is at least as important as the physical facts of what happened, and that this relative importance, paradoxically[2] is an objective fact.”

This may be a point you are inclined to make, which causes you to see postmodernists as fellow travelers of a sort, but this is – I think this is important – not the point OF postmodernism, in any of its more familiar/canonic doctrinal/textual formulations.

I’m confused, probably merely because of my own ignorance. It sounds to me like you’re not a relativist, in so far as you are happy to say some interpretations are better than others. I guess I don’t understand how you’re using the word.

I’ve literally never met anyone who claimed that all interpretations are equally good (what would that even mean, one is tempted to ask). I have met people who claimed (this is true for me over certain classes of judgments but not others) that the betterness involved is perspectival and doesn’t have an uncontestable “objective” basis. You’re probably a relativist about ice cream flavors, but that doesn’t prevent you from preferring one flavor to another and acting on that preference.

Since we are on the none-too-thrilling subject of relativism, may I point out that, whatever the Butterflies and Wheels website might think, relativism does not mean now, and never has meant, that ‘anything goes’,that ‘we’ can’t judge Nazi Germany, that the views of Holocaust Deniers are of as much value as those of Braudel, or anything similar.

What relativism means (and hey, the clue really is in the word itself) is that things are true or not true or whatever relative to something else (be it a cultural framework, our basic psychology, or something else). Which is a very different argument. (I might also add that there is a big difference between cultural relativism, epistemological relativism, moral relativism and so forth, and that unless you are defining what ‘flavour’ of relativism you are talking about the discussion tends to go round in circles).

You’re going to have to define “more meaningful,” there. “Subjectively important enough that I’m willing to force the preference on others” is basically what metaethical nonrealists believe about ethical judgments. “More useful in this situation” is what pragmatists believe about judgments in general. “There is an objectively true ‘interpretation'” is the unambiguous “non-relativist” answer, of course. What’s missing are people who hold that “all interpretations are equally good” over much of any class at all. There are classes over which some people say “all interpretations are equally valid,” but that’s not really the same thing. The best interpretation is almost always a valid one, but not all valid interpretations are equally good (for particular judgers’ “goods”) in all respects.

did this post have any unifying theme, other than to troll as many different segments of the ct readership as possible?

I note that “fuck off” is a rough English translation of Piero Sraffa’s vulgar chin-sweep gesture

I believe the normal rendering is “Jimmy Hill”.

On Globus – could not agree more with the insights offered. They’re 100 per cent right (on) about all those European battles, except Bannockburn of course. That was quite a different matter.

So postmodernism is the belief in non-physical facts? That would make Thomas Nagel, Plato, and others postmodernists.

#21 since “Everything that Daniel claims will blow the minds of dogmatic, linguistically-confused Analytic philosophers” is a null set, this is trivially true. And the “sneer condescending”, while certainly a popular way of objecting to the Chinese Room argument, isn’t actually a valid argument. Picture me stroking my chin suggestively right now …

To press the point the Brichians don’t have their facts straighter than their saner interlocutors- they’re simply wrong when they allege that JFK was treasonous. Your typical left winger is also not fully correct in their relevant views for the reasons you outline, but they get the facts straighter than a Brichian, in one important sense at least, because they get the conclusion of the argument right (“JFK was not treasonous”) and the premises wrong while the Brichians get the premises right(ish) and the conclusion wrong- and for most purposes, including developing good politics, getting the conclusion right is usually more important than getting the premises right. The point you’ve made is fair enough- but the mere fact that the essence of something can sometimes be understood reasonably well by someone who knows few of the facts, and very poorly by someone who knows many of the facts, isn’t going to break any well thought out theories of truth. Anti Relativist positions need not be tone death.

Your metaphilosophical position on the value of a certain kind of philosophy, backed up by vague appeal to Wittgenstein and a haughty sneer about Russell’s paradox (1) seems rather odd given that Wittgenstein would almost certainly clash with your philosophical views as much as just about anyone else’s. If I were to engage in some sort of blanket dismissal of the bulk of contemporary sociology or literary criticism essentially without argument I’d be rightly scoffed at for it, so the onus is on you to give a more concrete argument before pontificating on contemporary philosophy.

(1) And if I am a little sharp here consider that you are effectively dismissing my life’s work so far and the life’s work of my colleagues.

(Sorry, I lost sight of my original intention in commenting, which was to applaud the awesome “Shining” trailer.)

‘This is not to endorse B & W, who are knobs.’

Which is, I think we can all agree, an objective fact.

Could we calm down on the B&W bashing please guys?

22&23: Yes, you didn’t explicitly say that these things would blow the minds of dogmatic, linguistically-confused analytic philosophers—you implied it. And yes, you were not talking about all analytic philosophers—specifically those who have been wasting taxpayer money over the last 50 years. Well, the points that you make are all mainstream, though not uncontroversial views among contemporary, taxpayer money-wasting analytic philosophers.

Sneering condescendingly at Searle, though not the best way of arguing with him, does seem to be better than sneering condescendingly at an entire field that I don’t understand. Please tell me to fuck off if you ever hear me going off about Derrida. FWIW, I added that link to show that I like the stuff you write when you’re not going on about analytic philosophy.

Original poster: “Furthermore, when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 (in circumstances which made it look very much as if the responsibility lay with the Cuban government, and thereby with the Soviets), Lyndon Johnson’s immediate priority was to ensure that a train of events was not set in place which might end in his losing control of the country’s slide into nuclear war; in a telephone conversation recruiting members to the Warren Commission, he actually said ” this is a question that has a good many more ramifications than on the surface and we’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and chuck us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour”. ”

People whose background is in politics (as well as members of the general public who have no relevant expertise at all) tend to think the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy.

People whose background is in criminal justice (e.g. Vincent Bugliosi, John Douglas) tend to think that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy and that he acted out of the same banal motivations as other Presidential assassins.

I’m inclined to agree with the people who are experts in the relevant field.

Daniel @8: Karl Popper … had the right idea with that poker

How about Samuel Johnson, kicking a rock to refute Berkeley?

Darius: “whereby “postmodernism” simply turns out to have meant all along “common sense, only a bit cooler” (I’m looking at you, Daniel)”

Yes, exactly.

And a bit cooler in the “it’s uncool to care too much about anything” sense. For example:

“To take a topical example, it’s very clear that a lot more than twelve million people are under threat from a 2 degrees centigrade increase in global temperature, and that such an increase in temperature, if it occurs, will largely be as a result of policy choices taken by Western policymakers in full knowledge of the effects they will have. I don’t hear the same music playing behind these more or less uncontroversial statements that Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping[4] does, but one has to realise that Miles’ Law is applicable here (“where you stand, depends on where you sit”). ”

What? Twelve million people are under threat as a result of policy choices — and disagreement about this is breezily characterized as “where you stand, depends on where you sit”?

That’s postmodernism, right there. Sure, we can all agree on the facts, but they no longer mean anything really, because they are only interpretable through worldviews which are not right or wrong in the same way as facts. Or Daniel will assert that sure, some of them are “right”, but not really right. Whatever that means.

“If we don’t act on global warming, millions of people will die” is a fact.

“We should prevent millions of people dying” isn’t a fact. That doesn’t mean you should waste any time in pursuing it.

Most important things are subjective.

“Common sense, only a bit cooler,” seems to apply, Matthias. Converting the fact that millions will die into a prescription for action does involve the non-fact “we should prevent millions of people from dying.” It’s just that it used to be more or less accepted that people who didn’t think we should prevent millions from dying were evil or crazy. Now it’s considered cooler to point out that these evil and crazy people have a coherent worldview in which the death of millions is, for them, the right outcome — wow, man. That’s deep. And it would be totally uncool to just say that those people were wrong, as if you were setting yourself up as the sole judge of objective truth or something.

That might be almost as uncool as engaging people as if they meant what they wrote. Man, only noobs fall for that.

In what sense is “we should prevent millions of people from dying” not a fact?
“Slavery is a serious wrong in normal circumstances” states a fact. Nothing subjective about it.

“people who believe that important philosophical conclusions can be drawn from trivial linguistic puzzles [are among the people Wittgenstein should have told to fuck off]”

Ahem. Daniel, are you suggesting that Russell’s paradox is a “trivial linguistic puzzle”? If so, you may have floated a little too far outside your enviably large intellectual comfort zone here. Important philosophical conclusions can certainly be drawn from the paradox. (Frege’s response to the paradox: “arithmetic totters.”) Wittgenstein never lost his interest in the foundations of mathematics and, although he probably did tell Russell (effectively) to fuck off more than once, he certainly realised that the paradox was one of the greatest cataclysms in the philosophy of logic and mathematics ever.

“Slavery is a serious wrong in normal circumstances” states a fact.

Does it? It states something that I think no civilised contemporary individual would disagree with, and I think it states something that’s true. But is something a fact because it’s true?

But I d0n’t think it is, because there are different sorts of truths.

Well, in that case, there are different sort of facts.

Bloix is simply registering his/her intention to use either “fact,” or “true,” or both, in a new and interesting way.

Well, in that case, there are different sort of facts.

Um, isn’t this blindingly obvious?

It must be true it’s on Youtube

then i withdraw the objection.

Should anyone be interested, I have two related posts at Ratio Juris sharing the insights of a handful of contemporary philosophers (ones I’m inclined to agree with), among others (e.g., Jain philosophers), on questions of truth and objectivity (hence relativism as well), as well as facts and values. Please see, first, “A Jaina Propaedeutic for Metaphysical Relativism, Perspectival Rationalism and Contextual Pluralism:” http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/09/jaina-propaedeutic-for-metaphysical.html
And then, “Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity:” http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/09/facts-values-truth-objectivity_22.html
The latter post has a nice list of “references and further reading.”

I’m finding 25 hilarious (though probably unintentionally so). Yes, actual human beings are required to believe every logical consequence of their not-fully-worked out argument. Once you entertain a thought, you active the Modus Ponens Engine of Doom, which leads you to your inevitable and grim fate.

ejh: “unproven fact” is not a contradiction.

djw: Uh, yeah. The point is: that’s why there being different sorts of truths (as ejh claims) doesn’t show impugn the (obvious) claim that

p is a fact if and only if p is true.

Furthermore, if, as ejh claims

Sunderland won the FA Cup in 1973 and Ian Porterfield scored the winning goal

are facts, then both are true; and it’s hard to imagine how ejh could deny this latter claim.

OK, I’m stopping now, before d2 accuses me of retailing trivial linguistic puzzles.

@walt. I don’t think many of us expect humans to “believe every logical consequence of their not-fully-worked out argument”. All most of us expect is that, in return for letting them work through their argument, they not roll their eyes at us while they do so. And there was some fairly high-amplitude rolling going on as far back as the late ’70s.

It’s not supposed to explain anything Novakant. It’s about meanings.

Intellectually serious complex Modernism: Perspectives are important.
Pop/Cheap Modernism (not excluding political figures and academics): Perspectives are illusion. And if they were important once, they aren’t now because we’ve progressed beyond them.
Intellectually serious post-modernism: Yes, perspectives are in fact important.
Pop/Cheap Post-Modernism: “It’s all cool”
But Cheap Postmodernism didn’t last very long.

“It is important that women and minorities are represented in government and the courts because in our society at this point in time both offer a substantively different perspective from white men on policy and judicial decision-making.”
Our society is not a universal truth, but its all we know. That understanding can safely be called “post-modern”

_he could have saved himself a whole book and saved the taxpayer a small percentage of the last fifty years of higher education funding for philosophy departments._

As British academia today faces a round of further and deeper funding cuts, including likely redundancies and closures in philosophy departments, a set of cuts ultimately caused by the fuck-ups of people who work in the City of London (and their US confreres), I’d just like to say

Thanks comrade. Great timing. Happy Christmas.

[This announcement was brought to you by Bitter and Resentful Ad Hominem Services.]

“Slavery is a serious wrong in normal circumstances” states a fact. Nothing subjective about it.

… and in the red corner, from Stagira in Chalcidice, Aristotles, son of Nicomachus. Seconds out, round one…

#75 G.A. Cohen’s distinction between facts and (true) principles relies on a sense of “fact” restricted to merely contingent truths. I think he has some discussion (book in office) of the linguistic issues. Anyway, the sense in which, for Cohen, principles of justice are not fact-dependent, involves taking “fact” in this restricted sense.

to be honest, I would bet large amounts of money that I’ve seen more friends of mine sacked over the last two years for other people’s mistakes than you have (the actual mistakes having been made for the largest part in the cities of Newcastle, Edinburgh and Bradford), so I’ve become rather inured to both the experience and people making insensitive comments about it. Nevertheless, sorry for that one if it was ill-timed and a merry Christmas to you and yours.

Seriously? We needed postmodernism to inform us that perspective and context matter?

Thank God they came in time to save us!

Michael Harris: Quite so; and that’s all postmodernism qua relativism can amount to if it’s not to be vulnerable to the “extremely stupid arguments aiming to demonstrate that relativism is self-refuting” of Plato and others.

Engels: Like Bloix and ejh, you seem intent on using the word “fact” in new and exciting ways. Thanks, but I’ll stick to the established usage, whereby it’s equivalent to “true proposition.”

and what you mean by “matter”

ejh: “unproven fact” is not a contradiction.

Of course not. But all facts must, I’d have thought, be provable, which is something different. You can hold truths to be self-evident: facts, not so.

I don’t think I’m “using the word ‘fact’ in new and exciting ways”: I think I’m using it rigorously. It’s that sort of word, is it not?

‘We needed postmodernism to inform us that perspective and context matter?’

And what you mean by “postmodernism”.

Fact is something of a dogmatic concept.

Chris B: I don’t think it’s dogmatic to insist that it’s a fact that 2+2=4; “contingent fact” is not a pleonasm. To restrict the term to contingent truths (as Hume arguably did) is to make it a quasi-technical term; ie to use it in new and exciting ways.

ejh: Why insist that all facts must be provable? According to Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem (which dsquared no doubt considers a trivial linguistic puzzle), any formal theory strong enough to express arithmetic will include a true proposition (ie one expressing a fact, pace Chris B) which is not provable in the theory. More prosaically, there is a fact of the matter (leaving aside issues of vagueness) about how many blades of grass there were exactly one year ago on my front lawn, but this fact is not only not now provable, it’s presumably not even knowable.

Chris Y: Why so pessimistic about our prospects for establishing the wrongness of slavery (and so optimistic about our ability to persuade people of the true cosmology, come to that)? Is it really just an article of faith for you, no more rationally compelling than religious belief? We could, eg, make Aristotle our slave for a day and then say “How would you like it if that was the whole of your life?” We recognise that as a broadly legitimate mode of argument, and in other contexts so did Aristotle. We couldn’t convict him of contradiction, but then a paranoid schizophrenic could give very consistent-looking grounds for believing that the earth is the centre of the universe (the scientists are all in on the conspiracy etc).

Ok, so what you’re calling ‘the established meaning’ is the one you like best. Glad we’ve got the straight.

Engels: I think it’s the person who denies that it’s a fact that 2+2=4 who is allowing their conception of the established meaning to be moulded by what they like best.

engels @ #97

but it’s not only Darius, upthread Harry wants to conflate the fact/value distinction as well

I myself will bow out by quoting Quine’s “Two Dogmas”:

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

Happy Xmas!

Tim Silverman: But I do think that, and yet I have got involved in very, very many metaphysical debates. So you’re wrong!

Novakant: you are confused. It is true (ie a fact) that I don’t really believe in the so-called “fact/value” distinction, but I don’t conflate it by insisting that “fact” is equivalent to “true proposition.” On the contrary, only on such a conception of facts can the distinction make any sense for those who believe in it.

2 + 2 could be also 10 or 11.

so dj, why eschew the option that bertram and i have outlined? i.e., say that “fact” is not univocal; certain speech communities have used it in augmented, semi-technical ways; some of these ways have become sufficiently common to count as distinct senses.

you could even say, if you wanted, that the core and central sense of “fact” is just “fact iff true”. but why deny that various other usages have become sufficiently well-established so as to count as other senses? (esp. since doing so would not give anyone else any argumentative leverage; no conclusions follow from the label, cf. my #95)

Disucussions about relativism always put me in mind of Larry Laudan’s amusing little dialogue Science and Relativism. I’ve always especially enjoyed the the book title ascribed to the relativist figure, Quincy Rortabender: Skepticism about Everything Except the Social Sciences: A Post-Modernist Guide.

Darius, your insistence that your preferred sense, in which “fact” is equivalent to “true proposition” is the established use and that Hume’s use is a deviant “technical” sense ought to be settleable by reference to a dictionary. Here’s sense 4a from the OED:

bq. Something that has really occurred or is actually the case; something certainly known to be of this character; hence, a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony, as opposed to what is merely inferred, or to a conjecture or fiction; a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based upon it.

Which does, I think, tend to support the Humean view on the basis of ordinary usage.

You could appeal to 6c:

bq. the fact (of the matter): the truth with regard to the subject under discussion.

But generally, the OED isn’t on your side.

Nope, that’s like saying ‘Snow could also be blanche‘.

Nevertheless, I believe it raises a reasonable doubt about the notorious “2+2=4” dogma.

I think dsquared just made the ultimate dsquared post.

Concerning the heirs/circle of Gardner and Hofstadter and global warming, apparently James Randi just made some comments expressing doubt over anthropogenic global warming and then backpedaled when somebody educated him. I suspect it’s a manifestation of a more general phenomenon. It’s annoyed me for some time how deeply the organized skeptic movement is entangled with AGW contrarianism, and, generally, anti-environmentalism to the point of reflexive mistrust of some good science that proper skeptics really ought to be paying attention to, and improper credulity toward industry astroturfers. Penn and Teller are major offenders.

It’s not universal; lots of prominent skeptics like Michael Shermer and Phil Plait stress that the evidence for AGW is good. But even they often evolved that view from an initially contrarian or confused position, probably because of what was in the air subculturally. To their credit, they eventually paid attention to evidence, but they could have had better priors, so to speak.

I’d say that this is just overreaction to various bits of New Age environmentalist antiscience, but I doubt it’s just that; I suspect there is tribal/ideological stuff going on. The movement has a lot of libertarians in it, who tend to be quite vocal about their libertarianism, and American-style libertarianism has never been terribly sympathetic to environmentalist causes or the proposed remedies thereto.

Matt – I think that the trouble with the skeptic movement these days is that it’s full of people who like science but are scared of maths (that is my explanation for why Roger Penrose, who is a fantastic science writer, is such a marginal figure for them compared to Dawkins). In general, lots of the philosophers that I’m talking about above really ought to have been mathematicians (as in, they’ve clearly got enough intelligence to do it and it would clearly have been a more productive and satisfying thing for them to do) and I’m very interested in trying to work out the reasons why so many of them didn’t go that way.

Penrose, LOL.

#106

As I have pointed out earlier, I think that playing hermetic games with words like “fact” and “true” does not elucidate the matter one bit and is irrelevant to the fact/value distinction, which is an insufficient but still worthwhile attempt to describe the material difference between the realms of human action (free and conscious) and nature (deterministic and soulless). In #87 you are clearly conflating the two, which you are of course your free to do, but then you also need to bite the bullet and dismiss anything that remotely resembles moral philosophy as misguided and useless.

I’d be curious to know if anyone has read Road to Reality all the way through. Not just anyone here, but anyone?

I think that the trouble with the skeptic movement these days is that it’s full of people who like science but are scared of maths (that is my explanation for why Roger Penrose, who is a fantastic science writer, is such a marginal figure for them compared to Dawkins).

Substitute W. W. Sawyer or Ian Stewart for Penrose and I would agree with this, but The Road to Reality is unreadable AFAIAC and I’ve done plenty of maths.

Horses for courses I guess – I loved it. But also Penrose is unpopular I think because of “The Emperor’s New Mind” – I forgot that for various reasons to do with Hofstadter and Dennett, being a skeptic in the 1990s seemed to mean that you had to be a total believer in some sort of Turing-machine theory of the mind, which for equally historic and contingent reasons was given the name “Strong AI”.

Steve LaBonne@112
It’s the next shelf over from Failure of Nerve? I’ve Never Heard of Such a Thing.

JoB, when I suggested that Wittgenstein ought to have adopted that method of argumentation on one particular point, I wasn’t suggesting it as a general method for everyone.

Q. We needed postmodernism to inform us that perspective and context matter?

A. That depends on what you mean by “we” / “matter” / “postmodernism”

Well, I guess these are examples of perspective and context.

(But don’t ask me what I mean by postmodernism — it was dsquared who started in on “the whole point about postmodernism”. I’ve no idea which works or writers he meant, and what they added to matters of “perspective” and “context” over and above everyone prior to them, from the Greeks on.)

I think that I’ve heard this conversation before – after taking a few ounces of mushrooms.

So it was Wittgenstein on the grassy knoll?

“As to the formal Platonic refutation of relativism, Gadamer pointed out that it fails, simply because the assertion of a Platonic absolute truth and its denial don’t take place on the same level and are not symmetrical in their burdens of proof.”

As someone who thinks the Platonic argument is sound (if a bit dusty), I’ll bite. What’s the Gadamerian argument against the argument against relativism, john?

Well, I think I sort of got the point (it’s only gestural, in your formulation). What I was really asking after were the reasons, such as they may be, for accepting the point, such as it may be, as true or valid. But I’ll give old google a try.

Is “slavery is wrong” an incontrovertible and invariant absolute or unconditional moral truth or is such a claim symptomatic of a lack of historical reflection, as well as, perhaps unreflectively appealing to an unspecified account of human agency, “freedom”, and its limits, as determinative of moral worth?

Well that puts Wilberforce firmly in his place…

_let me say that I am talking about matters of degree in adhering to those laws_

Hmm. Does the law of non-contradiction admit of degrees of adherence?

Well that puts Wilberforce firmly in his place…

Is it a mere coincidence that Wilberforce lived at the time of the industrial revolution in the UK?

Is it a mere coincidence that Wilberforce lived at the time of the industrial revolution in the UK?

Yes, I would say that it is, if you’re alluding to some sort of economic-determinist argument here. Such an argument would rely on the myth that the slave trade was no longer highly profitable. That is not the case. Read e.g. David Brion Davis’s piece in the current NYRB (can’t link because it’s behind a subscription wall.)

Is it a mere coincidence that Wilberforce lived at the time of the industrial revolution in the UK?

Probably not, but let me ask you a similar question. Is it a mere coincidence that ‘post-modernism’, ethical relativism and rejection of the possibility of progress, rational social criticism and knowledge of world around us all became wildly popular among lower-middle-class people in the late-imperial period of American capitalism?

“Hmm. Does the law of non-contradiction admit of degrees of adherence?”
Can the law of non-contradiction be applied to human society, and
can it be applied to any human society that we could consider just?

A modernist would say yes/ a post-modernist would say no.
An 18th century Philosoph would say yes/ a 16th century Humanist would say no.

And there’s a difference between relativism in an absolute sense and relativism as an acceptance of what we can know of the world. Relativism of some sort is a necessity for a democracy, otherwise if you want to follow Plato fully take the politics too.
The dream of a perfect grammar in politics becomes a defense of authoritarianism. That’s the post-modern and the pre-enlightenment (still secular humanist) critique of modernism and of the enlightenment and the age of revolution.

And Engels in a different context your words could have been written by a someone at Volokh arguing with Jack Balkin, or Brian Leiter mocking Bruce Ackerman. Your argument is fundamentally conservative in that to follow it results in conservative [read: anti-democratic] policy.

References follow:

Thus the Renaissance conception of humanitas had a two- fold aspect from the outset. The new interest in the human being was based both -on a revival of the classical antithesis between humanitas and barbartias, or feritas, and on a survival of the mediaeval antithesis between humanitas and divinitas. When Marsilio Ficino defines man as a “rational soul participating in the intellect of God, but operating in a body,” he defines him as the one being that is both autonomous and finite. And Pico’s famous ‘speech’ ‘On the Dignity of Man’ is anything but a document of paganism. Pico says that God placed man in the center of the universe so that he might be conscious of where he stands, and therefore free to decide ‘where to turn.’ He does not say that man is the center of the universe, not even in the sense commonly attributed to the classical phrase, “man the measure of all things.”
It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.
…The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition.

Irwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” in Meaning in the Visual Arts

“Humanism- Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.”

Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

Two definitions of Humanism. I prefer the first, but then I’m not a Modernist.

@141:

So what exactly is wrong with mere “gestures”, such that they should be excluded from rational consideration? Perhaps you should read the collected works of one Diogenes of Sinope, who was a real character, though I don’t think he appeared as one in any of the Platonic dialogues. Nonetheless, Plato purportedly called him mad somewhere. (Personally, I find Plato, with is obsession with the passions as “little despots”, more than passingly weird).

But we’re back at “the disunity of reason” again. There is no set of absolute premises underpinning a logically self-inclosed space or circle of reasons, by which all concepts and thereby (sic) the being of the world itself can be conjured. (And yes, it must end up as a circle, for reasons of systematic completeness, as Hegel recognized, though the image of the perfect circle is already a motif in Plato). The belief in such a thing is precisely metaphysics. But reasons are actually of disparate sorts and a “good” argument is one that judiciously combines such disparate reasons, Oh, dear! We’re knee deep in the mud. But the muddy ground on which we’re standing is called “practical reason”.

But then “philosophy” would not be a matter of elaborating logical techniques to calculate perfect arguments and achieve knockdown conclusions once and for all. Rather it would be an art of apposite questioning, which doesn’t arrive at “final” conclusions, but rather recognizes there is always more to be said, (or, following Levinas, unsaid).

There are various forms of “relativism”, some of which are simply unexceptional, such as differences between cultural mores, such as, e.g. burial practices. Granted, there are brutal and reprehensible practices in tribal or traditional societies. But brutal and reprehensible things also occur in “advanced” societies, without necessarily being reparable or readily resolved. And rescue fantasies involving the U.S. Marines are little likely to be of much avail. But why exactly should we consider philosophical reason capable of solving such problems or immunizing us from them? On the other hand, there are forms of relativism that are just non-starters, such as the subjectivist variety, which Wittgenstein put paid to with his critical dissolution of solipsistic skepticism in PI. It may be in some “deep” or undecidable metaphysical sense that each of us occupies a unique perspective to which somehow all our truth claims attach incommunicably and incomensurably, but once we’re talking about the matter and sorting our differences, we’re already irretrievably past that point, so what’s the worry?

All truth or validity claims are raised in particular contexts and conditions by similarly conditioned beings, but equally all such claims involve some degree and elements of conceptual generalization, which extends beyond particular contexts and lays claim to something “unconditional”, if perhaps impossibly so. The general worry about “relativism” is that it would impugn such validity, but it’s often not clear why that should be so, unless final and absolute conclusions amidst differences are sought. If there is a general formula to confute relativistic claims, it’s not the formalistic objection that a claim to relativism must at least be claiming that it itself is true and hence acknowledge at least one unconditional truth. Rather the way to go about confuting or defusing a relativistic argument is to point out that it is actually adhering to some absolutistic standard, which it shares with its absolutist antagonist, and by removing that absolute standard and, in effect, relativizing and “radicalizing” the relativistic claim, the relativistic quandary goes away. For example, historicist relativism was all the rage in fin de siecle Germany. But such historicism was based on claiming an absolute extra-historical theoretical standpoint, by which all historical knowledge could be gathered together and the variance of standards of validity between different historical societies/eras could by observed. But it failed to note that historicism was itself a product of history, such that the recognition of variance in historical norms and standards of validity, (based on temporal finitude), doesn’t impugn currently reigning norms and standards of validity, which historicism itself was implicitly drawing upon. And historicism is focusing on precisely the wrong problem with history. An idiosyncratic version of such a radicalizing move is a key to Benjamin’s critique of historicism and a more normalized form of it occurs in Gadamer’s notion of “effective history”. Such a substantive approach toward countering worrying relativistic claims works much better than the mere formalistic objection, as it actually gets into the weeds of what is at issue and the stakes involved. But then simply asking different sorts of questions about the “same” matter from the perspective of a different project of inquiry doesn’t constitute relativism, as when, say, one inquires into the power relations or interests involved in the generation of scientific knowledge, rather than into its basis of validity and modes of confirmation.

Much animus against “relativism” currently occurs in the name of the “authority” of modern natural science. But it was precisely modern natural science that stripped natural causal processes of any moral or human meaning or purpose, resulting in an “Enlightened”/disenchanted view of the world. Which precisely gave rise to all sorts of possibilities and worries about “relativism”. But denouncing and shouting down “relativism” hardly serves to vindicate that “authority” or resolve the issues involved. What is required instead is an account of the sorts of rational obligations involved in adhering to scientifically informed beliefs, which is not a simple matter and requires patient deliberation, but also, I think, an appreciation of the limits of scientific claims and their validity. Grounding the claims of scientific rationality on a decisionistic basis, such as occurs in complicated and ambivalent fashion in Weber or more simplisticly with Popper, leads to the worry that a too narrow conception of rationality and the issues involved is decided for, generating its own forms of irrationality, both with and against.

Novakant 124: You’re still confused.

I don’t admit to conflating facts and values — I just don’t believe in the distinction!

It’s not me who has to “dismiss anything that remotely resembles moral philosophy as misguided and useless” — it’s the people (such as yourself?) who don’t think that “value-judgements” can be true or false.

Does the law of non-contradiction admit of degrees of adherence?

Well, in an introduction to philosophy 101 sense: no.

But I strongly suspect that professors of logic, mathematicians and other experts on these matters don’t spend all their time harping on about what a wonderful law this is and how everybody should always adhere to it. Rather, I’m pretty sure they’re probably busy working on all sorts of variations and extrapolations that would at least partially clash with our common sense view of it.

And anyway, as soon as we leave the confines of formal logic and are trying to apply those laws to our discourse about the wider world, we do have to deal with the fact that the latter cannot be restricted by such laws in a narrow sense, if it is supposed to have some actual substance. Reading Hegel, Quine or whathaveyou, an essay, a poem or a novel, or simply trying to make sense of our own conflicted selves and relationships, this becomes clear quite quickly.

Reading the Gadamer, a bit quickly, I’m only semi-agreeable. At first he says that the Platonic argument is perfectly valid, but that it isn’t very interesting. Which I would tend to agree with. (If someone is REALLY willing to stand on that bright red X, you can drop a big Plato bust on his or her head, but …) But then he says that the deeper point is that “the formal refutability of a proposition does not exclude its being truth”, as evidence of which he cites Plato’s Seventh Letter. But to me this sort of posture looks like precisely the thing Gadamer is disdaining: a perfectly useless, uninsightful thought-for-every-occasion. ‘Even if you have shown I am wrong, perhaps there is a mystical sense in which I am right.’ Yes, fine. But is that really ALL that interesting? (I don’t think this is what Plato’s 7th Letter says, but if you cite that letter as support for this sort of claim, this is what you are claiming.)

The thing we can probably agree on, so maybe we can really agree to agree all around, is that people shouldn’t be SO dumb about their relativism that they get their heads taken off by a bust of Plato. (But it does happen.) The challenge is to formulate forms of relativism that don’t get your head taken off. What is the insight or thought that, when it misses a step, turns out self-defeating and wrong? What is the right formulation of that felt, intuited insight into something Plato would prefer to minimize? To get clear about this, you really need to have respect for the dumb old Plato argument, and I don’t think it’s healthy to cultivate – as Gadamer seems to me to be doing here – a sense that one is somehow mystically immune. Getting refuted by Plato’s anti-relativism argument is something that happens to other people. I don’t think that’s a very healthy attitude.

Scanning around more generally in this section of the book, Gadamer is presupposing a lot of stuff by page 341 – as well he should be. That whole historical consciousness has the structure of experience business. But that makes the things he says he here distinctly un-portable into, say, stray comment boxes. This sort of philosophical Big Gun can really only be properly brought to bear if someone is assaulting Fortress Gadamer (or some place quite close by). It can’t be scooted around the field to meet local deployments of the good ol’ Platonic argument, which – by contrast – is very portable and handy whenever you really need it. Which is to say: once in a while, when someone has said something really self-defeating.

novakant, that is also a challenge. Perhaps I should not have used ‘the’. I should have said, instead, ‘the challenge for aspiring relativists is to formulate forms of relativism that don’t get you in serious conceptual trouble.’ Likewise, of course, the challenge for aspiring non-relativists is to formulate forms of non-relativism that don’t get you in serious conceptual trouble. And I wish everyone all around good luck with that! After all, it’s Christmas!

Oh, and Io Sol Invictus to all.

“Seriously? We needed postmodernism to inform us that perspective and context matter?

Thank God they came in time to save us!”

Come on, Michael, this is precisely the sort of know-nothing attitude that makes opponents of postmodernism look like dicks.

Most reasonable people [I’ve no idea if you are one] would agree that, for example, there are attitudes embedded in literature that are not always obvious to the casual reader, attitudes regarding, for example, class, race and gender. Likewise they would agree, if pressed, that there is something deeply dishonest about claiming that literature shows “human universals” when the authors and intended readers of a work had in fact a very different worldview from us.

Postmodernism, at its best, simply highlights these points — it tries to make explicit both attitudes in the text that were not obvious to the author and intended readers, because they were simply part of the water in which those individuals swam; and it tries to make explicit the same attitudes, NOT in the text, which are brought to it by current readers. This may seem like a sensible and reasonable proposition, but it is in fact the case that, yes, we needed postmodernism to inform us of these issues — or, less drastically, it is the case that viewing literature through these lenses was not commonplace until postmodernism. To take an example, read your Victorian critics — they certainly do not view the world in this way, in terms of what social context is implicit in a text and in its reader.

Now people can, and have, gone beyond this into the political realm — you can, if you wish, elide from discussing the portrayal of women in Moby Dick to a rant on how little women are valued in contemporary American society. But this secondary activity, regardless of what you feel about it and about its politic, has no relevance to the value of the first activity.
Personally, for example, I find Stanley Fish to sometimes come across as a douchebag when discussing contemporary issues, almost autistic in his blindness; but that doesn’t change the fact that I have found him absolutely fascinating when discussing literature, pointing out so many ways in which there is a context to a piece of writing of which I was largely unaware.

This point sort of relates to Hidari’s claim, upthread, that relativists are usually just contextualists. I think it’s important to realize is that ‘relativists are usually just contextualists’ is typically an objection to relativism, not a defense. That is, if you really just want to make the garden variety point, it’s not such a good idea to overstate it, for thilling emphasis, in completely incoherent and confused fashion (see, for example, the collected writings of Stanley Fish – to stick with the example Maynard gives.)

“But if this is true, then postmodernism, at its best, merely reiterates almost commonsensical (hardly even theoretical) historicist (‘you’ve got to understand the context!’) attitudes.”

You and I would consider this to be a common sense attitude. But there are plenty who do not think this. And, while I am nothing close to an expert in this area, my limited exposure to the way “people” (ie the establishment) viewed literature in the 19th and even the early 20th century was that this was not the way they operated. You might get some background discussion of the mores of the time in which the work was written; but you’d certainly not get an analysis of the assumptions that the reader was bringing to bear on the work.

Heck, outside the academy this attitude is rare even today. Hollywood will make a movie about Rome in which our heroine acts in some very feminist manner, and few will criticize this as an unhelpful way to understand what Rome was really like.
It is interesting to see the widespread blog discussions of _Avatar_ viewed as _Dances with Smurfs_, viewed through the lens of 100 years of anti-colonialism, but this, as a relatively mainstream phenomenon, strikes me as something new, not the way the movie would have been discussed 20 years ago.

So I think there was something new, in that this way of viewing literature, obvious as it may be to us, became commonplace starting, what, fifty or so years ago. I think to imagine that people always viewed the past “in context” is to radically retrodict our attitudes into the past — precisely to miss the whole point of the exercise. Similarly historians may have believed, for a long time, that they were looking “objectively” and “dispassionately” at the past, but it seems to me that it’s only in the last seventy years or so that there’ve been really serious attempts to compare how different societies and different groups have viewed the same events, and to try to pin down more seriously the ways in which the onlooker interprets matters; attempts before then seem somewhat cursory and slipshod, of the “of course I’m not being biased, I talked to all the guys who went to school with me and considered all their different opinions” variety.

@171 I don’t think he even went as far as that.

I was never able to get very far into the book, but it seemed to me he simply asserted “physics has proved there are phenomena that [cannot be computed] by a Turing machine” and concluded, “therefore we don’t have to believe the brain/mind is mechanistic,” therefore AI is pointless. This seems to be correct–Penrose, unlike some other AI critics, actually thought a true thinking machine was possible in principle–as the argument would seem pointless otherwise. He didn’t have any reason we should believe there were little non-Turing-computable particles in the human brain that made us thinkers.
\

#173–
that’s a joke, right? i mean, it has already become clear that the main defense of pomo is now, “well, it didn’t say any of that controversial stuff, really.” but this is taking lowering the bar to new lows.

now it is sufficient for something to be pomo, that it mixes hi and lo culture? that is the innovation which only derrida, deman, foucault, and their gang could bring to us?

just one thread over, we’ve been discussing henry iv, parts 1&2. doll tearsheet? bardolph and peto? they are mixed right into the same play with kings and archbishops. it scandalized voltaire, of course, and racine would never do it. but dickens did it all the time, and it has been english at least since chaucer followed the knight’s tale with the miller’s.

you’re just going to have to work harder to show us something which is characteristic of pomo, genuinely innovative, and not a load of bollocks.

177–

sadly enough, i think something roughly like that is true about the market for fresh phd’s in the mla.

it’s not so much that “the only way to get them to understand” old stuff is to dress it in impenetrable jargon. it’s rather that the arbiters of disciplinary fashion want fresh, bold, revolutionary ideas, or the simulacra thereof. if you say something dull in a way that is easy to understand, you won’t get the job or the book-contract.

anyhow, that’s how it used to be. but now that bérubé is the new sheriff in town, it’s all gonna change.

oh, enough to recognize a bait and switch when someone attempts it.

now your stance is that you are still defending pomo, only it’s a very big umbrella. and you’re only going to defend the parts that are common to the whole history of english literature prior to the rise of pomo, while abandoning three of the central names who were associated with its most distinctive claims.

your umbrella has torn in half. you’re all wet.

Come on, Michael, this is precisely the sort of know-nothing attitude that makes opponents of postmodernism look like dicks.

Heh.

I’m Christmassing with the out-laws (in John Quiggin’s fair city, as chance would have it) so don’t have access to my own computer or bookshelves, so this is a bit seat-of-the-pants.

Please note that my own starting point here is Daniel’s “the whole point of postmodernism” claim, which sounds (arguably) stunningly trivial. Imagine if Daniel had posted “the whole pont of heterodox school of economics X was to demomonstrate that markets are rarely perfectly competitive”. It would be fair enough to draw one of two conclusions:
(i) we didn’t really need a whole new heterodox school of thought to demonstrate that, or
(ii) Daniel is vastly under-selling the more significant contributions of school of thought X.

Comparing options (i) or (ii), individuals’ mileage may vary.

I note that very few significant thinkers associated with post-structuralism (say) are being name-dropped in the many comments above. We’ve got John Holbo taking us all the way back to Plato, and then, with various figures chronologically in between, we’ve got a somewhat separate discussion on Turing, Penrose and AI. I don’t see Foucault or Derrida as the centre of these discussions, and if I did, I’d be interested in the literature critically evaluating their contributions (including but not confined to John Ellis on Derrida/deconstruction and Merquior on Foucault, for example — whether or not these critics are the kinds of taxpayer-draining analytical philosophers Daniel was sneering at might be revealed).

All that said, I don’t think postmodernism can take credit for what you claim it can, Maynard. I think the 1960s can. The rise of civil rights and feminism in the US and elsewhere, and liberation struggles in many countries, changed the whole landscape. As an example, feminist criticism was making its impact felt during the rise of the second wave (especially 1970s-80s) before postmodernism became the default analytical frame in many Women’s Studies programs.

OK, restaurants are being booked and movies arranged. But remember, you cannot take seriously anything I might have just said.

novakant: “The playful juxtaposition of low and high culture is merely one aspect of it”

This seems to me just a basic conceptual mistake in mapping the terrain, novakant. Playful juxtaposition of low and high culture is neither here nor there with regard to postmodernism, at least insofar as this is considered a philosophical position. Philosophical non-postmodernists – for example, myself – may playfully juxtapose low and high culture without therefore become postmodernists. And (and you yourself see) philosophical postmodernists may fail to engage in this sort of play without failing to be postmodernists. Kid Bitzer therefore has you dead to rights re: the umbrella.

To put it another way, you are engaging in that rhetorical move I have previously dubbed ‘the two-step of terrific triviality’. That is: make claims that are ambiguous between some wild and implausible (probably metaphysical or epistemological) thesis and something so basically obvious or commonsensical that no one would bother mentioning it (certainly not with a thrilled tone of voice.) Now here are the two steps: when accused of saying something wild and implausible, object that really one is saying something quite trivial (some mild-mannered unassuming thing that would never trouble a soul). When accused of saying something quite trivial, assert that one’s interlocutor fails to see how we are dancing over the abyss here!

Hop from foot to foot as necessary.

You, for instance, are hopping mightily on the first foot. For the sake of defending postmodernism’s philosophical virtues, you are turning it into a diffuse sort of cultural attitude or energy, such as is plainly shared by philosophical postmodernists and their adversaries. But how can this be philosophically interesting? If the energy shows that anyone is philosophically wrong, it shows that the postmodernists were wrong – not their adversaries – for confusingly claiming something as a distictive virtue of their position that, in fact, wasn’t. (Postmodernists – deconstructionists – have frequently accused their philosophical critics of being tone deaf to the subtle music of play and irony, and so forth. Their critics, however, have never accused themselves of being tone deaf in this way. And, in fact, the critics quite typically are not tone deaf in this way – why should they be?)

Personally, Michael, I’m happy with your statement. The problem with referring to “the 1960s” is that, even more so than “postmodernism” it has too many connotations — one could start imagining the reference is to the changes in sexual attitudes of the 60, or the Vietnam war, or drug culture or whatever.

To me, an outsider, reading this entire thread, it seems that there are a few different arguments going on:

(1) The claim that postmodernism is a waste of time because (as I understand the argument, reduced to its essence) people and societies are, apart from the superficial, basically all the same across time and space. A slightly fancier version of this admits that societies differ, but claims that it doesn’t matter because words “mean what they mean”.
This is the know-nothing argument against postmodernism that I was criticizing. I really have nothing to add to what I said earlier. It seems to me absolutely obvious that, to use a notorious example, when one encounters words like “punish a criminal” one CANNOT simply assume “words mean what they mean”. To us, the phrase conjures up a whole host of ideas — laws, codified by legislators, enforced by police, judgement at a trial, guilt, paying a fine or time in prison, the point of prison being deterrence and/or keeping dangerous folk away from decent folk. How much, if any, of this constellation of ideas is what goes through the head of a 16th century European confronting the phrase, as opposed to ideas of sin and God’s judgement and I don’t know what else (contamination? it’s all just a gamble, and he had bad luck? )

(2) On the other hand, we have the supposed idea that postmodernists claim that they alone, for the first time in history, saw the true relationships between authors, their society, and their current and future readers. We’ve had a lot of complaints against this view, but, for this thread I can’t see against whom these complaints are directed. I imagine there probably are people, somewhere, who have made claims like this — the world is full of nut, there are even plenty of them in universities — but it seems unfair to allow such nuts to tarnish the whole field. Would those who deal with this stuff day to day claim that
– this belief (pomo opened our eyes, for the first time, to the true light) is common or even
– this belief, while fringe, is not vociferously rejected by most people?

(3) Finally we have the claim that this stuff (when reading a text there is value in understanding both your culture and the authors culture, part of which means that the plain words the author states may actually have meant something very different to him than they do to you) is all obvious, and always has been. A few people have stated something like this above, and it strikes me a grossly wrong — not just a false opinion, but a false FACT.
– As I said, Victorian critics did not carefully consider their cultural biases when writing about, for example, classical literature; they operated basically like all those Renaissance painters depicting Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus as European bodies wearing European clothes of the time.
– Africa and Polynesian art, at the start of the 20th century, were, notoriously, interpreted by most Westerners through Western eyes. It was precisely the genius of Picasso et al to go beyond that. But Picasso et al did not represent the majority view by any means. AND what they took from the images was essentially the visuals; they took the other culture seriously, but did not take the characteristically postmodern step of “viewing their own culture as a martian might”. You could say Duchamp did that with his urinal, but Warhol does this more aggressively.
– When I went to high school, our reading of, lets say Shakespeare, was along the lines of “this strange word here means outside”, or “this phrase here refers to a ship bringing spice from India” or suchlike — the sort of one-way translation of “foreign language” into modern English. But there was NOT the reverse process, the explanation that when we think of a concept, “love” or “justice” or whatever, we bring to that concept a whole host of ideas that may have been very different from the ideas that Shakespeare and his audience brought to the idea.
And I don’t think it’s much different today in high school. Sure, there is the obligatory viewing of the past through the lenses of “sexism bad, racism worse”, but there is no real attempt to unpack OUR implicit understanding of the world, to attempt to show how truly foreign other societies were. Instead we have the reverse, claims that literature shows “universals” of how we are all actually the same; which wraps back to my point 1.

So if people want to continue this, there might be value in their stating exactly which of these three points they are contesting, and why.

Maynard, you will note that, upthread, I was careful to say ‘decades or centuries’, to show that there is a serious question about how far back to trace these attitudes. Is there any sort of supple play of skepticism in Derrida that wasn’t worked first by Montaigne? To the extent that relativism just means contextualism and contextualism just means historicism or sensitivity to culture, philosphical belief in the importance of the study of culture and history, then we are at the very least reaching pretty far back into the 19th Century. To the extent that Picasso and Duchamp did it first, we are talking modernism not postmodernism. And the 60’s changed a lot, too. What we have been objecting to in this thread (I and those who have been saying similar things, that is) is that it is quite silly to try to wag the whole dog of Western intellectual attitudes from Montaigne to Woodstock, by this tail: a set of post-1960’s philosophical fashions that achieved dominance for a time in university humanities departments, outside the philosophy department. That is, when accused of philosophical error, vaguely take credit for the whole cultural atmosphere. Which makes no damn sense, because it’s obvious that academic Theory is not the cause of this atmosphere, for better or worse, but only one of many effects. We are all, if you like, postmodern. But that doesn’t mean we have to put up with a lot of nonsensical arguments, just because they are labeled ‘postmodern’.

And another point you are making is that these virtues – historicism, contextualism, so forth – are not always lived up to. And that is quite true, but not at all to the point. It’s not as though postmodernists have a recipe for fixing THAT problem, after all. I don’t see any reason to suppose that people who like to read postmodernist philosophy (Theory) are any less bad at noticing their own critical failures than any ‘traditional humanists’. Why should they be?

You make the point that there is a very naive ‘words mean what they mean’ and facts is facts attitude that is less sophisticated than postmodernism. But this is setting the bar pitifully low. What we need is an argument that postmodernism is distinctively philosophically sophisticated. What you are saying is that it is logically possible to be more philosphically naive than postmodernism. But, seriously, who is there worth talking to who is naive in this ‘facts is facts, and words is words, and you just stick ’em on each other, and there couldn’t possibly be a problem with that’ way?

As to boredom, novakant, I am an incurable romantic, and so I must quote F. Schlegel:

“In order to be able to write well upon a subject, one must have ceased to be interested in it; the thought which is to be soberly expressed must already be entirely past and no longer be one’s actual concern. As long as the artist invents and is inspired, he remains in a constrained state of mind, at least for the purpose of communication. He then wants to say everything, which is the wrong tendency of young geniuses, or the right prejudice of old bunglers.”

Which is why I am an analytic philosopher, more or less. When I read ‘postmodern’ arguments, I think: this is all well and good for geniuses going wrong and old bunglers, but I aspire to a more sober intellectual equilibrium state.

Maynard

I’m really, I suppose, trying to work out what people here think “postmodernism” added to existing intellectual discourse over and above stuff that was already “known” from thinkers past. Of course, this is hard to pin down in a conversation where Daniel has, perhaps deliberately, set many hares running by referring vaguely to “the whole point about postmodernism”, without giving any specific clues. Hence my opening comment in the thread, a kind of arm-folded “ORLY?”

A run through the history of ideas ought to make clear that context and perspective and interpretive nuance are things that were thought about before the 1960s. Did the intellectual zeitgeist ossify at some point? Maybe. Did we need the postmodern turn in the humanities to save us from this? Well, this brings us to a counterfactual question about what might have occurred as a result of social, political and intellectual changes stemming from “the 1960s”. I’m pretty convinced (and the example I gave of feminism in the 1970s and ’80s helps convince me) that whole world views were in the process of being redefined and sometimes overturned. How would things have turned out had writers like Foucault or Derrida (or Lacan or …) turned their talents to baking or roof-tiling instead of writing? How would we be dealing with context and perspective and nuance, ‘about recognising that the choice of “mood music” is at least as important as the physical facts of what happened’?

We can’t really talk about that without getting down into the muck with individual writers and assessing their contributions, which we haven’t really done.

But, you know, something about how interpretive diversity has changed over some of these years can be gleaned from Fred Crews’ satirical books on Pooh:, The Pooh Perplex from 1964, and Postmodern Pooh, from 2006. He seems a lot less light-hearted in the second one.

(Shorter me: I’m ignoring your (1); I’m saying we can’t deal with your (2) without analysis of specific thinkers/authors; and (3) isn’t about ‘we always had context and perspective’, it’s about asking what the pomos genuinely added to our ability to apply context and perspective — this also needs some discussion of specific thinkers/authors, but some of us here are likely to start from the assumption that it might not be that much.)

In this context I think it means something along the lines of: “He looks French!”

A strategy I’ve always found useful was to actually study the authors being subsumed under a certain label – one might be surprised by what finds in such texts, and if they are any good the whole labelling business will soon seem much less important.

Novakant: “Also, it seems to me that you yourself [Holbo] on occsaion exhibit a decidedly pomo attitude, because it seems you like to mix high and low culture quite a bit, no?”

Now that I know (192) all novakant meant was that I look French – I’ll agree to agree. (Just to be friendly)

Are there any more outstanding disputes needing address at this point?

No – another impasse, but at least we seem to be able to keep things reasonably civil.

If anyone doesn’t already have enough to read over the holidays and feels the need to delve deeper into the matter, may I suggest this book:

Manfed Frank: What is Neostructuralism ?

engels, if refuse to go beyond “x is out there and y is true”, i.e. naive realism, you’ll have a pretty hard time even at the most hardcore analytical philosophy departments …

I believe that some objects are in fact out there in the world and some statements are in fact true

That is a nice interpretation, and it should be encouraged.

Alasdair MacIntyre says IIRC that the postmodernist should refuse to answer the questions put to novakant at @203. A less than amusing alternative is to refuse to answer, but then go find a new victim and put the same questions to him/her, not that I believe there’s a fact of the matter as to whether anyone here including myself is truly doing just that.

What is the capital of Azerbaijan? What were the causes of the First World War? How many elephants can you fit in a mini?

‘It does rather seem that way by now, doesn’t it? Of course the usual way of doing this is through careful use of capitalisations or inverted commas, so you can start off by announcing that ‘there is no World Out There!’ or ‘”truth” is a myth’ and when someone points to object X that does indeed appear to be out there and rather hard to move or statement Y that seems to be (rather inconventiently) true you can reply that of course you weren’t saying there is no world out there, nobody would deny that, but only that there is no World Out There, obviously some statements are true and others are false but still there is no “truth”… I am sure it must have been amusing the first few times…’

OK: first point. Who, precisely, actually stated, in a paper published in a recognised academic journal (or for that matter in a book published by a reasonably prestigious academic press) that ‘truth is a myth’ (or even that “truth” is a myth)? Since it’s Christmas I’m not even going to make it clear that really this person should be a self-described postmodernist to make the point (which is, presumably, that this is the kind of thing that postmodernists believe (or ‘believe’)).

That’s your starter for ten. Follow up question: who, precisely, stated that ‘there is no world out there?’ (Let’s skip gaily past the problem that it’s not clear where ‘out there’ might be if there is no world ‘in it’).

I mean, since Bishop Berkeley?

Novakant, I don’t have a ‘position’ on the nature of truth — and I’m not required to have one in order to hold a generally negative opinion of post-modernism, relativism, or whatever it is you take yourself to be defending here — but you can find references to recent work on this topic here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

Engels,
Why is it now thought wise to have both women and racial minorities on the US Supreme Court? Is it to satisfy political obligations, or because it is understood that minorities and women may see facts differently than white men? Is there an intellectually substantive politically neutral logic or merely a politically instrumental one?
Both can apply of course but for you that’s not an option.
People argue over the definition of justice. Does that mean there’s no such a thing as justice, or only that justice is a thing we argue over?

On a more general note. Modernism is the celebration of Synchrony -Saussure, Mallarme and Cezanne- and the move away from the representation of the emotional life of others -mimesis- and to “Structuralism” and “Formalism.” You want a historical determinist description it’s pretty basic.
Q: In the history of human culture what is usual representation of crisis?
A: At the beginning, there isn’t one, only the representation of an increasingly brittle representation of an increasingly ideal abstract stability Look the record (read: the history of culture,) it’s all there. Look up scholasticism, the renaissance and mannerism, the culture of the reformation, the counter-reformation . Look not only at the history of ideas but the history of forms of representation: flexible or brittle.

In the context of the 19th century: against narrative as mimesis, against the ethics and esthetics of time: time as the origin of the logic of “perspectives” of the subjective as opposed to the ideal. The ideal as Scientific, Platonic, timeless, absolute. Plastic and formal. Narrative- films and comics- as the popular representation of popular vulgarity in the context of the modernist high snobbery. When “modernist” forms of abstraction were returned to the social sphere the result was disaster. Inflexible ideas worked as well in politics as they did in architecture.

Wittgenstein’s understanding of language late in life was where Proust’s began. Proust like Baudelaire and others was a “modern” not a “modernist.” But modernism is not just instrumental reason but Adnrno’s phobia of instrumentalism: is not only hyper-rationalism but hyper-anti-rationalism. Post modernism is the new understanding of modernity or a return to an earlier less simplistically enthusiastic view of the facts and situation.
As to Derrida and Montaigne the answer is obviously, yes., in the sense of the attempt to reclaim a history. But Derrida is mannered, trying to escape and to become. Every generation relives the past in its own language, and sometimes that language is adolescent.
Our age is one of mannerism, heading towards the baroque. The baroque age at its best was an age of sophistication. We’ll see if we get there.

Following arguments like those above is like listening to a man talk about what a good driver he is because he doesn’t drink.

“Why do I get the feeling that “analytic philosophy” is used here merely as a cudgel to hit your opponents over the head with …?”

I’ve no idea why you have this feeling. Ignorance? Prejudice? Insecurity? Certainly there doesn’t seem to be anyone actually using the term in the sense you describe.

Joaquin Tamiroff: At the beginning, there isn’t one, only the representation of an increasingly brittle representation of an increasingly ideal abstract stability

But don’t postmodernists characterize this as always being the case–that what had been well understood close to the source, in both space and time, gradually degenerates–until someone creates a new form of order again? It sounds as if you are denigrating modernity for being overly abstract and hence “brittle” (a term I like, something fragile, which can’t be changed even a hairsbreadth here lest unpredictable failures crop up there, but which I’m not sure applies well to mental representations of reality or to social systems).

@203: What type of statements are true, in what sense are they true, relative to what are they true, what “makes” them true?

Isn’t this where someone poses the “What would be the result of stepping out of a ninth floor window on the planet earth with nothing between you and the concrete roadside below?” question?

Just to be clear: I’m not denying I’m (more or less) an analytic philosopher. I’m just saying that it doesn’t make much sense to link my comment snarkiness to my analytic philosopheriness, and deplore analytic philosophy – or usage of the term ‘analytic philosophy’ – on that basis. Because many people who are analytic philosophers are not especially snarky. And many people who are especially snarky are not analytic philosophers.

I don’t think I DO give a total pass to the corresponding move, Dave. It may be that I should have said so earlier. If so, I hereby state that the realism-Realism one-step certainly cannot be securely made in one step. (Possibly not in any steps, but certainly not in one.) This mistake is not the same as the two-step of terrific triviality mistake (although it is equally serious, plausibly). I have been trying to keep my eye on two balls only, in this thread. This would have been number 3. But again – if it helps – yes. Bad argument, clearly.

I do think the ‘you believe in rocks, don’t you?’ move retains a certain, albeit annoying, strictly negative utility, in that certain ‘relativist’ positions (constructivist, a couple of other ists as well) really commit their proponents to denying this. Stanley Fish, for example, has no business believing in (non-socially-generated) rocks, what with the other stuff he believes. (Obviously he really does believe in rocks. And he will say so, and he’ll try to leave it at that. But, conceptually, I think he can’t.)

The trick is distinguishing cases in which 1) someone is deploying ‘you believe in rocks, don’t you?’ fairly and strictly negatively, to show that, say, Stanley Fish has got a serious metaphysical and epistemological problem on his hands, making sense of his own claims; and 2) someone is deploying ‘you believe in rocks, don’t you?’ to try to prove a form of metaphysical Realism that clearly cannot be proven in this way. I am not sure that those in this thread who have been trying out the ‘you believe in rocks’ argument are doing the bad thing, not the good thing. So I haven’t really weighed in.

The important thing to see (I think you and I agree) is that Realism and Anti-Realism are twins, in that they both have the same philosophically dubious features. They are non-explanatory and not clearly meaningful (a Wittgensteinian point). But it is common, I think, to see this only with regard to Realism and to conclude that Anti-Realism is the answer. But no: anti-foundationalism (to shift terms again to another usual suspect) is just as metaphysically unsupported as foundationalism, paradoxically. (But the paradox is only superficial.) So I tend to target the Anti-Realist claims – which results, maybe, in Novakant concluding that I’m a Realist. So perhaps I should be clearer.

To put it yet another way: when I argue with, say, John C. Halasz, we both try to take the later Wittgensteinian line. This is due to our reading Wittgenstein differently. John sees Wittgenstein as advancing a version of Anti-Realism, whereas I see Wittgenstein as trying to avoid both Realism and Anti-Realism. That is, I see the position that Halasz thinks IS Wittgenstein’s position as one of his targets. The issue, really, is whether the kind of anti-Realism Halasz favors turns out to be an Anti-Realism. Which, admittedly, is not an issue that can be settled simply by use of the shift-key.

“I have read and understood enough of it to find statements like the one below cringeworthy:”

Is there some philosophical reason for this? If so, what is it? Just to be specific, what point in Davidson do you take ito be 1) important and correct and crucially bearing on the present discussion; 2) clearly not appreciated by me, his former student? (I agree that it is possible I have badly misunderstood my teacher. Wouldn’t be the first time.)

I would note, in case it was clear, that the statement was intended somewhat ironically and hyperbolically, following up on the Schlegel quote the way it did. Soberly, and bereft of snark, I think a lot of Theory is just philosophically appalling. I hereby express an opinion and do not expect anyone else to share the opinion on my say-so. However, I have not infrequently been told that I cannot possibly hold this opinion without thereby depriving myself of a lot of good sense about pluralism and contextualism. To this I reply: whether I am right or wrong about a lot of Theory being philosophically appalling – for that we would have to get down to cases, and I am willing to do so – I am sure my thinking that a lot of Theory is a terrible muddle does not straightaway cut me off from all that good stuff about pluralism and contextualism and so forth. I find my way to it by alternate routes, which certainly exist.

In for a penny:
“It sounds as if you are denigrating modernity”
I’m not denigrating modernity. Or maybe I am but we’re stuck with it. We’re modern. Modern-ism is something else: enthusiasm and optimism regarding the technological advancements of modernity. Modernism involves a conflation of technological and moral progress. It gets more complex when you’re dealing with someone like Eliot who is called a modernist when he’s more a regretful modern. It’s the same when thinking about humanism. Do you mean the humanism of humane irony or the later humanism of clarity and optimism? I think of the latter as a variant of post or anti-humanism. But I’m not any bigger on the optimistic enlightenment than I am on modernism. And for the record Surrealism and Duchamp weren’t dealt with seriously in this country until the 60’s and 70’s, with the moves against Greenbergian modernist idealism. Surrealism is more a touchstone of post-modernism than modernism itself. See Rosalind Krauss.

Quine’s naturalism begins with the arch rationalist’s assumption that the self is a stable thing: acting and not reacting. And if that’s not his argument then that doubt should be applied back to any speaker. This ties in in the 50’s I guess to a distaste for behaviorism. A distaste that’s more moral than logical.
But what happens when you apply formal systems or assumpions to the complexities of the social world? If you want to treat language as formal system go ahead, but don’t delude yourself that it will still function as a representational one, representative that is of our experience. Numbers may or may not function as models but words are used in mimesis and mimesis is very personal. Don’t even begin to talk about politics. It seems more like an escape from politics or with social engagement outside the academy.

If you want to talk about philosophy in the world look at the relation of ideas and behavior. You may want to see your ideas as representing yourself in the world, but actions do a better job of that. Arguing that we should all live by rules when we live (at our best) by principles and prudence is arguing for abstract reason from wishful thinking. Successful politics is always founded in empiricism, both the politics that civilized people despise and that they praise. But it’s a functional streetwise empiricism, a different form of “realism” than that discussed here. What sort of a naturalized epistemology can we have when the agent of naturalization is so prone to going off?
And this means specifically that no one should confuse my argument with anti-realism. The relevant question to me is not the existence of the outside world but the problem of access and of moral responsibility. Someone should respond to my question about SCOTUS. And in general: if you don’t have the capacity to describe your existing relations to the world: of social life; and politics, then you have little business discussing philosophy. And I say that assuming that for anything to be of broader philosophical interest it has to be seen to model something other than itself.

As to post-modernism. There is another division. There’s the librarian model of de Man and Borges which is a sort of literary epicurianism (of language divorced from the world) which is connected to decadence and even anti-humanism but which helped lead towards a return to humanism. I think Garcia Marquez called Borges something like ‘necessary’, which wasn’t meant simply as a compliment. And again: Duchamp and Surrealism and Krauss. Don’t rely on Danto for Duchamp. Duchamp goes back to Baudelaire. He didn’t want to be called a dumb painter because as he said: no one ever got called a stupid poet. And Eliot used readymades too, as collage: “Hurry up please, it’s time.” Duchamp is a literary trickster and if anything as conservative in his way as Eliot.
Playing off of outmoded forms of narrative that he couldn’t quite let go of. He was a perv of the old bourgeois, but the pervy bits got him street cred with the punks.

Between modernity and modernism it’s a mish-mash but they aren’t identical. And the same with what follows, but if you want to imagine the American equivalent of European pomo-theorists you won’t find them in the American academy. The unreliable subject is the subject of literature, and from there it became one of continental philosophy. The American academicized version of continental theory is like the perfect replica of the Parisian bistro in NY: a simulacrum without the context. And the unreliable author, whether Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek , Philip Roth or Norman Mailer, becomes in the academy the very very reliable expert in Unreliability Studies. The American academy is predicated on the reliability of American academics, when they are no more reliably aware of the external world than the rest of us. Humanism on the other hand, I am being snarky here is founded on the hope of a worldly academy, even occasionally a vulgar one.

And in relation of ideas to literature, complaining that the Europeans are just ripping off Montaigne is like saying Proust is ripping off Lady Murasaki. The point is the communication of ideas in the language of the present. It’s the present that’s being observed and described in literature. The world is the subject being represented through mimesis in language. People have been making chairs for thousands of years. If you and a friend are looking at a room full of chairs at the Metropolitan Museum you’re not going to talk about the one thing they all have in common. If you’re talking about novels you’re not going to pretend the stories are “true.” But there’s probably more truth in the collected lies of Philip Roth than there is in the collected truths of Donald Davidson. The difference is that all Roth is trying to give an objective description of his subjective experience.
And maybe the Continentals are all lousy poets but in a very real sense what they were trying to describe was post-war Europe, while their American contemporaries were trying to describe absolutes. But maybe all the Americans succeeded in describing was post-war America. And that is what makes the Europeans smile.

For the record, then, novakant: I’m a semantic holist (of sorts) and I believe that anomalous monism is a possibly correct view. Certainly it is a very consideration-worthy position. Is there any any inconsistency (or even mild tension?) between me believing such things and also believing the things I have written upthread? If anything, these sorts of positions are evidence that I am right: namely, there is no particular reason to suppose you need to be a philosophical postmodernist to be contextualist, holist, non-reductionist, etc. etc. You can be, alternatively, a Davidsonian, for example. (This is really all I have been arguing in this thread: namely, it is wrong to regard postmodernist philosophy as the privileged route to these attitudes, or to suppose critics of postmodernist lack a healthy appreciation of the importance of such things.)

So: so far I do not see the inconsistency in my position. If I am cringeworthily wrong about this, then I think it ought to be possible to provide some brief indication of how and why this is so.

I read all 229 comments (whew). My main reaction is that i’m glad you guys are “blogging it out” rather than doing stuff in the real world.

John Holbo @ 222
Okay, but Fish doesn’t have to fail to believe in rocks, because rocks really are socially constructed. Both at the academic level and at the popular level. Now, when you go to Hawaii and you visit a volcano and you got to the visitor’s center, you’ll see an exhibit of different kinds of solidified lava, and these will be labeled with the different names given to the different kinds. And, I guess, you can argue about whether they’re all the same kind of thing, whether they are really “rocks,” whether the local Hawaiian religious or other cultural connotations given to these different lava formations should have equal epistemological and ontological status as geologists’ names, even whether differences of opinion between academically trained geologists in different parts of the world are real or more like “emacs vs. vi.” But for Fish, from what I’ve been able to gather from some of what he’s written, especially recently, it doesn’t really matter, if you want to think like an academic (and, granted, he restricts his argument only to the humanities, which geology very obviously is not one): the only thing that matters is the arguments that have been given for and against all the different aspects of all the different positions, and being able to list them, deploy them, etc.

But Fish needs it not to really matter whether one (as an academic) holds to one of those positions rather than another. He says, or at least implies, over and over again, that if you are an academic, you need not to care whether a position is true or false, only whether there have been good arguments of a certain sort made in its favor by the people whose writings you care about. (And, as I’ve suggested before, since he’s writing for non-academics, this comes off oddly, because it sounds as if he’s urging Times readers to think the way he does, raising the question whether he believes non-academic thought–coming down on one side rather than the other–is worthy of the name thought.)

Obviously, Realism disagrees with that. If you’re a neo-Thomist, the upshot of no argument can be that certain propositions are false. Power struggles between academic schools have nothing to do with the search for truth. Similarly, Bruno Latour has the notion of “resistances” that make certain intellectual positions impossible, but I’m still trying to work out why Latour and his school, which seems fairly uncontroversial to me (and from what I’ve read to other scientifically educated people), is described as anti-science reality-deniers.

By “emerged as a primary villain” I mean “in the minds of Sokal’s partisans”.

AcademicLurker beat me to the punch!

I think a lot of the problem is (guess what!) a clash of cultures. From what I can tell there’s a specifically Gallic kind of humour, evinced by Latour and Baudrillard, among others, in which one says ‘outrageous’ things one obviously doesn’t mean just to be ‘provocative’. It’s very obvious (at least to me) that both the thinkers mentioned above consider these ‘controversial’ statements* to be hugely amusing, or at least thought provoking, and don’t know (or don’t care) that the average Anglo-Saxon thinks that statements like these could only be produced by self-important twats.

*Such as ‘the Gulf War did not take place’, etc.

John,
I’m not sure why you would want to say, for the sake of argument, Fish holds a position that it’s not likely he holds. By misunderstanding him, even for the sake of argument, it seems to me, you allow him to say something like “people like John Holbo, for obvious reasons (for example, everyone knows Holbo is a postmodernist who thinks comic books and Zizek and ‘performativity’ are worthwhile), think such and such stupid, wrong things.”

And my guess about Fish is that he doesn’t think “failing to believe in rocks” is something anybody can really do. I have no real reason to think this is true about him other than that I think I understand his approach to some other issues. Another guess is that he has never encountered a situation where he was asked, “don’t you believe in rocks,” as a way of leading him to accept the existence of, say, Platonic Forms, and felt the need to take his questioner seriously.

And he may have said something that implies “nobody can fail to believe in rocks” somewhere in The Trouble With Principle or somewhere else where he’s saying something about “socially constructed” being a meaningless term.

“I’m not sure why you would want to say, for the sake of argument, Fish holds a position that it’s not likely he holds.”

Just to be clear, I am saying, for the sake of argument, that Fish holds a position that he is not only likely to hold but actually holds – in the sense that he is committed to it by decades of published writings. I realize that you do not believe he is committed to this position. That’s fine. I think you are misreading Fish. And you, clearly, think I am misreading Fish. Again: fine. My point is just that if – IF (!) – someone (Fish is an example) has made an argument that commits them to something absurd, it is perfectly reasonable to point this out by pointing out some ordinary thing that they are, unfortunately, no longer able to hold, because the absurd thing has accidentally displaced it. The point is to induce the other person to give up the absurd thing that has pushed out the ordinary thing. Now. I am willing to argue with you about the substance of Fish’s commitments. But can I first get you to grant the simple thing I’ve been arguing for? Because there is a serious point here. Namely, ‘but you believe in rocks’ is not properly regarded only as a bad attempt to establish dubious forms of Realism. It is also part and parcel of perfectly reasonable attempts to point out to someone that their signature brand of social constructivism has gotten out of hand.

Is Fish committed to not believing in rocks? Yes: The existence of rocks can make no difference to what he believes to be true, because what he believes to be true is socially constructed.

I can, however, come up with numerous ways Fish could get out of it. My favorite would be to suggest that as a non-philosopher, and as someone who’s written with some resentment towards philosophy, he can’t be held to fine distinctions in meanings of philosophical terms like a technical definition of “true” or “believe.” Trying to supply reasons why his position should be finer-grained will look like hair-splitting.

Another would be to suggest that he separates what he really believes from what he thinks is warranted for public, academic purposes. The people socially constructing the knowledge are no less in touch with the truth than anybody else. The system for winnowing out falsehood is a good one. At any given time, what’s generally held to be true might actually be false, but there’s reasonably good reason to believe we can move closer to truth.

I’m leaving the stuff about Milton’s angels out of it, though. I don’t think they fit well.

Not sure whether this is what you were asking for.

Bianca, I really don’t understand this. “My favorite would be to suggest that as a non-philosopher, and as someone who’s written with some resentment towards philosophy, he can’t be held to fine distinctions in meanings of philosophical terms like a technical definition of “true” or “believe.”

First, that amounts to just giving up. Which is fine, so long as Fish actually admits that philosophers are perfectly right to ignore his arguments (which he won’t do). But also: how do you know how to get Fish out of ‘it’ when I haven’t told you what it IS? How do you know that my argument against Fish is going to hinge on technical definitions of ‘true’ and/or ‘believe’. (For the record, I wasn’t planning on using technical definitions of either term.)

I’m stilling looking for a very small concession, before we move on to the question of whether Fish is right or wrong about anything. Let’s shift subjects. Suppose there is a thinker named …. Schmanley Schmish. Now just run the whole thing again. He has written things I think are absurd. I chose to bring out the hidden absurdity by showing the inconsistency between things he has written and other ordinary things he surely accepts. That is, I construct a reductio ad absurdum. Do you, or do you not, accept this as a reasonable way to argue against Schmish? You seem to be resisting this possibility. That is, you seem to be hinting that it will always be legitimate (palatable, intellectually or socially plausible) for Schmish to brush aside any reductio ad absurdum on his position as … something he doesn’t have to bother about. (Because he didn’t intend for his position to be open to stupid objections, so therefore whatever position the stupid objection is scoring against can’t be his? I’m not clear.)

Of course, john c. denies the “anti-realism” imputation, which is that Analytic fetish of classification/labeling in binary oppositions without regard to degrees and nuances and aspects in the complexion of any “serious” philosophical view or position. And, of course, he recognizes that Wittgenstein was concerned with critically dissolving aporetic philosophical puzzles, such that he would not be taking up either horn of the dilemma. (The only thing I can recall having said about W. that’s even semi-controversial is that he devolves from Kant and is to be understood far more in line with “continental” thinking than empiricist/Analytic thinking). I would actually be inclined to say that W. was a realist of sorts, though only in attitude, and not a metaphysical realist (Platonically , epistemologically, or what not), nor a scientific realist (such as Popper). But he was obsessed for peculiar reasons of his own at bringing about a reconciliation with the world-as-it-is, while avoiding the reifying traps involved in attempting to grasp the world as given or providing releasement from them. At any rate, though he claimed to provide philosophy with a stopping-off point or resting place, he himself proved unable to cease his ongoing, rather compulsive activity, perhaps because we always remain liable to bumping into our own mental furniture and such undoing activity is never completely done.

“Anti-realist” is a label that could be applied to all manner of matters or views, such that it doesn’t convey much specifically. I’m most familiar with its use in philosophy-of-science debates. Without getting into the weeds there, I’ll just remark that it’s often enough natural scientists who might say “anti-realist” sorts of things, as when advanced physicists say that they are not interested in or concerned with causality, (rather than, presumably, formal relations between basic forces). (For the record, lacking any but the sketchiest notions of advanced physics, I tend to stick to the “common sense” view). But I suppose the key issue is: is a change in the understanding of the world or part of the world actually based on or requiring the notion that such understanding is entering into or increasingly approximating some “final” reality, or is the motive-force of an enlarged understanding and an increased phenomenal coherence sufficient, (which also means a more complex and differentiated understanding)?

If someone points and strutters, “b-but external reality exists!”, what is the need involved in attempting to erect a theory over such an utterance and what further, missing implications would it yield? One can’t prove P: “the physical world really exists”, since that is neither true, nor false, but tautological, which is a species of nonsense, and one can’t prove nonsense. (I don’t believe the physical world exists, which is not to say that I believe it doesn’t exist, but rather that the matter would be so far in the background of any belief I would entertain, that it would never come up, as a matter requiring or worthy of any investment of belief). The scandal of philosophy is not, as Kant had it, that the reality of the external world has never been adequately proven, says Heidegger, but rather that the matter was ever considered as requiring proof. It’s not the reality of the world that is doubtful, but our own sense of unreality. As finite, embodied beings situated within the reality of the world, we are subject to constraints; but not all those constraints, nor necessarily the most important ones are addressed by answers such as “gravity”, nor are all the questions we might responsibly be enjoined to decide upon.

Again, similarly, what is it about our words/language that represents or corresponds to the reality of the world other than the ways in which we use them? It’s reasonable to claim that because of their well-worn iterations, and the concomitant practices that they help to sustain, that they are likely suitable to such communicative purposes. But that is not to claim that they somehow reflect or are pinned down to some prior givenness of the reality of the world. If one asks how the world emerges into language and language maps onto the world, then the obvious answer would be through communicative interaction across the world. But that is not to offer some guarantee of “correspondence”, nor “identical” and invariant understandings, which would obviate all misunderstandings or specify uniquely correct ones.

“But no: anti-foundationalism (to shift terms again to another usual suspect) is just as metaphysically unsupported as foundationalism, paradoxically.” But no, this seems to me to be obviously incorrect, since it misses the asymmetry between the two cases: denial of the existence of or need for (metaphysical or epistemological) “foundations” is not on the same level as assertion of them. Worse, it misses the critical point: that recursion to the “necessity” deriving from a “foundation” in prior being as the basis of “rational justification”, obstructs and misconstrues the actual possibilities and limits of such “justification” and puts it in league with the reifying tendencies of “given” reality with respect to our actual and emergent possibilities.

So the upshot is that I fail to see just what I am accused of missing, in not somehow adequately taking account of “reality” and what addition implications re to be supplied. And why that accusation might not itself be involved in reifying category mistakes, in which, say, the existence of rocks is offered as an answer to how and why we attribute pain. (There might be many other issues on which the accusation of “anti-realism” functions as a disguise for too cozy assumptions, such as, say, the “nature” and limits of human agency, the (dis)unity of the self, its dependency on/exposure to the other, the collective basis of “freedom”, hence its implication in power, etc., but I’ll leave off for now).

“Post-modernism” is such a vague terms that it’s useless for getting at much of anything, so it might as well be just mood music. That’s, I take it, the whole point of this thread, and why it tended to drift back into old discussions of the Analytic/continental rift. (If one wanted to put some meat onto “post-modernism”, the place to start might be declarations by post-War rightist German thinkers of entering into a “post-history”, in which modern societies/cultures would become “crystallized”, succumbing, if not to Egyptian immobility, than, at least, to Hellenistic cultism, followed by a leap ahead to considering the intensification and proliferation of mass media in generating/producing what now passes for “culture”). “Post-structuralism” for that matter is an Anglo academic coinage, not recognized in its originating province, (though from the outside, some commonality of sources and concerns might be recognized in the differences among that disparate group of thinkers, such as a focus on problematicizing problematics). And “Theory”, after all, was assembled by Anglo literary studies to address the concerns involved in studying literary works/matters, so no matter how philosophically “bad” it might be adjudged, it’s not clear that the “same” concerns are at issue. (Though deconstructing literary works strikes me rather like carrying coals to Newcastle, as too easy and redundant, given the unreal and fictive, as well as, polysemous and subtextual, status of such writings). So some care in considering the boundaries being crossed, in the darkness and confusion of these times, might be in order. If only to avoid the wilder sorts of polemical misprisions.

That said, I’ll add some comments on “Analytic” philosophy. It doesn’t seem to me fruitful to remain stuck in the 1950’s, in maintaining some sort of polemic divide with the “continental” tradition. In fact, Analytic philosophy has lost its “unity” and now represents a considerable diversity of views, some of which have taken on board “continental” concerns and considerations, (as well as, a much better appreciation of Wittgenstein). It amounts to a style or, very loosely, a method of doing philosophy, no more unified in method and substance than phenomenology ever was. That stated, much of Analytic philosophy still seems to me to be oriented toward a common project of developing a consistent, systematically complete form of naturalism, which I would take issue with on 3 “grounds”: a) such a drive toward systematic ‘”completeness” is still driven by a metaphysical urge; b) an inconsistent and incomplete naturalism is closer to and more consonant with the “facts”; and c) modern science and technology have so thoroughly, if not “completely”, displaced, repressed, destroyed or dominated natural reality, that such a project amounts to an obtuse denial of the “artificial” world and its “imperatives” that such “naturalism” has produced, so as to amount to a kind of bad faith or inauthenticity with respect to the responsibilities involved. Such a “final” aim amounts to philosophical mis-direction.

BTW, “Joaquin Tamiroff”above, on the evidence of his last iteration, seems detectably to be our old mutual friend Mr. Third-Son-of-Adam Tree-of-Paradise.

@249: John, I don’t know for sure that Fish’s position has implications he would not accept, even assuming he agreed with you about what is implied by what. I think we agree that he doesn’t have a philosophical justification for a belief in the existence of rocks. But who except some unfortunate, caught in the snares of Descartes’ nightmare, would disbelieve in the existence of rocks? Who was it who ordained we ought to have a philosophical justification for our beliefs? Having a philosophical justification (or something like one) for things academics do might be a different story.

Now, I think it is a contradiction in Fish’s position that he apparently rejects at least some philosophical critiques of what literature professors do, and at the same time pronounces on what law professors and judges do.

But if all it comes down to is whether you think philosophers or literary critics are (as Rorty puts it) the proper teachers of the young, it hardly matters whether a literary critic like Fish is going to accept a philosopher’s critique. I guess.

JH @222: Realism and Anti-Realism are twins, in that they both have the same philosophically dubious features. They are non-explanatory and not clearly meaningful

Could you elaborate a bit, or simply refer me to something (perhaps upthread) that does? Ditto for “anomalous monism”?

@253:

Nope. Sorry, boss, you’re just trying to pull rank. It’s not me who’s ever claimed to be “anti-realist”; that imputation comes from you. So it’s incumbent on you to make plain the distinction and its implications. I’m just refusing to be pinned down and classified in Dr. Holbo’s Museum of Philosophical Insects. As if that were a worthy enterprise. It’s not as if there is a philosopher’s stone called “Reality”, which would a priori contain and confer all inferences and implications, eh? Logical moves like modens ponens or reductio ad absurdum might work locally, but don’t necessarily apply globally, without question begging. All our inferences and implications will break down somewhere, though we don’t know just when or where. But that assurance is a pretty good indicator of “reality”, eh? Which is not what remains the same amidst all change, but rather what changes of itself, willy-nilly. Thinking otherwise might “cause” one to fly over differing philosophical “terrains” without noticing. It’s only the routes of transmission of the “news” which are at issue. (And, of course, natural language is no more immune to break-downs than formal logic).

BTW, not to interfere with your tete-a-tete with Bianca Steele or defend Stanley Fish, but, according to my last iteration/comment, “I believe in rocks” is an incoherent or nonsensical utterance, unless taken in some pervy sense, such as, “only my pet rocks accord me the love and comfort I deserve”. “I believe in the existence of rocks” is not much better.

@255:

“As I recall, he believes (or says he believes) in objective reality and all that, but believes also that it is impossible to construct a non-question-begging argument from agreed-on premises to any significant conclusions. This being the case, he feels justified in arguing in any particular context in whatever way he feels appropriate, in order to bring about whatever he thinks needs to happen.”

Er, again, not to defend Fish, but that sounds more like a description of rhetoric than sophistry. Which latter means a deliberately fraudulent deployment of rhetoric, akin to the modern notion of ideology. Rhetoric was highly esteemed in the ancient Greco-Roman world, with the pejorative sense of it, as mere empty verbiage, a minority view, largely arising with the Stoics, who contrasted it with “dialectics”, meaning in their account basically analytic logic. But Plato knew that “dialectical” arguments needed rhetorical clothing to address its audience effectively, else why the dialogues? And Aristotle made the distinction in his work on rhetoric between the practicing and the learned kind, which would be irrelevant, if the only use were to deceive. Further, “first principles”, archai, could only be arrived at by means of dialectical syllogisms, in which the premises were “merely probable”, rather than “certain”. Why is it that philosophical history is so easily forgotten, while being drawn upon?

[a note from the management – John Holbo that is. The time limit on the thread has run out and comments have closed automatically. Just thought I should say: I didn’t turn the thread off in response to john halasz’ final comment, which – having won the luck of the final word draw – shall be the final word. But I’ll try to find the time to compose a suitable follow-up post on a related theme.]