Analytic Bullshit, Ben Kotzee
Can analytic philosophers talk bullshit?
The publication as a small book last year of Harry Frankfurt’s (1986) paper “On Bullshit” ignited great popular interest in “bullshit”: what is it “to bullshit someone” and why is there so much bullshit about these days? Prime examples of bullshit mentioned in the many popular contributions to the subject post-Frankfurt (just google for it) are found in “business-speak”, in advertising and in politics. What people enjoy about Frankfurt’s book, it seems, is that having a theory of bullshit available makes it possible now to do with a straight face what you previously had to hide in a cough: say that someone is talking bullshit. (We might say that, after Frankfurt, “bullshit” is a technical term.)
As far as I can tell, the theory of bullshit is in its infancy and I’m afraid that I don’t have much to add. Frankfurt distinguishes between honest assertion, lying and bullshitting as follows: In making an honest assertion (in telling the truth) one aims to say what is true and in lying, one aims to say what is not true… both in honest saying and lying one is guided by the aim of truth. In bullshitting, however, the speaker is unconcerned with the truth of what he says; the bullshitter pretends to make an honest assertion whereas he really is just mouthing off. As such, bullshitting is a faking of assertion: the bullshitter pretends to make an assertion, but actually asserts nothing. To people who know me, it will be quite clear why I’m interested in this: I work on the relation between truth, believing and assertion and think Frankfurt makes a very good point about the nature of assertion: honest saying and lying, as species of asserting, involve a concern with the truth of what one says. This comes into sharper focus when we consider the case of the bullshitter who pretends to assert, but, not caring about the truth of what he says, really ends up saying nothing (ends up not really asserting at all).
Be that as it may, Frankfurt thinks that bullshitting is a kind of dishonesty: whenever one speaks dishonestly in this way, what comes out one’s mouth is bullshit. Jerry Cohen disagrees with this characterisation of the relation between bullshitting intent and the shittiness of what one says. He holds that it is possible to talk bullshit without dishonest intent and mentions as an example the stuff emanating from French departments of philosophy and departments of literature in the English-speaking world overly occupied with French theory. (Holding up an example of bullshit, Cohen refers to Althusserian Marxism; he also mentions the writings on science of French theorists from Latour to Kristeva that Sokal criticises.) Cohen holds that there need not be any dishonesty on the part of these people: the problem is not that they are unconcerned with whether what they are saying is true, it is that there is a deficiency in the concepts and language that is deployed by people who “do theory”. What is wrong with much of French philosophy, Cohen thinks, is that it is unclarifiable nonsense and this he wants to distinghuish as a sort of bullshit in its own right. He provides a test for being unclarifiable nonsense that involves adding a negation-sign: if adding a negation-sign to what one is saying makes no difference to its intuitive plausibility, it is bullshit of the “unclarifiable nonsense” kind.
What Cohen calls bullshit, it is clear, is that kind of philosophy perpetrated by people whose names sound continental, that is obscure, a little bit avant garde and generally down on mathematics, science, logic and technology. Recently, I criticised Cohen’s “unclarifiable nonsense” account of bullshit, but offered the following (qualified) support for his views on French philosophy. I held that “postmodernism” is bullshit for the following reason: Assume that the central tenet of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as truth or that the word “true” is no more than a clever cover for whatever beliefs or attitudes are generally accepted in some culture (and that is accepted due to concealed coercion). The problem is this: If there is really no fact of the matter as to what is true and someone may become conscious of this, then there can be no honest speech and no lying; this is because, as Frankfurt holds, assertion and lying is characterised by aiming to say what is true and aiming to say what is not true, respectively. Being fully aware that there is no truth either way, no-one can honestly assert anything (or lie) at all; without truth, assertion looses its goal. All that can remain of speech, if there is no truth, is bullshit or pretending to assert (although just pretending to assert would require at least the idea of truth and truthful assertion to remain, itself a tension in the postmodernist’s position on truth).
My argument invited the accusation of tu quoque from an editor. Analytic philosophers, he suggested, shouldn’t cast stones. Bullshit is not confined to the continent and, in any case, I wouldn’t take it as alright if a “postmodern philosopher” made a blanket attack on analytic philosophy in the same manner as I did. He had me wrong – I am perfectly willing to consider any reasonable argument that there is something systematically wrong with the presuppositions and method of analytic philosophy, its just that I haven’t heard one, despite listening. (By the way, I’m not complaining about the editor, who liked the rest of the piece and accepted it.)
In the interest of fairness, though, my question to the blog is this: do analytic philosophers ever bullshit? Nothing suggests that an analytic philosohper can’t talk Frankfurt bullshit – that is, pretend to care about the truth of what they say when they do not: of course any analytic philosopher is just as capable of this form of dishonesty, psychologically speaking. What’s less clear is that an analytic philosopher can talk Cohen-bullshit. I would suggest that the true analytic philosopher cannot. This is because analytic philosophy is characterised by its reliance on the method provided by formal logic: by formalising the contentious parts of our work, we make absolutely clear what we mean. At least when we formalise our philosophy, we can of course be wrong, but not “unclarifiably unclear”. Precisely the ideal of analytic philosophy is to be clear.
Bearing in mind these two points, does anyone want to offer examples of analytic philosophers talking bullshit (of the Frankfurt or Cohen variety)? Specifically, I’m interested in the role that formalisation in the language of logic plays in making our work clear or unclear. To some – that is people who’ve never taken a first level course in logic – much analytic philosophy looks absurdly complicated and technical. I’m interested in this. Does the method provided by formal logic ever obscure rather than clarify, or is this just a matter of not being able to read the logic? Even assuming that everyone should be capable of following it (and why should they?), can someone think of an example where formalising a point or argument renders something that is clear obscure? Would people write to me with their nominations for the prize “most gratuitous formalisation in the language of logic of something that’s perfectly clear in English”?
The publication as a small book last year of Harry Frankfurt’s (1986) paper “On Bullshit” ignited great popular interest in “bullshit”: what is it “to bullshit someone” and why is there so much bullshit about these days? Prime examples of bullshit mentioned in the many popular contributions to the subject post-Frankfurt (just google for it) are found in “business-speak”, in advertising and in politics. What people enjoy about Frankfurt’s book, it seems, is that having a theory of bullshit available makes it possible now to do with a straight face what you previously had to hide in a cough: say that someone is talking bullshit. (We might say that, after Frankfurt, “bullshit” is a technical term.)
As far as I can tell, the theory of bullshit is in its infancy and I’m afraid that I don’t have much to add. Frankfurt distinguishes between honest assertion, lying and bullshitting as follows: In making an honest assertion (in telling the truth) one aims to say what is true and in lying, one aims to say what is not true… both in honest saying and lying one is guided by the aim of truth. In bullshitting, however, the speaker is unconcerned with the truth of what he says; the bullshitter pretends to make an honest assertion whereas he really is just mouthing off. As such, bullshitting is a faking of assertion: the bullshitter pretends to make an assertion, but actually asserts nothing. To people who know me, it will be quite clear why I’m interested in this: I work on the relation between truth, believing and assertion and think Frankfurt makes a very good point about the nature of assertion: honest saying and lying, as species of asserting, involve a concern with the truth of what one says. This comes into sharper focus when we consider the case of the bullshitter who pretends to assert, but, not caring about the truth of what he says, really ends up saying nothing (ends up not really asserting at all).
Be that as it may, Frankfurt thinks that bullshitting is a kind of dishonesty: whenever one speaks dishonestly in this way, what comes out one’s mouth is bullshit. Jerry Cohen disagrees with this characterisation of the relation between bullshitting intent and the shittiness of what one says. He holds that it is possible to talk bullshit without dishonest intent and mentions as an example the stuff emanating from French departments of philosophy and departments of literature in the English-speaking world overly occupied with French theory. (Holding up an example of bullshit, Cohen refers to Althusserian Marxism; he also mentions the writings on science of French theorists from Latour to Kristeva that Sokal criticises.) Cohen holds that there need not be any dishonesty on the part of these people: the problem is not that they are unconcerned with whether what they are saying is true, it is that there is a deficiency in the concepts and language that is deployed by people who “do theory”. What is wrong with much of French philosophy, Cohen thinks, is that it is unclarifiable nonsense and this he wants to distinghuish as a sort of bullshit in its own right. He provides a test for being unclarifiable nonsense that involves adding a negation-sign: if adding a negation-sign to what one is saying makes no difference to its intuitive plausibility, it is bullshit of the “unclarifiable nonsense” kind.
What Cohen calls bullshit, it is clear, is that kind of philosophy perpetrated by people whose names sound continental, that is obscure, a little bit avant garde and generally down on mathematics, science, logic and technology. Recently, I criticised Cohen’s “unclarifiable nonsense” account of bullshit, but offered the following (qualified) support for his views on French philosophy. I held that “postmodernism” is bullshit for the following reason: Assume that the central tenet of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as truth or that the word “true” is no more than a clever cover for whatever beliefs or attitudes are generally accepted in some culture (and that is accepted due to concealed coercion). The problem is this: If there is really no fact of the matter as to what is true and someone may become conscious of this, then there can be no honest speech and no lying; this is because, as Frankfurt holds, assertion and lying is characterised by aiming to say what is true and aiming to say what is not true, respectively. Being fully aware that there is no truth either way, no-one can honestly assert anything (or lie) at all; without truth, assertion looses its goal. All that can remain of speech, if there is no truth, is bullshit or pretending to assert (although just pretending to assert would require at least the idea of truth and truthful assertion to remain, itself a tension in the postmodernist’s position on truth).
My argument invited the accusation of tu quoque from an editor. Analytic philosophers, he suggested, shouldn’t cast stones. Bullshit is not confined to the continent and, in any case, I wouldn’t take it as alright if a “postmodern philosopher” made a blanket attack on analytic philosophy in the same manner as I did. He had me wrong – I am perfectly willing to consider any reasonable argument that there is something systematically wrong with the presuppositions and method of analytic philosophy, its just that I haven’t heard one, despite listening. (By the way, I’m not complaining about the editor, who liked the rest of the piece and accepted it.)
In the interest of fairness, though, my question to the blog is this: do analytic philosophers ever bullshit? Nothing suggests that an analytic philosohper can’t talk Frankfurt bullshit – that is, pretend to care about the truth of what they say when they do not: of course any analytic philosopher is just as capable of this form of dishonesty, psychologically speaking. What’s less clear is that an analytic philosopher can talk Cohen-bullshit. I would suggest that the true analytic philosopher cannot. This is because analytic philosophy is characterised by its reliance on the method provided by formal logic: by formalising the contentious parts of our work, we make absolutely clear what we mean. At least when we formalise our philosophy, we can of course be wrong, but not “unclarifiably unclear”. Precisely the ideal of analytic philosophy is to be clear.
Bearing in mind these two points, does anyone want to offer examples of analytic philosophers talking bullshit (of the Frankfurt or Cohen variety)? Specifically, I’m interested in the role that formalisation in the language of logic plays in making our work clear or unclear. To some – that is people who’ve never taken a first level course in logic – much analytic philosophy looks absurdly complicated and technical. I’m interested in this. Does the method provided by formal logic ever obscure rather than clarify, or is this just a matter of not being able to read the logic? Even assuming that everyone should be capable of following it (and why should they?), can someone think of an example where formalising a point or argument renders something that is clear obscure? Would people write to me with their nominations for the prize “most gratuitous formalisation in the language of logic of something that’s perfectly clear in English”?
posted by bloggin the Question at 8:01 PM
19 Comments:
Good points Niall, I'm also inclined to think that Ben's treatment of postmodernism is attacking a straw-man, because it's too strong:
"Assume that the central tenet of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as truth or that the word “true” is no more than a clever cover for whatever beliefs or attitudes are generally accepted in some culture (and that is accepted due to concealed coercion)."
I don't think that most postmodernists in general deny the existence of a notion of truth, rather they only deny the existence of truth as it is understood/defined by for instance most analytic philosophers, that is, as an absolute and universal notion.
My point is that such an absolute notion isn't necessary to make sense of lying (and, I presume, bullshit). Assume the postmodernist notion of alethic relativism according to which what is true is relative to cultures or societies. For instance, it is true for us that the Earth is billions of years old, but not true for everyone (e.g. for societies that take biblical creationism to be literally true). So there are facts of the matter, even for postmodernists, it's just that these facts are (for instance) culturally constructed, rather than universal. Lying is then easily accommodated, in the normal way. If I said that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, I would be lying because it is not what I believe, nor is it true (for us). If a creationist said that the Earth was billions of years old then he would be lying, for analogous reasons. Postmodernists don't need to throw away the notion of truth or to disassociate it from notions like lying and honesty. They just disagree about some of its (rather fundamental) properties.
Hi Ben
Cohen’s idea of bullshit is quite hard to understand. The “unclarifiable nonsense” formulation on its own seems far too strong – presumably these maligned French philosophers could clarify their claims to a certain extent. They’re not speaking pure gibberish, even if their ideas may be confused, inflated or platitudinous. But the negation-sign thing, on the other hand, looks far too weak. Wouldn't “There are 172 sweets in that jar” come out as bullshit? Since it is equally "intuitively plausible" that there are 172, as that there are not.
As such, it is hard to offer examples of Cohen-style bullshit from the analytic school. But grasping at what Cohen is getting at, here is a speculative attempt.
Charles Hartshorne presents the ontological argument for the existence of god as follows, where g means ”God exists”.
g --> N(g)
N(g) v ~N(g)
~N(g) --> N(~N(g))
N(g) v N(~N(g))
N(~N(g)) --> N(~g)
N(g) v N(~g)
~N(~g)
N(g)
N(g) --> g
g
Evidently, Hartshorne has formalised the bejesus out of this argument. But the whole thing is a sideshow if the proposition “God exists” is incoherent. And whether this is the case is a question that formalisation seems powerless to address. We would need a lengthy natural language discussion about what it would be for an all-powerful being to exist. And we may discover in the course of that discussion that “God exists” cannot be successfully clarified -- that we’ve been the victims of a big confusion.
If that did turn out to be the case, Hartshorne’s whole argument would be shot through with Cohen-style bullshit despite its very analytical style.
If by the 'language of logic' is interpreted broadly, then Chris Peacocke's treatments of concepts would have to count as obscuring something otherwise clear. For example:
SQUARE is the concept C for a thinker to possess which is for him
(S1) to be willing to believe the thought Cm, where m is a perceptual demonstrative, when he is taking his experience at face value, and the object of the demonstrative m is presented in an apparently square region of his environment, and he experiences that region as having eequal sides and as symmetrical about the bisectors of its sides; and
(S2) for an object thought about under some mode of presentation m; to be willing to accept the content Cm when and only when he accepts that the object presented by m has the same shape as perceptual experiences of the kind in (S1) represents objects as having.
This quote is used by Hanjo Glock where he discusses the difference between analytic and continental philosophy (google for his paper 'was wittgenstein an analytic philosopher?' if interested).
My first thought is to agree with Niall that the categories of true, false and Frankfurt bullshit do not jointly account for all possible utterances. Two types of speech in particular seem to me to fall outside this schema: things said for rhetorical or humourous effect. We often say things for these reasons that could not be defended in the context of an analytic philosophical discussion - it is (somtimes) missing the point to call someone on their 'bar-room argument' with proper philosophical objections.
A question then is are we to say that these utterences are bullshit. If not, do they fit into the true or the false category? If so, it seems that the category (Frankfurt) "bullshit" is less interesting (and less moralised) than may otherwise be thought.
Clarification - by "if so" I mean, if they do fit in the category "bullshit".
Hey all,
Ben here.
Apologies for not sticking my hand up yet. To take a few things in turn:
Frankfurt does rule out fiction, acting and so on. In these cases, everyone is aware that no real claim is being communicated by the speaker. What bullshit is for him is pretending to communicate a real claim (and getting the cudos associated with saying something), while no claim is actually being made.
Cohen's negation test is something I don't support, largely for the sort of reason that Niall suggests. Cohen differs from Frankfurt in trying to define bullshit in terms of some feature of the language used by the utterer of bullshit, rather than (as Frankfurt does) in terms of an attitude of the utterer. What I like about Cohen's account, though, is the attempt he makes to explain why some philosophers talk so much bullshit. He gives some hint in a paper called "Deeper into Bullshit" (in Overton, ed. 2002. Contours of Agency) and has an unpublished paper that he distributes by email in which he really lets rip (he blames the pop status of philosophers in France, the ex cathedra teaching style, the centralisation of intellectual life in Paris, etc.)
I'm interested that more than one of you want to defend postmodernism. My claim is this: if you spend most of your philosophical time saying that nothing is really true, how can you explain what it is that people do when they assert anything at all? Asserting is presenting a certain possibility and asserting of it that it actually obtains in the world. Denying that anything is ever really thus and so amounts to a denial that assertion has a point. And if you perfectly self-consciously hold that assertion has no point, you can't lie either and then, on Frankfurt's scheme, only bullshit remains.
Sure, the postmodernist may with a heartfelt feeling utter words like "the space of war has become definitively non-euclidean" (as Baudrillard did about the first gulf war), but this heartfelt feeling doesn't mean he is asserting something (i.e. making a claim). Same with the logical positivist (on whose own scheme describing anything as evil is contentless... of course I don't subscribe to this view).
Janne holds that most postmodernists reject absolute or objective truth, opting for an account of truth that is relativistic. He mentions the possibility of alethic relativism to show how lying can be possible. Problem with this is that of how to account for intercultural lying (even though it does make possible intracultural lying, Janne).
In general, I don't think relativism will help and my "bullshit" account of postmodernism is designed to show why not. If you assert something, you offer an explanation of how the world is not just for you, but for everyone who would care to look. If you DON'T think of assertion like this, assertion wouldn't have any point. I mean, why assert something if you know its only true-for-you? To this, please don't say "I offer something that's true-for-me and you interpret it in a way that's true-for-you". If I can have the awareness that you, too, can take certain things as "true-for-me" (so if I can imagine "true-for-me-for-you" or "true-for-me" from your perspective) I'm assuming that you're much like me, amongst other things as having to treat seeing something is so as a reason for believing it.
More later.
Thanks to all for writing.
Ben again.
Rob S and Mike Campbell's suggestions are both cool. I'll check up on it.
I think humour and so-on Frankfurt will also treat as he does acting, fiction etc.
But hey, do I have to sign up as a "blogger" or an "other" to not be anonymous?
Howzit to all in London anyway. Cape Town's lovely, although all my latest work is on, well, pure bullshit.
PS, my KCL email is a dead parrot now, so I can't see if there have been any responses on the grad staff and students list to this thing. Feel free to encourage people onto the blog to discuss here.
Hi Ben,
Not sure if you succeed in reposting the defence of relativism. "If you assert something, you offer an explanation of how the world is not just for you, but for everyone who would care to look" The relativist can easily agree with you, but just qualify "everyone who would care to look" as everyone in the relevant culture. Admittedly intercultural assertions will be lost to bullshit, and this is philosophically undesirable. But "cultures" don't have to have fixed members. So "Carnap's project is morribund" may assert something to a relatively small set of people, whereas "Eating meat is permissable" will assert something to a larger set containing some of the members of the smaller set. Whether there are any assertions that are true in all cultures is an interesting question, one that the relativist is equipped to answer, but the anti relativist is not.
Anyway, thanks for your post, much appreciated. If you want to have your name on your post just sign in as "other".
You're definitely right, Ben, about the impossibility of intercultural lying the way I set things up, but I still think you're just begging the question against the postmodernists. See, the postmodernists would just reject the notion of truth you're insisting on, and so you're arguing at cross purposes. Or, more infuriatingly, they would probably insist that your analysis is likely to be completely correct, but it's only true for you and your cultural kin, and not for them... I think postmodernists would be happy to concede that intercultural lying is impossible, and that's no bad thing because they would also reject the possibility of intercultural agreements and disagreements in general. The reason is clear: the domain of application of all facts doesn't extend beyond the cultural boundaries in which the facts are constructed. It's a bullet they're gonna bite with relish.
I think there must be ways to snare postmodernists in, but I don't think yours will do the trick. They're a slippery bunch, and on the whole seem entirely unconcerned by the postmodernism-bashing that Sokal and cohorts engage in. I would have thought that their weakest points lie in their own definitions of cultures/societies and the ways in which facts are supposedly constructed in them. In other words, their writing needs to be shown to be absurd in their own terms, and not from the outside, because for them the outside just doesn't count. Of course, if your Baudrillard quote is anything to go by, many postmodernists may always remain beyond the pale, wherever they are...
Anyway, good to hear from you mate. And congrats for the publication, why don't you send me a copy?
Thinking about this further, I’m not convinced there is a distinct category of bullshit here in anything like Cohen’s sense.
Take the Baudrillard example. The above quote is certainly pretentious and an unnecessary abuse of technical language. But it’s also clear that Baudrillard has something in mind when he says that “the space of war has become non-Euclidean”. I imagine he means something like “this is a war such that it is hard to definitively find the ends of it”. This would fit in with Baudrillard’s view that the first Gulf war was a kind of show war held for symbolic reasons in front of the TV cameras. This may be wrong and the way it is expressed is not conducive to reaching a wide audience. But people express bad ideas badly all the time, without uttering bullshit in the sense that Cohen wants to capture.
Perhaps then the real distinction is in the motives people have for the way they express themselves. E.g. Baudrillard chose the term “non-Euclidean” rather than plainer (and more explanatory) language because he wanted to project a certain image of himself, and to create a certain reaction in his audience. But again this doesn’t give us a real distinction. Analytic philosophers at their clearest may also choose to use the vocabulary they do to project a certain image of themselves -- e.g. as hard-headed types able to laser through confusion.
I wonder if analytic bullshit is better found in contextualist discussions. When a philosopher is giving an example of something he does not think felicitous, what is he trying to assert? Here's an example from Stanley's new book on knowledge:
" (1) If I have hands, then I know I have hands. But come to think of it, I might be a brain in a vat, in which case I would believe I have hands, but wouldn't. Now that I'm considering such a skeptical possibility seriously, even if I have hands, I don't know that I do. But what I said earlier is true. FOOTNOTE The reason I have placed the initial sentence in conditional form is that, if the initial sentence was just "I know I have hands", the contextualist could explain the infelicity of the final sentence by appeal to the knowledge account of assertion."
My question is what is the author trying to assert here? His point is that the last sentence is infelicitous, so he could be trying to assert that if some uttered "..", then it would be hard to interpret. But the footnote shows that he has deliberately avoiding making his made up speaker assert anything. "If I have hands then I know I have hands" just doesn't assert anything. The best interpretation I can think of is that I don't have hands, which seems absurd. A parody of the whole passage would be: "If someone to utter a sentence that asserts nothing, then deny it, then claim that it was true, the third claim would sound odd."
Ben, I like your analogy, let me engage with it. I disagree with you when you say "We aim to believe the truth, but don’t know what the truth is that we’re aiming at independently of forming the belief" Surely one can understand a sentence without believing or disbelieving it. Suppose you say to me "Blair died this morning" If I make up my mind to believe you, my arrow firing is my belief, the target is clearly in view: the truth condition of "Blair died this morning".
The other thing you say I disagree with is
"Furthermore, even after we’ve “shot off” our belief, we also don’t ever know for sure that our arrow has really hit…"
This is a little too skeptical for me. Surely we know some of our beliefs are true? Surely we sometimes find our beliefs confirmed. I form the belief that I left the light on in the kitchen. I go to the kitchen and discover that my belief had hit its target: the light is on in the kitchen.
Zooming out of the archery analogy I'm probably broadly in agreement with your project. I withhold belief from "an "African" diet of sweet potatoes, beetroot and lots of garlic is as good in curing AIDS as "western" medicine is." but I don't think the truth of this statement depends on the culture of the believer, apart from in so far as the norms governing "goodness in curing" and
the extension of "western medicine" are culturally variant.
Thanks Ben. Its getting clearer now. If we take an observation sentence, eg. "That wall is red" I claim that if the sentence was true, then anyone who denied it would not be competent in the use of the terms involved ( a blind person would not deny such a sentence) So no one could claim that the sentence was only "true for x" where x was some culture or group. We could simply say that anyone who believed the sentence was false just had a different belief.
Now contrast "Kurt Vonnegut is the greatest American novelist". There is no doubt that someone could sensibly assert this, and sincerely believe it. It is not "bullshit". However, it is possible to believe that Kurt Vonnegut is the greatest US writer while at the same time conceding that there are perfectly literate and intelligent people who would not agree, that the statement is "not true for them".
Where I don't fully understand you is that you seem to be claiming that in the Kurt Vonnegut case, such people, in aiming to have a belief about Vonnegut, are aiming at a different truth. That if S can believe P is true, but also concede that R can believe that P is false without contradiction, then S and R must have different propositional attitudes. In my view it is clear that they have different attitudes to Kurt Vonnegut and what constitutes good literature, but I would not go so far as to say that this means they are operating on completely different concepts of truth or belief.
This kind of relativism is not confined to literature. In the sciences there can be many explanations for the same event, sometime competing in such a way that cannot be resolved. We would want (at least sometimes) to say that there is no final answer, the competing explanations both have their merits, without having to go so far as to say that those who favour one explanation over the other have a different concept of truth or belief.
Hi Ben – a quick point about the political wagon Cohen (and maybe you) are hitched to.
It is very easy to listen to what people say outside of philosophy and incorrectly infer that they are depending on some background philosophical assumption that they would probably disown. For example, is it necessary to believe the South African minister of health “thinks there is no truth”? Maybe she just has mistaken views on AIDS.
Similarly, just because humanities students might talk about what’s ”true for X”, and a “society’s truths” – even about truths being “socially constructed” and such – needn’t lead us to assume they have faulty philosophical assumptions. Rather they’re talking in a different idiom from the one we’d use as philosophers, and they’re talking about different subjects. You just have to probe to find this out. Moreover, many debates about e.g. literature, propaganda, group consciousness, proceed in exactly the same way if you use an idiom in which e.g. “true for you” appears in place of “that which appears true to you”. Because the idiom does no harm (even gives us access to shortcuts and abbreviations), these things can persist in the language harmlessly.
I’m not saying that bad philosophy cannot infect non-philosophical practice. But I think it’s more unusual than you’re making out, for the reason that we literally cannot behave in a way consonant with believing that there is no such thing as truth. And this is to say that we literally cannot (even despite a very small minority of people's protestations) ever bring ourselves to believe such a thing.
Last sentence was unclear. Should have said: "Which is to say that we literally cannot believe such a thing. Even a very small minority of people who say "I believe there is no truth", don't thereby believe it. They demonstrate by their behaviour that they don't."
Having just tried to clarify it again and failed, it's possible my last paragraph above is a bona fide example of analytic Cohen-style bullshit. I stand with what comes before it though.
This is a depressing post because it seems to betray a complete lack of understanding, or even cursory knowledge of so-called post-modern/french/continental philosophy. Actually - that in itself is not depressing. The depressing thing is that this lack of knowledge does not seem to prevent anyone from making absurdly sweeping statements.
"Assume that the central tenet of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as truth or that the word “true” is no more than a clever cover for whatever beliefs or attitudes are generally accepted in some culture (and that is accepted due to concealed coercion)."
Well we can make that assumption, but in terms of empirical accuracy it misses the archer's target and hits an innocent bystander somewhere in paris. The number of important "continental" thinkers who have a 'relativistic' view of truth is incredibly small - in fact I can't think of anyone really. Perhaps you were thinking of Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Lyotard, Levinas, Heidegger, Baudriallard, Badiou or Deleuze? Unfortunately none of them would dream of holding such a view.
Well, the only way I could further argue that point as if you'd read a bit about one or two of these chaps, but it seems you haven't - and so I'll try a more constructive approach. Let's make your original asumption despite what I've said above. I think the problem is that you have taken one 'proposition' of a relativistic position "there is no such thing as absolute Truth" and then interpreted amongst other ideas that, as it were, should have got thrown out at the same time as Truth with a capital T. Well as some of your peers have pointed out, you can still do all the things you did without [T]ruth by using [t]ruth.
This established, we get back to the old analyic Vs. continental hobby horse. Sokal doesn't help things a bit - his hoax was brilliant but Fashionable Nonsense was patchy at best. I remember specifically what he wrote about Deleuze was ignorant because it failed to realise that Deleuze was (explicitly) taking concepts from mathematics and science and using them as a basis to create philosophical concepts. Sokal had no idea of this, had apparently just skimmed through looking amateurly for dodgy looking prose - a sorry state of affairs.
As an example of ignorance take the quotation given here from baudrillard ""the space of war has become definitively non-euclidean" . This can be explained quite easily, according to his theory old er wars were located very locally and easily at a particular place (Dunkirk lets say) whereas the Gulf War was perceived in a much more complex way including (as I think someone said Television). Not just perceived but fought in that way through the use of complex on the ground propaganda etc. The result being (he argues) that the war took place in dimensions of digital propaganda which, from a conceptual point of view, have a complex relation with the battle field. Now consider non-euclidean geometry and Riemmann's contributions to the solution of topological manifolds and you'll happen to see a nice analogy for what Baudrillard is saying. I think he's got it all sorely wrong, but he's certainly not talking nonsense. I guess we should read whole books rather than single sentences, huh?
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