I have to say that the positivist critique that “it’s all meaningless” is seductive and it may well be correct—it feels like the words have meaning, but when you try to parse the sentence the feeling quickly disappears.
The problem is, this isn’t very useful for talking about specific errors and how to avoid them. Many of the statements on that list looked rather meaningless to me, but to someone who believes in one of these statements, there are some underlying beliefs or confusions that need to be addressed before the “meaningless critique” will have any effect. At this point, pointing out the meaninglessness of their pet statement becomes entirely superfluous.
There is a pretty innocent reason for why those passages look meaningless– they’re all jargon filled when you don’t know what the jargon means you will likely fail to understand what the passages mean. A paper on quantum chromodynamics is going to look meaningless to someone who doesn’t know what quarks, quanta, flavor symmetry, gluons, hadrons, chirality etc. refer to. Similarly, I assume most people here have no idea what Plotinus means by “Being”, “Essence”, “Intellectual-Principle”, “form” etc. I’ve done course work on Neo-Platonism and I don’t remember what all of that was about. The same goes for the other passages.
Now Plotinus is particular might still be meaningless since some of that jargon is actually meant to refer to real things that he thinks exist. And insofar as he is referring to non-existentials whether or not the passage is meaningful depends on your philosophy of language (it is either false, meaningless or non-propositional).
Occasionally you find an analytically trained philosopher working on continental subject matter and they tend to assure me that the jargon and unconventional usage actually DO mean things. What does happen, I think, is that the jargon and unconventional language gets abused by stupid people who don’t really understand the original philosopher but try to use their language. Since the language is so hard to parse in the first place it ends up being pretty easy for a charlatan to survive. Particularly if the charlatan isn’t actually working in a philosophy department where there are people to challenge her.
In that vein, I don’t think “bad continental philosophy” consists in Foucault and leading figures like him but many of their insipid followers on the continent and off who were never trained to express themselves clearly and logically.
This is why all philosophers should be trained in the analytical tradition, even if they want to work in other areas.
There is a pretty innocent reason for why those passages look meaningless– they’re all jargon filled when you don’t know what the jargon means you will likely fail to understand what the passages mean.
No, the passages given in the article have much deeper problems than just the jargon. The jargon only serves to defend these texts from criticism; because they’re difficult to understand, anyone who says that these passages are wrong or mere gibberish can be accused of not understanding them. This defense works even if the critic understands the text perfectly.
Uh, maybe. I’m willing to hear arguments to that effect. But you didn’t give one.
I think Plotinus is definitely wrong, I don’t know enough about Hegel to form an opinion, and I disagree with what I know of Foucault. But that doesn’t make what they wrote meaningless.
Arguments to what effect? Are you objecting to my claim that “you don’t understand” is used inappropriately to defend bad philosophy, to the claim that jargon makes it easier to do so, or to my claim that the passages have deeper problems?
Sorry, I should be specific. I don’t think the passages, or the writing of these philosophers and the well-know continental philosophers, generally, are gibberish. I think the reason people think they are gibberish is because of the jargon. I would like to see an argument for why I should consider them gibberish for reasons other than jargon I don’t understand.
And since I hold that the jargon is meaningful, I don’t think that the jargon “only” serves to defend the texts from criticism (did you really mean “only”)? I also, deny that a critic who understands the text perfectly would argue that the text is meaningless– but that issue will be addressed by the argument I ask for above.
(Note: Of course there are deeper problems to these passages. But those problems don’t have anything to do with the syntactic rules for sentence formation or semantic rules for word usage. In other words, the problem isn’t that their gibberish.)
I define “gibberish” to mean “difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely false or meaningless”. Since you have said you think Plotinus and Foucault are wrong, and I think we can agree that they’re at least somewhat obfuscated, then we must have different definitions. What’s yours?
I define gibberish as “difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely meaningless”. I think Plotinus and Foucault are “difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely false”. A statement is meaningless if it either fails to follow rules of syntax, i.e. “Running the the snacks on quickly!” or semantics, i.e. “Green ideas sleep furiously.”
The distinction is actually pretty important. If you know something is meaningless then you can move on, but you can’t decide something is false without first considering the argument, obfuscated or not.
There is some middle ground when it comes to arguments about things that don’t exist. The trinity argument (and probably Plotinus) appeals to something that doesn’t exist and so it says things that would be meaningful if the holy trinity was real but can’t really be evaluated since there is no such thing. Obviously there is no reason for you to care much about this argument. But I don’t think Hegel, Foucault or Heidegger and the other usual suspects are talking about things that don’t exist.
Semantic rules aren’t holding knives to the throat of meaning either.
So yeah, it is more complicated than what I said before because our brain is pretty good at fixing broken sentences with context. Rules for context and pragmatics should also be included in requirements of meaningfulness. My bad for missing that.
The word “exist” confuses you. Does three exist? Maybe yes, maybe no; what real-world consequences would arise from three existing or not? If a tree falls in the forest, etc.
Humanity to date knows two families of statements that appear to possess truth values independent of the listener’s psychology:
1) Experimental results, objectively verifiable by repeating the experiment.
2) Axiom-based mathematics, objectively verifiable e.g. by proof checking software.
Of course people can make personally or culturally meaningful statements that don’t fall into type 1 or 2. Just don’t delude yourself about their universal applicability or call them “science”.
First, the word exist does not confuse me anymore than it confuses anyone else. If you think it does you should say why, since it wasn’t explained in the previous post. The ontological status of numbers is a classic and ongoing philosophical dispute, whether there are real-world consequences to the question, I don’ t know but even if there aren’t it does not follow that the question has no truth value.
Experimental results don’t verify anything, they either falsify or fail to falsify huge sets of different scientific propositions. When an experimental test of a hypothesis comes up false one can dismiss the hypothesis or one can dismiss any number of auxiliary assumptions that you had when you made your hypothesis. It is the job of scientists to find the best interpretation of experimental results according to criteria such as parsimony, consistency, usefulness, etc. But scientific theories are better understood as best working interpretations not objectively verified truths that exist independent of human interpretation. Metaphysics uses the exact same criteria to try and figure out the best interpretations with regard to other issues for which experiments are sometimes relevant but often not.
Also, axiom-based math can’t really be addressed by proof checking software since you can’t program proof-checking software before discovering some axiom based mathematics. Plus it isn’t like we started believing math was true 60 years ago. We figured it out because our vulnerable, biased, human brains happen to have considerable abilities for ascertaining the truth.
Anyway, we also know things based on non-experimental observation and data gathering. This includes non-scientific things like whether or not there is a car on the street as well as the less experimental sciences like, astronomy, linguistics and economics. Knowledge in linguistics and economics is certainly somewhat more precarious than in physics since in the former fields it is by turns often impossible or unethical to run experiments. But that doesn’t mean the insights in these fields aren’t useful. I have no problem calling them sciences.
Of course there are the other so-called analytic truths- the whole set of possible tautologies one can make with natural language and entailment relations between categories. Altogether, I think there are quite a few more statements that possess truth values than just experimental science and axiomatic mathematics and they all involve human interpretation.
This isn’t a reason to be frustrated, it just means we don’t get to take an aerial picture of the terrain in making our map, we’ve got to figure it out by making best guesses according to limited information.
Finally, so what if some philosophy is simply personally and culturally meaningful statements? That isn’t a reason to reject them as bad thinking.
You might have missed my emphasis on well-transferable truth value. Even if the “ontological status of numbers” question has a well-defined truth value to you, or non-experimental economics, or linguistics… how do you transfer the answer between individuals? I’ve indicated two methods of independent verification that correspond to science and math; is there a third one? Persuasive-sounding literature doesn’t cut it, because it can be used for religion just as well. About your final question, what makes philosophy distinct from literature?
Fine. My point was that experimental results aren’t perfectly transferable either. They require interpretation. Hypotheses are proven and disproven in the context of hundreds of other assumptions. We construct models and theories that we think best explain experimental data. Linguists and economists construct models and theories that best explain observed economic behavior and language use. Linguists and economists, granting some exceptions, agree with each other on lots of issues! There is not as much agreement as there is in physics since there is more room for biases and preconceptions when you can’t repeat an experiment over and over again to prove someone wrong. But that doesn’t mean linguists and economists aren’t getting less and less wrong.
Philosophy is a broad subject. A lot of it (definitely most of it in the English speaking world) isn’t just culturally meaningful but scientifically meaningful. In epistemology they try and form models and theories that best explain our understanding of what counts as knowledge. In ethics they do the same for our understanding of what counts as moral. In philosophy of science they try and explain our understanding of what counts as science. There are also fields such as philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology which address philosophical and interpretive issues within those fields like interpreting quantum mechanics (where the philosophers new the Copenhagen interpretation was bunk long before the physicists began realizing it) and the ontological status of biological categories like ‘species’. There is Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Time, Philosophy of Mathematics etc. That doesn’t even include the fields that were once part of philosophy but expanded to become separate subjects (logic, linguistics, cognitive science).There is even something called experimental philosophy where they, you know, experiment. I don’t know what your experience with philosophy is. Maybe you just had someone make you read Plato.
Now it is true religions make metaphysical arguments. But I think you’re wrong to say it can be used for religion just as well. The metaphysical arguments for God’s existence fail. The vast majority of analytic philosophers (and even continental philosophers) are atheists.
But of course there is a whole continental tradition which might be better described as “culturally meaningful” or “politically meaningful”. But even here there is an obvious sense in which culturally meaningful philosophy is distinct from fiction. Cultural philosophy makes arguments and descriptions which readers can dispute and challenge. You can say of a cultural philosopher that he does not have a complete grasp of our culture or that his response is misguided. Cultural philosophers hold debates. All the time. Novelists don’t. Now, I admit that these debates are not often that valuable since if the two sides have a different understanding of culture they’re going to talk past one another. Nonetheless, viewers still have grounds to adjudicate between them and often their thinking inspires political action.
Literature is stories. Stories that may have allegorical or instructional purposes but they’re not in a form that one can contradict and that makes them particularly dangerous.
So you maintain that anything which follows a few syntactic and semantic laws cannot be gibberish? I disagree; text can have meaning and still be gibberish. Consider a sequence of words drawn uniformly at random from a dictionary, then slotted into a repeating template like (noun) (verb) (article) (adjective) (noun). The template ensures that no rules of syntax are violated. A few constraints on the vocabulary can ensure there are no egregious violations of semantic rules, like green ideas and furious sleeping. Restrict the vocabulary to a few hundred concrete words and you can even ensure that every sentence makes a testable prediction. But it’s definitely gibberish.
Well there are a lot of semantic rules and plenty that we’ve haven’t formalized. So I’m not convinced anyone now alive could write such a program. But I’m not a programmer so maybe someone has proved me wrong. However,iIf they were successful I don’t think I would consider the result gibberish- especially if each sentence made a testable prediction. In this case wouldn’t some of the predictions be true? If so then it is clear that your definition is not broad enough.
Thats troubling since I had already concluded your definition was too broad because it seemed to include important but complex and falsified scientific claims,
Uh, maybe. I’m willing to hear arguments to that effect. But you didn’t give one.
If you narrow it down to one passage, I will. The reason I didn’t before was because you referred to all the passages collectively, and I don’t have time to analyze all of them.
I have to say that the positivist critique that “it’s all meaningless” is seductive and it may well be correct—it feels like the words have meaning, but when you try to parse the sentence the feeling quickly disappears.
The problem is, this isn’t very useful for talking about specific errors and how to avoid them. Many of the statements on that list looked rather meaningless to me, but to someone who believes in one of these statements, there are some underlying beliefs or confusions that need to be addressed before the “meaningless critique” will have any effect. At this point, pointing out the meaninglessness of their pet statement becomes entirely superfluous.
There is a pretty innocent reason for why those passages look meaningless– they’re all jargon filled when you don’t know what the jargon means you will likely fail to understand what the passages mean. A paper on quantum chromodynamics is going to look meaningless to someone who doesn’t know what quarks, quanta, flavor symmetry, gluons, hadrons, chirality etc. refer to. Similarly, I assume most people here have no idea what Plotinus means by “Being”, “Essence”, “Intellectual-Principle”, “form” etc. I’ve done course work on Neo-Platonism and I don’t remember what all of that was about. The same goes for the other passages.
Now Plotinus is particular might still be meaningless since some of that jargon is actually meant to refer to real things that he thinks exist. And insofar as he is referring to non-existentials whether or not the passage is meaningful depends on your philosophy of language (it is either false, meaningless or non-propositional).
Occasionally you find an analytically trained philosopher working on continental subject matter and they tend to assure me that the jargon and unconventional usage actually DO mean things. What does happen, I think, is that the jargon and unconventional language gets abused by stupid people who don’t really understand the original philosopher but try to use their language. Since the language is so hard to parse in the first place it ends up being pretty easy for a charlatan to survive. Particularly if the charlatan isn’t actually working in a philosophy department where there are people to challenge her.
In that vein, I don’t think “bad continental philosophy” consists in Foucault and leading figures like him but many of their insipid followers on the continent and off who were never trained to express themselves clearly and logically.
This is why all philosophers should be trained in the analytical tradition, even if they want to work in other areas.
No, the passages given in the article have much deeper problems than just the jargon. The jargon only serves to defend these texts from criticism; because they’re difficult to understand, anyone who says that these passages are wrong or mere gibberish can be accused of not understanding them. This defense works even if the critic understands the text perfectly.
Uh, maybe. I’m willing to hear arguments to that effect. But you didn’t give one.
I think Plotinus is definitely wrong, I don’t know enough about Hegel to form an opinion, and I disagree with what I know of Foucault. But that doesn’t make what they wrote meaningless.
Arguments to what effect? Are you objecting to my claim that “you don’t understand” is used inappropriately to defend bad philosophy, to the claim that jargon makes it easier to do so, or to my claim that the passages have deeper problems?
Sorry, I should be specific. I don’t think the passages, or the writing of these philosophers and the well-know continental philosophers, generally, are gibberish. I think the reason people think they are gibberish is because of the jargon. I would like to see an argument for why I should consider them gibberish for reasons other than jargon I don’t understand.
And since I hold that the jargon is meaningful, I don’t think that the jargon “only” serves to defend the texts from criticism (did you really mean “only”)? I also, deny that a critic who understands the text perfectly would argue that the text is meaningless– but that issue will be addressed by the argument I ask for above.
(Note: Of course there are deeper problems to these passages. But those problems don’t have anything to do with the syntactic rules for sentence formation or semantic rules for word usage. In other words, the problem isn’t that their gibberish.)
I define “gibberish” to mean “difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely false or meaningless”. Since you have said you think Plotinus and Foucault are wrong, and I think we can agree that they’re at least somewhat obfuscated, then we must have different definitions. What’s yours?
I define gibberish as “difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely meaningless”. I think Plotinus and Foucault are “difficult to understand and entirely or almost entirely false”. A statement is meaningless if it either fails to follow rules of syntax, i.e. “Running the the snacks on quickly!” or semantics, i.e. “Green ideas sleep furiously.”
The distinction is actually pretty important. If you know something is meaningless then you can move on, but you can’t decide something is false without first considering the argument, obfuscated or not.
There is some middle ground when it comes to arguments about things that don’t exist. The trinity argument (and probably Plotinus) appeals to something that doesn’t exist and so it says things that would be meaningful if the holy trinity was real but can’t really be evaluated since there is no such thing. Obviously there is no reason for you to care much about this argument. But I don’t think Hegel, Foucault or Heidegger and the other usual suspects are talking about things that don’t exist.
Syntax does rules necessarily broken imply meaninglessness not.
Semantic rules aren’t holding knives to the throat of meaning either.
So yeah, it is more complicated than what I said before because our brain is pretty good at fixing broken sentences with context. Rules for context and pragmatics should also be included in requirements of meaningfulness. My bad for missing that.
The word “exist” confuses you. Does three exist? Maybe yes, maybe no; what real-world consequences would arise from three existing or not? If a tree falls in the forest, etc.
Humanity to date knows two families of statements that appear to possess truth values independent of the listener’s psychology:
1) Experimental results, objectively verifiable by repeating the experiment.
2) Axiom-based mathematics, objectively verifiable e.g. by proof checking software.
Of course people can make personally or culturally meaningful statements that don’t fall into type 1 or 2. Just don’t delude yourself about their universal applicability or call them “science”.
First, the word exist does not confuse me anymore than it confuses anyone else. If you think it does you should say why, since it wasn’t explained in the previous post. The ontological status of numbers is a classic and ongoing philosophical dispute, whether there are real-world consequences to the question, I don’ t know but even if there aren’t it does not follow that the question has no truth value.
Experimental results don’t verify anything, they either falsify or fail to falsify huge sets of different scientific propositions. When an experimental test of a hypothesis comes up false one can dismiss the hypothesis or one can dismiss any number of auxiliary assumptions that you had when you made your hypothesis. It is the job of scientists to find the best interpretation of experimental results according to criteria such as parsimony, consistency, usefulness, etc. But scientific theories are better understood as best working interpretations not objectively verified truths that exist independent of human interpretation. Metaphysics uses the exact same criteria to try and figure out the best interpretations with regard to other issues for which experiments are sometimes relevant but often not.
Also, axiom-based math can’t really be addressed by proof checking software since you can’t program proof-checking software before discovering some axiom based mathematics. Plus it isn’t like we started believing math was true 60 years ago. We figured it out because our vulnerable, biased, human brains happen to have considerable abilities for ascertaining the truth.
Anyway, we also know things based on non-experimental observation and data gathering. This includes non-scientific things like whether or not there is a car on the street as well as the less experimental sciences like, astronomy, linguistics and economics. Knowledge in linguistics and economics is certainly somewhat more precarious than in physics since in the former fields it is by turns often impossible or unethical to run experiments. But that doesn’t mean the insights in these fields aren’t useful. I have no problem calling them sciences.
Of course there are the other so-called analytic truths- the whole set of possible tautologies one can make with natural language and entailment relations between categories. Altogether, I think there are quite a few more statements that possess truth values than just experimental science and axiomatic mathematics and they all involve human interpretation.
This isn’t a reason to be frustrated, it just means we don’t get to take an aerial picture of the terrain in making our map, we’ve got to figure it out by making best guesses according to limited information.
Finally, so what if some philosophy is simply personally and culturally meaningful statements? That isn’t a reason to reject them as bad thinking.
You might have missed my emphasis on well-transferable truth value. Even if the “ontological status of numbers” question has a well-defined truth value to you, or non-experimental economics, or linguistics… how do you transfer the answer between individuals? I’ve indicated two methods of independent verification that correspond to science and math; is there a third one? Persuasive-sounding literature doesn’t cut it, because it can be used for religion just as well. About your final question, what makes philosophy distinct from literature?
Fine. My point was that experimental results aren’t perfectly transferable either. They require interpretation. Hypotheses are proven and disproven in the context of hundreds of other assumptions. We construct models and theories that we think best explain experimental data. Linguists and economists construct models and theories that best explain observed economic behavior and language use. Linguists and economists, granting some exceptions, agree with each other on lots of issues! There is not as much agreement as there is in physics since there is more room for biases and preconceptions when you can’t repeat an experiment over and over again to prove someone wrong. But that doesn’t mean linguists and economists aren’t getting less and less wrong.
Philosophy is a broad subject. A lot of it (definitely most of it in the English speaking world) isn’t just culturally meaningful but scientifically meaningful. In epistemology they try and form models and theories that best explain our understanding of what counts as knowledge. In ethics they do the same for our understanding of what counts as moral. In philosophy of science they try and explain our understanding of what counts as science. There are also fields such as philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology which address philosophical and interpretive issues within those fields like interpreting quantum mechanics (where the philosophers new the Copenhagen interpretation was bunk long before the physicists began realizing it) and the ontological status of biological categories like ‘species’. There is Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Time, Philosophy of Mathematics etc. That doesn’t even include the fields that were once part of philosophy but expanded to become separate subjects (logic, linguistics, cognitive science).There is even something called experimental philosophy where they, you know, experiment. I don’t know what your experience with philosophy is. Maybe you just had someone make you read Plato.
Now it is true religions make metaphysical arguments. But I think you’re wrong to say it can be used for religion just as well. The metaphysical arguments for God’s existence fail. The vast majority of analytic philosophers (and even continental philosophers) are atheists.
But of course there is a whole continental tradition which might be better described as “culturally meaningful” or “politically meaningful”. But even here there is an obvious sense in which culturally meaningful philosophy is distinct from fiction. Cultural philosophy makes arguments and descriptions which readers can dispute and challenge. You can say of a cultural philosopher that he does not have a complete grasp of our culture or that his response is misguided. Cultural philosophers hold debates. All the time. Novelists don’t. Now, I admit that these debates are not often that valuable since if the two sides have a different understanding of culture they’re going to talk past one another. Nonetheless, viewers still have grounds to adjudicate between them and often their thinking inspires political action.
Literature is stories. Stories that may have allegorical or instructional purposes but they’re not in a form that one can contradict and that makes them particularly dangerous.
So you maintain that anything which follows a few syntactic and semantic laws cannot be gibberish? I disagree; text can have meaning and still be gibberish. Consider a sequence of words drawn uniformly at random from a dictionary, then slotted into a repeating template like (noun) (verb) (article) (adjective) (noun). The template ensures that no rules of syntax are violated. A few constraints on the vocabulary can ensure there are no egregious violations of semantic rules, like green ideas and furious sleeping. Restrict the vocabulary to a few hundred concrete words and you can even ensure that every sentence makes a testable prediction. But it’s definitely gibberish.
Well there are a lot of semantic rules and plenty that we’ve haven’t formalized. So I’m not convinced anyone now alive could write such a program. But I’m not a programmer so maybe someone has proved me wrong. However,iIf they were successful I don’t think I would consider the result gibberish- especially if each sentence made a testable prediction. In this case wouldn’t some of the predictions be true? If so then it is clear that your definition is not broad enough.
Thats troubling since I had already concluded your definition was too broad because it seemed to include important but complex and falsified scientific claims,
If you narrow it down to one passage, I will. The reason I didn’t before was because you referred to all the passages collectively, and I don’t have time to analyze all of them.