Truth Discussion Time - Page 68

On February 12 2018 11:39 Liquid`Drone wrote: I don't understand why any of this is supposed to be important or significant

You like loco claim these are outliers, they do not represent mainstream feminist or leftist culture, so since that cant be quantified easily I said I would post these things to give a glimpse, and as I said, these are verified twitter people, people calling for white genocide and shit like that, I would like you to show me a single tweet from a verified user calling for the genocide of a minority, please go ahead.

This should give you some perspective onto what is really more mainstream, white fascism or violent leftist ideas.

On February 12 2018 20:47 RiKD wrote: The postmodern boogey man similar to the lesbians at Brown. What about the frat boys at Duke or Vanderbilt? That is a much scarier proposition. A guy like Bill Frist or those lacrosse players that raped women. Not some 20 year old who colors her hair blue, doesn't shave her armpits and reads Foucault.

Again, this false perception that this blue-armpit-haired woman are harmless, it seems this thead need even more twitter screenshots

On February 12 2018 20:10 Loco wrote: Existentialist comic.jpg

Posting comics from a known postmodern communist about how postmodernists arent communist is totally a good idea bro

On February 13 2018 01:32 Stroggoz wrote: i don't know what you mean by we are entering a 'post modern world'. what does that mean? enlightenment ideals are what we need, the quest for truth and rationality, and moral enlightenment too. That's what is needed to live in a world built on peace and justice rather than war and inequality, and environmental degradation, which is what we have. It is in fact, what the world has always needed for any real progress.

Ok, I agree with you on the enlightenment ideals.

3 things:

- Derrida on interpretation is valuable. The common misconception is that he is saying that there are no bad interpretations and basically that nothing matters. That is not true.
- Foucault on something like surveillance and docile humans. We are in that future. It will only get worse if we do nothing about it.
- Baudrillard on the hyper real. Do humans even just go out to a camp site somewhere in the middle of no where and just have missionary sex? Social media, McDonald's, pornography... what is actually real anymore?

Why not get educated in both? I know there is only so much time and I would agree that if time is a factor go with the Greeks but a lot of the post-modernist thought is more than nonsense.

Several prominent MDG politicians in Norway keep retweeting Linda Sarsour lulz (leftist / green political party)

On February 13 2018 01:59 Baalim wrote: Show nested quote + On February 12 2018 20:47 RiKD wrote: The postmodern boogey man similar to the lesbians at Brown. What about the frat boys at Duke or Vanderbilt? That is a much scarier proposition. A guy like Bill Frist or those lacrosse players that raped women. Not some 20 year old who colors her hair blue, doesn't shave her armpits and reads Foucault. Again, this false perception that this blue-armpit-haired woman are harmless, it seems this thead need even more twitter screenshots

Maybe they aren't all harmless or maybe when they all get together they can be quite annoying or "dangerous" somehow but the ones I have known in real life are actually quite harmless. Where I used to live a lot of my female friends were "lesbian at brown" types or had red colored hair, blue colored hair, green colored hair or just what some would label as "freak" haircuts. There was a crowd who stopped shaving their legs and armpits. Most of them were pretty cool people and I don't see how they were causing any harm. They may talk about the patriarchy or white men but genocide? No. Most of them were just cool people I was happy to associate with.

On February 13 2018 02:53 RiKD wrote: Show nested quote + On February 13 2018 01:59 Baalim wrote:   On February 12 2018 20:47 RiKD wrote: The postmodern boogey man similar to the lesbians at Brown. What about the frat boys at Duke or Vanderbilt? That is a much scarier proposition. A guy like Bill Frist or those lacrosse players that raped women. Not some 20 year old who colors her hair blue, doesn't shave her armpits and reads Foucault. Again, this false perception that this blue-armpit-haired woman are harmless, it seems this thead need even more twitter screenshots Maybe they aren't all harmless or maybe when they all get together they can be quite annoying or "dangerous" somehow but the ones I have known in real life are actually quite harmless. Where I used to live a lot of my female friends were "lesbian at brown" types or had red colored hair, blue colored hair, green colored hair or just what some would label as "freak" haircuts. There was a crowd who stopped shaving their legs and armpits. Most of them were pretty cool people and I don't see how they were causing any harm. They may talk about the patriarchy or white men but genocide? No. Most of them were just cool people I was happy to associate with.

If they aren't ranting about the patriarchy, toxic masculinity and cis white male and privileges then these are not the people we are talking about

On February 12 2018 23:36 Stroggoz wrote: post modernism is harmful in that it teaches people nonsense when those people could be learning science. You don't want to teach people nonsense at a university. everyone here would agree that teaching astrology is harmful because it is holding people back from science. The same applies to postmodernism. And i am talking about the extreme elements of postmodernism like slavoj zizek, lacan, derrida, ect. I dont agree with the rantings and ravings from the right wing, that is meant to be 'criticism', of post modernism, but the more reasonable criticisms of postmodernism like that from dawkins, chomsky, bricmont, ect. It's not a huge deal because post modernism is dying out anyway, rationality is prevailing.

There's really no comparison between post-modern philosophy and astrology. Only a lazy person who has relied on terrible second-hand opinions of non-experts would think something like that (lazy because it's convenient and it simplifies the world, no doubt). This sounds insulting but I really don't mean it to be. I'm sure you mean well by saying it, it's just misinformed. And Dawkins, really? If you want to see how much of an authority Dawkins is on philosophy and other scientific disciplines, go watch "Moving Naturalism Forward" on YouTube. What you'll see in every segment is the most quiet person ever, it's a wonder he didn't fall asleep. Even in his own field he was a dismissive and arrogant cunt for so long, especially towards Margulis, who ended up proving him wrong. Her contributions are understood to be far more important than his now.

People aren't taught post-modernism in the way you mean it, i.e. they are not indoctrinated to become Derridaists or Foucaultists. They're taught to be intellectually curious and challenge themselves and those people just happen to have said challenging things that merit attention (well, maybe not Zizek). They're not inherently harmful, it's what people do with the ideas and whether they become dogmatic or not that matters. I haven't read Lacan but I came across a passage where he is cited in a book I just finished by Francisco Varela and it was quite profound, so I immediately think he shouldn't be dismissed either.

I don't think anyone can take a sober look at the world and come to the conclusion that "rationality is prevailing". When the US engaged in torture in recent years in places like Abu Ghraib, it was embraced and defended by liberals. I also don't think anyone who is up to date with the work in neuroscience (Damasio), or the work in anthropology (Bateson) would think that the ideal of the Enlightenment in Reason (with a capital 'R') is believable nowadays. Rationality at the very least needs to be complexified and understood to be something quite different than what Enlightenment thinkers thought it was. This is one of the things that Peterson partly gets right, man is not just homo sapiens (meaning ''endowed with rationality'') but also homo mythologicus (with a deep need for meaning/mythology) and also homo demens (capable of madness and rationalization), which are antagonistic to rationality. Man is also not just homo economicus (self-interested rational agent that tries to maximize utility) but also homo ludens (with a desire to play and even waste).

On February 13 2018 11:21 Loco wrote: Show nested quote + On February 12 2018 23:36 Stroggoz wrote: post modernism is harmful in that it teaches people nonsense when those people could be learning science. You don't want to teach people nonsense at a university. everyone here would agree that teaching astrology is harmful because it is holding people back from science. The same applies to postmodernism. And i am talking about the extreme elements of postmodernism like slavoj zizek, lacan, derrida, ect. I dont agree with the rantings and ravings from the right wing, that is meant to be 'criticism', of post modernism, but the more reasonable criticisms of postmodernism like that from dawkins, chomsky, bricmont, ect. It's not a huge deal because post modernism is dying out anyway, rationality is prevailing. There's really no comparison between post-modern philosophy and astrology. Only a lazy person who has relied on terrible second-hand opinions of non-experts would think something like that (because it's convenient and it simplifies the world, no doubt). This sounds insulting but I really don't mean it to be. I'm sure you mean well by saying it, it's just misinformed. And Dawkins, really? If you want to see how much of an authority Dawkins is on philosophy and other scientific disciplines, go watch "Moving Naturalism Forward" on YouTube. What you'll see in every segment is the most quiet person ever, it's a wonder he didn't fall asleep. Even in his own field he was a dismissive and arrogant cunt for so long, especially towards Margulis, who ended up proving him wrong. Her contributions are understood to be far more important than his now. People aren't taught post-modernism in the way you mean it, i.e. they are not indoctrinated to become Derridaists or Foucaultists. They're taught to be intellectually curious and challenge themselves and those people just happen to have said challenging things that merit attention (well, maybe not Zizek). They're not inherently harmful, it's what people do with the ideas and whether they become dogmatic or not that matters. I haven't read Lacan but I came across a passage where he is cited in a book I just finished by Francisco Varela and it was quite profound, so I immediately think he shouldn't be dismissed either. I don't think anyone can take a sober look at the world and come to the conclusion that "rationality is prevailing". I also don't think anyone who is up to date with the work in neuroscience would think that the ideal of the enlightenment in Reason is believable nowadays. Rationality at the very least needs to be complexified and understood to be something quite different than what Enlightenment thinkers thought it was.

I was talking about the worst elements of post modernism, which have thankfully been eradicated largely thanks to rational people like sokal. It's pretty harmful though, i mean i've seen rikd make comments like one the one about different truth narratives. Again, a comment that didn't even rise to the level of stupidity in my view, and one that people like socrates or plato were making fun of back in classical greece. astrology at least achieves stupidity. So some of the things postmodernists have said are in fact dumber than astrology. And yeah rationality has prevailed. I think there is a graph displaying this showing how postmodernism is on the decline in universities. Thank god, because i hate seeing grad students get sucked into this and wasting their lives on constructivism theorirs

I was refering to dawkins criticism of postmodernism, and you invoke the words 'authority', as if you need any authority to criticize it. His criticism is a pretty simple one actually. And then you go on to attack him for his personal character and his work in other fields, which may well be true but it is irrelevant to the argument. What about sokal and chomsky? Do they have the 'authority' to criticize post modernism? Because chomsky has read a lot of post modernist work and his criticisms are very simple as well, basically the same one anyone from the sciences make. It's either useless superflous theory or its gibberish.

I added a couple things to my previous post if you want to go and re-read it. I have already commented on Sokal & Bricmont and the conclusions we can draw from that in our previous talk on this. I have also commented on Chomsky when Baal brought up his critique, who is very far from having read a lost of post-modern work. He admits that much himself. The short answer is no, they are not authoritative sources on the subject. Chomsky is a brilliant linguist and political activist whose interest in philosophy doesn't go outside of the Analytic tradition. Go read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on these thinkers if you want a real idea of what they said. Relying on the opinions of people who have had no interest in Continental philosophy their entire life--no matter how respected they are in their fields-- is just an excuse to not do any work. If you don't want to do any work, that's completely fine, we can't be interested in everything, but then at the very least you shouldn't present the opinions of other people as gospel because that's just embarrassing.

You should be embarrassed that you constantly to resort to appeal to authority and evade basic criticisms all the time. I wasn't impressed with how you addressed sokal and bricmont because you basically evaded their criticisms. I havnt seen your counter to chomsky.

I'm not totally relying on second hand opinions, I definitely havn't read even a small fraction of post modernism literature. i've tried reading richard rorty for example, but you cant make sense of it. I tried reading zizek as well. Alot of it is just sheer nonsense. how are you supposed to make your way through a paragraph without cringing? I read some foucault and thought he had done some good historical research. I came to the same conclusion people like chomsky did. People like rikd are saying dumb shit like there are different versions of truth and you never address that or any of the other equally stupid things that post modernists say. I never see you admit that those very simple things are just nonsense.

Saying some people are not authoritative sources is a negative proposition, an appeal to authority is a positive claim. Pointing to the most famous Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the internet must be the appeal to authority then? What is it with you guys struggling so much to understand this fallacy? Logical Form: According to person 1 (an authority), Y is true. Therefore, Y is true. The Encyclopedia is maintained by a large number of scholars in different fields, it's not a person. At the very least you should have cited Dennett who has a hundred times more credibility even though he's also largely dismissive of Continental thought.

Dawkins himself says exactly what I stated before in his critique: "Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics." This is a minority of texts/authors. Your problem is not with a minority of texts and authors who "misrepresent science". It's with thinkers who doubt the objectivity of knowledge (foundationalism) and the myth of progress (among other things). And probably people who write things that you are not able to understand quickly. So Hegel for instance would be a total charlatan to you even if he's not misrepresenting science.

RiKD is working through things and expressing himself, it's not my place to police his thoughts. I also don't think his particular view of truth is necessarily wrong, it just needs to be contextualized. It's very much a Nietzschean "You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." type of thing. You can oppose that and offer arguments for your position but you just mock it.

has chomsky ever agreed with anything?

uh no, you were making an of appeal to authority by dismissing chomsky/dawkins by saying they are not experts in postmodernism, and the implication was you needed to be an expert in a field to criticize it. No one needs to be an expert to criticize any field, whether its mathematics or astrology.

Did i actually say anything about people who doubt the objectivity of knowledge or myth of progress? Your putting words in my mouth.

I mean all the people i cant understand because they are clearly obfuscating their writings to be as difficult to understand as possible. and those who have ridiculous views on science, like richard rorty for example, and others. His page on stanford enclycopedia is a good laugh, esp the part on science, truth and rationality. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/.

Then there is the stuff that i dont mind too much but don't see the point in spending much time on it, like the social construcivist theories.

You can't argue against a person who denies truth altogether, that's the point. It in itself does not even rise to coherent argument so how do you address it? But there are postmodernists like rorty who dismiss the idea of 'argument' as a form of intellectual progress, so according a some postmodernists i can't even argue with you anyway,

Oh wait nvm, you've got neitszche to explain it to me! this whole argument doesn't even matter. i got my way, you got yours. Great! fantastic, it looks like you and baal have got your own views and it doesn't even matter there either. lmao.

uh no, you were making an of appeal to authority by dismissing chomsky/dawkins by saying they are not experts in postmodernism, and the implication was you needed to be an expert in a field to criticize it. No one needs to be an expert to criticize any field, whether its mathematics or astrology.

I've just posted the logical form of an appeal to authority fallacy and demonstrated clearly that my statement wasn't one since it's a negative proposition, yet you're still hurling this around. It's not very rational of you. An appeal to authority is not what you decide it is when authorities are brought up.

You are relying on the authoritative status of a couple physicists, Chomsky and Dawkins in order to dismiss a deep well of varied philosophical thought which you deem 'extreme'. I'm simply saying that you're making an error by transferring their authority in their fields to other fields of inquiry in which they are not educated. That's all. Yes, they can critique whatever they want based on their cursory exploration of it, that doesn't mean that it's good criticism and that you should take it as gospel. Dawkins is out of his depths on anything philosophical, not just concerning post-modernism. Chomsky has clearly stated that he hasn't been able to get into their writings because of the prose so he can't even comment on the substance. You're damn right to say it's simple criticism, it's so simple as to be meaningless.

Did i actually say anything about people who doubt the objectivity of knowledge or myth of progress? Your putting words in my mouth.

You don't need to explicitly say those things... you're a foundationalist when you get upset at someone who doesn't have the same concept of truth as you do. You also have faith in the idea of progress as a classical liberal with Enlightenment ideals and oppose those who believe those ideals are insufficient and that human moral and social progress is a myth. This is the underpinning of why you dislike everything Post-modern, because they are relativists who don't believe in your view of progress. But those are not uniquely post-modern things. The former isn't even of Western origins.

I mean all the people i cant understand because they are clearly obfuscating their writings to be as difficult to understand as possible. and those who have ridiculous views on science, like richard rorty for example, and others. His page on stanford enclycopedia is a good laugh, esp the part on science, truth and rationality. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/.

You can assume that they are doing it on purpose and maybe they are. But I find it a lot more productive to assume that it was necessary and that I have something to learn if I make an effort to understand it. If I'm not willing to make the effort, and I admit that I'm not with a lot of post-modern thinkers, then I'm just going to withhold judgment until I do.

I haven't read Rorty but as far as I know he popularized Derrida's thought in America so of course his philosophical views would bother the crap out of you. I'm pretty sure his views on science are thoughtful since he was influenced by Kuhn. You'd probably think Kuhn is nonsense too but he was a genius who would blow your mind if you allowed him to. Dennett disliked all of the post-modern writings and was critical of Rorty's work which legitimized them but they were close friends and he was a huge admirer of his anyway. It should tell you that it's not as black and white as you think it is.

Oh wait nvm, you've got neitszche to explain it to me! this whole argument doesn't even matter.

You asked me to comment on it and I did. I just remembered the context where RiKD said "this is my truth", it was a clear nod at Nietzsche and you got upset about it and thought it made no sense from your own positivist/foundationalist perspective. I'm not on either side of this argument, but I'm closer to Nietzschean perspectivism as a non-foundationalist than I am to your position.

Edit: I think this bit of Rorty answers your expressed concerns ("denis truth altogether" = charge of 'relativism'):

You can't argue against a person who denies truth altogether, that's the point. It in itself does not even rise to coherent argument so how do you address it? But there are postmodernists like rorty who dismiss the idea of 'argument' as a form of intellectual progress, so according a some postmodernists i can't even argue with you anyway,

'"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called 'relativists' are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.'

'In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try."

i'm not saying anyone has authority over anything actually. Chomsky himself admits he has no qualifications in linguistics. i'm saying chomsky and dawkins had some reasonable criticisms of postmodernism, that's all. I wouldn't say sokal or bricmont have any forms of intellectual authority. I simply don't beleive such a thing exists in the context of rational argument. I pointed to those guys because they have good criticisms and experiments to test whether some of the leading postmodernists were talking nonsense and not getting their journals peer reviewed, and those experiments were successful. Dawkins was not out of his depth in the bits he criticized. he was basically looking at the stuff bricmont and sokal reviewed, and his ridicule of postmodernism was well warranted. It doesn't take a genius to read article which argues newtons principia is a rape manual to realize something is seriously nonsensical here. I mean, I havn't read newtons principia. Does that make me out of my element? No because i can simply rely on the fact that thousands of physicists have read it, and i doubt very much they are lying to me when they say the postmodernists are mispepresenting it. That's basic common sense.

look, anyone can and should doubt the objectivity of knowledge, you should doubt everything. The postmodernists who do doubt it don't actually present good arguments in favour of their views. (well they cant, because they dont beleive in rational argument, or at least some of them dont.) so yes you did put words in my mouth. As for progress being a myth. I havn't explored those arguments. It seems reasonable to me to assume moral progress can be made given it has been done in many ways up until now. But of course history isn't linear, and it may not happen in the long run. and everything can be undone.

i've read khuns work and i think it was quite valueable, rorty's views are worlds apart from khun. I don't get the comment on dennet being friends with rorty. That isn't relevant from what i can tell. I am friends with post modernists as well, so what?

And yeah i will get upset about this stuff because i care about intellectual rigor and integrity. And it does make no sense. lol

I think you care more about intellectual rigidity than intellectual rigor at this point in time. This is normal in a consumer capitalist society though, we are brought up to value rigidity since we have to become (hyper-)specialized to compete with others. I read a wonderful analogy yesterday related to this topic and I wish I could quickly translate it but it would be challenging. The gist of it is that communication is made much easier and more fruitful on a scaffold instead of a completed structure. When a structure is completed, it's fixed and frozen. Its rigidity doesn't allow you to go further and explore, with the goal of having a global vision of things and a better understanding of other people's perspectives. Better to have a makeshift bridge made of rope instead of steal when it gives you more freedom and allows you to go further. The fragility of it doesn't bother us in the measure that the rules of the game are accepted. The problem is that people don't come to agree on the rules of the game, most of the time they're not aware there's one or they are just interested in winning, not exploring. Kuhn's profound insight is here: "when the theory changes, reality changes" (when the rules change, the game is a completely new one). And Foucault's contribution is showing how those with power change the rules.

You might be friends with 'post-modernists' but they're probably not spreading the ideas of people you detest to thousands of people on campus. That Dennett still admired Rorty despite this tells us something relevant. As for Dawkins, he just jumped on an easy bit of publicity by making unoriginal criticisms of the Sokal hoax as far as I can tell. It's the equivalent of attacking low-hanging fruit on social media nowadays. Where it actually matters, he's completely out of the loop. I think he actually did doze off during the Moving Naturalism Forward conference and he just bailed after a few sessions.

yeah not too sure i know what you mean by intellectual rigidity. I think we should try to understand the structure, principles, and laws of reality, as the philosopher rudolph carnap argued. And i think we should constantly be questioning the rules of the game. And by that i take it you mean certain assumptions/axioms that we accept. Well, that's partly why i like philosophy. I don't really understand your analogy too well, perhaps present it in clearer terms? I am completely unforgiving and merciless in views i don't agree with. If they seem clearly wrong to me i'm going to argue against it. It is certainly my experience that many fields have become far too specialized in academia. This doesn't have anything to do with consumerism from what i can see,, and it is partly to do with corporatization of the university, and the rapid production of 'knowledge'. I think it's something like 10,000 journal papers in philosophy published every year, no one can keep up with that so it forces specialization. I hate it in a lot of ways because it forces you to be dogmatic, in both the sciences and humanities. But it is not as harmful in the sciences, probably. In philosophy i dont see much point in becoming a specialist in some area of meta ethics if your assumptions are already super shakey, as they always are in philosophy. In the sciences you dont need to worry as much about, but you should still think about it a lot. But you still need to have specialists in algebraic topology, and they need to focus on that or they wont understand it.

yes i would agree Dawkins is out of the loop, and knows very little philosophy from any school, at least it looks like that from what i've seen. his criticisms definitely are unorginal as he was just secondarily citing sokal. They still hold the same weight though. i don't mind if someone attacks easy targets as long as it has some significance. Richard dawkins attacks religion, I'm fine with getting rid of religion through education since in principle we should not believe things that are untrue, Dawkins has been pretty arrogant about it at times but i don't follow him closely at all. I'm fine with him attacking post modernism as well even if it is just an agreement with sokal/bricmont. It is at least valueable to give secondary reference to sokal, and that way we can purge the worst elements of postmodernism from the university. That's what's been happening thanks to sokal/bricmont and dawkins and i support this purge.

one of those existential comic quotes is a mild understatement. If you believe in democracy for the workplace, you will get murdered/added to the US terrorist list, so long as you live in a poor country. The united states had nelson mandela on the terrorist list for those views, up until 2008. There is a good book called 'killing hope', which has a lot of examples of the US murdering people and overthrowing governments for believing in workplace democracy.
And the united states is very open about this, the cold war presidents called this the 'domino theory'. you basically have to murder everyone in vietnam to stop the idea of workplace democracy spreading to other countries. And workplace democracy is communism for those that havn't read much early 20th century libertarian communist literature.