But most of them had (or still have) an obfuscatory style of writing — jkop

You forgot the gratuitous name dropping.

I was referring specifically to the Bouveresse v Rorty debate — Frederick KOH

Yes, and I was reminding you that your take on "this debate" shouldn't motivate your dismissal of Ramberg's unrelated piece, which is directly relevant to the topic of scientistic reductionism, to Rorty's take on it, and is furthermore endorsed by him.

then maybe you can tell me what specific pro-reductionist argument Weinberg makes that strikes you as being very strong and/or generally ignored in the philosophical literature. — Pierre-Normand

Challenge accepted. I propose as reference his Reductionism Redux collected in Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries

I picked the text. You fire the first salvo.

Yes, and I was reminding you that your take on "this debate" shouldn't motivate your dismissal of Ramberg's unrelated piece, — Pierre-Normand

Could you show me where I dismissed Ramberg's piece.

I am not optimistic about debating you given your tactics.

You forgot the gratuitous name dropping. — Frederick KOH

You are the one who dropped Weinberg's name and endorsed his views on reductionism as authoritative (without providing specific references).

Challenge accepted. I propose as reference his Reductionism Redux collected in Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries — Frederick KOH

Do you really endorse that? OK, let me read this chapter and I'll comment later.

Feel free to attack the reductionism chapter in the 'Dreams" book too. I will defend both.

But my earlier point is, people are often saying this sort of thing, but not citing the apparent purveyors of it. Who are these postmodern 'thinkers'? What is the detail of their claims? How do they get to be so influential? Why is it so hard to name or quote them? It would be good to get to grips with them. — mcdoodle

If one that I dislike has actual social implications, I will argue against it on a political level. But that's arguing against the idea, not against a nebulous 'ism'. — andrewk

What you guys want seems unreasonable. Foucault, for instance, replaced the very idea of argument with discourse, and truth with power (Archaeology of Knowledge). Under such premises it is futile to argue against anyone's detailed ideas.

According to Chomsky it was around the 1970s when a group of Parisian intellectuals and maoists (e.g. Julia Kristeva & Co.) could no longer deny the atrocities in Asia for which other maoists had been responsible. So, did they reconsider? No, instead they became outspoken post-structuralists who rejected the self-sufficiency of right, wrong, true, false, good, bad and so on. As I understand it they exploited problems of philosophy as a means to get away with a dubious past. — jkop

I haven't read Julia Kristeva. But I know that Deleuze, for instance, was inspired by the social unrest of 1968 in France in writing Anti-Oedipus. I also know that while Derrida indicates later on that he has Marxist leanings, he tried to remain aloof of the political scene in France. I point to 1968 just to note that the writers typically associated with post-modernism aren't necessarily maoists. (I am aware of maoists involved in 68, but it was far from strictly maoists, and certainly had a lot of on the ground political demands which were far away from China and maoist theory).

Not all Parisian intellectuals were maoists, of course. But most of them had (or still have) an obfuscatory style of writing which has the illegitimate benefits of making themselves (or their interpreters) the sole intellectual authorities of their claims, and thereby also immune to criticism. If one does not blindly accept their claims one runs the risk of being intimidated and accused for being ignorant.

I think a lot of it is hard to read. But I also think that Godel, for instance, is hard to read. With secondary literature and study it becomes easier, but it takes effort.

I wouldn't expect anyone to blindly accept any writer's claims. It's on this basis that I'm saying what I say, I suppose. Don't accept any of it -- just read it if you want to actively reject it. Or don't read it, but you don't need to have an opinion on it in that case, no?

I think postmodernism has little to do with philosophy, although demarcation seems to be a recurring theme. Kristeva, Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze etc. became intellectual rock-stars by making all kinds of outrageous claims embedded in impenetrable jargon which attracted the intellectually curious as well as those with a grudge against established knowledge, skills, or habits.

It is not over yet, though. Currently many professors at our universities are old fans of these rockstars. Most graduates from my school of architecture know very little about how to build, because many of their teachers think it is naive to believe that there would be right or wrong ways to build. As if an absence of right and wrong would make us creative. But the way we build will therefore be determined by power instead of knowledge or rightness. I don't think that's so creative. — jkop

I suppose I'd just advise looking at the writers and criticizing them before criticizing the thing 'post-modernism itself', or at least just not having an opinion on them without reading them. That seems to me to be a pretty reasonable standard for criticism, no?

After all -- we wouldn't criticize a modern philosopher -- from Descartes up to wherever you draw the boundary -- just by belonging to that historical period. Clearly modern philosophers disagreed with one another. They have nuances which deserve attention. The understanding of the historical category is worthwhile for getting a broad overview, but it's not a way to reject all modern philosophers.

Under such premises it is futile to argue against anyone's detailed ideas. — jkop

Not if one is arguing for the benefit of the audience - and ultimately of the voters. As I said, the yardstick there is what convinces the voters, not what one's opponent accepts. It is futile only if I fail to convince the voters. I very much doubt the average voter uses a Foucaultian paradigm to decide what cause to support.

The fact that I personally am useless at convincing anybody of anything speaks volumes about my lack of charisma and my incompetence at rhetoric, but not about the futility of someone less rhetorically-challenged publicly opposing a political view espoused by Foucault (not that I am currently aware of any political view of Foucault's that I particularly want to oppose).

Do you really endorse that? OK, let me read this chapter and I'll comment later. — Pierre-Normand

Good for you! I for one will look forward to reading your comments. This thread could yet turn into something worthwhile and educational - for me at least.

[Insert 'I'm not being sarcastic' icon here, because the internet always makes it look like one is being sarcastic whenever one expresses enthusiasm]

Under such premises it is futile to argue against anyone's detailed ideas. — jkop

What if your goal precisely is to assert power? Might that not be worthwhile? It need not be nefarious either. One may want to defend ideas in order to assert power on behalf of some oppressed group (or on one's own behalf), say, and not with an aim of revenge but rather as a claim for legitimate re-enfranchisement. I'm not used to argue on those terms, but that seems to be a line that would be available to a constructive (or social-democrat) Foucaultian, if there can be such a beast.

Not if one is arguing for the benefit of the audience — andrewk

Foucault replaced argument with discourse, recall, so, you don't get to argue at all. Instead there is discourse, and whatever rhetoric you can muster e.g. by word play, charm, bribery, populism... anything but words that refer to facts. Explain the benefit of that.

Further, the argument is aimed at persuading not the interlocutor, but the audience of the debate. Hence I am not constrained to use techniques that the interlocutor accepts as valid. All that matters is that the audience sees them as valid. — andrewk

Anders Weinstein who introduced me to philosophy 17 years ago (on the comp.ai.philosophy Usenet newsgroup) was constantly reminding me of this through his patient attitude to often fairly hostile fellow group participants. Also useful to do is to picture yourself conversing with your interlocutor's 'future self', as it were. People seldom change their minds on a dime. That doesn't mean that some of your (or her) arguments won't sink in in the distant future, when much of the rhetorical dust will have settled, and many stubborn background assumptions will have mollified.

More like he pointed out "argument" or "reason" was actually a functioning of rhetoric and power all along. In many contexts, we told ourselves we dealing with truth (biological essentialism, logic of identity, religions, gods, the technological utopia of modernism etc.,etc.) when it was actually a myth of hierarchy, performed to assert power over others. Under Foucault, the illusion that "truth" or "reason" is something more than rhetoric, word play, charm, bribery or populism is broken.

In dealing with the world and logic, thinkers like Foucault direct us move away from that illusion, to gasp our knowledge not by whether it is "Reason" or The Truth," but in terms of the world and expression itself. Both "Reason" and "The Truth" are empty in terms of knowledge. They don't identify any state of the world or talk about any true logical relationship. All the do is act as a marker for what ought to be believed under their own terms-- much like how "It's God's will" functions in religious cultures.

That's the benefit post-structuralism brings. We no longer confuse our idol of Truth for what is true.

I'm afraid I don't follow this. Surely you're not suggesting that before Foucault all political discourse was purely rational - all logic and no rhetoric, are you? What about Gorgias?

Foucault replaced argument with discourse, recall, so, you don't get to argue at all. Instead there is discourse, and whatever rhetoric you can muster e.g. by word play, charm, bribery, populism... anything but words that refer to facts. Explain the benefit of that. — jkop

At no point in any of his works did Foucault propose that argument be 'replaced' with discourse, nor truth with power. Neither did he equate discourse with rhetoric (and indeed spent alot of time and effort trying to disentangle the two). These are prevalent caricatures of his work, but they are wrong.

What about Gorgias? — andrewk

The case of Gorgias is difficult to decide for we may never know whether his claim that Empedocle had ordered his office in Leontini to be "eavesdropped on" purported to be factual or merely rhetorical.

These are prevalent caricatures of his work, but they are wrong. — StreetlightX

That is useful to know!

Does my use of the word "replace" matter a lot? Foucault's prose is notoriously dense, so let me quote what is written on the subject in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault's terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. — SEP

As I understand it, what governs the outcome of an argument is, then, not the truth of its premises but some force beyond it and beneath our consciousness. That sounds like a rejection of argument to me, and without argument there are just thoughts and discursive formations (e.g. formed by the act of discourse).

Neither did he equate discourse with rhetoric (and indeed spent alot of time and effort trying to disentangle the two). — StreetlightX

I'm sure he did, but did he succeed, or just try, and thus failed to disentangle discourse from rhetoric? Sorry for being so vulgar not being a fan of his.

governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. — SEP

There are also constraints imposed by the material world. In activities closely tied to the material world like counting, we find a lot less variation across cultures, and once asked, questions like "is multiplication commutative" admit only one answer.

Of course your use of words matters. You can't complain that some philosophers are too slippery with words then complain that others are being too pedantic about your own use of words. It just these types of equivocations that lead the the kind of misreadings which you're perpetuating.

In any case, your own second-hand quote deals with Foucault's work on epistemes, regimes of knowledge and truth, rather than the far more narrow practices of reason-giving and argumentation. These are two different things, and there needs to be some bridging work done to connect the two. Furthermore, even if if inference was legitimate - which remains to be proved - none of it would entail a 'rejection' of argument. What it would entail is a wider conception of what argument is, which, quite commonsensically, always involves questions of power, position, and influence.

Critics of Foucault often make the mistake - as you are - of thinking that Foucault pitches truth against power, argument against discourse or whatever. But at no point does Foucault ever set up such dichotomies. If Foucault is often badly misunderstood, it's precisely because he challenges these simplistic distinctions. The point is instead to demonstrate the workings of power in truth, discourse in argument, and so on. Foucault is explicit about how truth is not simply subject to power which manipulates it from the 'outside', but instead has a power of it's own:

"The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power: ...Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power." ("Truth and Power", in Knowledge/Power). This is hardly an implausible thesis, and from the Foucauldian perspective, it's precisely the power inherent to truth which can make it so effective in practices of giving and asking for reasons (argumentation). The idea that the focus on power and discourse somehow undermine truth or argument is simply a bad one - Foucault himself never makes this claim, despite the frequent projections of it made upon him - based on sloppy misreadings that don't attend to the specifics of the argument.

I'm sure he did, but did he succeed, or just try, and thus failed to disentangle discourse from rhetoric? — jkop

But it could only be a complete and total failure of comprehension that would confuse discourse and rhetoric in Foucault. The intense focus on corporeality, institutions, disciplinary techniques, and historical events at every point undermine such a reading. Like, you'd literally need to have never read a single paragraph of Foucault to make this mistake. Not to mention his explicit understanding of discourse as "a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area." (Archaeology of Knowledge). Rhetoric would be one element in this entire ensemble of considerations.

It is neither equivocation nor misreading to infer that he is, in effect, replacing argument with discourse.

He does so by introducing alleged powers beyond argument, which may compromise the argument even. The explanatory power of the argument is thus made less significant, or irrelevant even, compared to, say, bribery, good looks, or whatever powers there could be lurking beneath consciousness. Hence Foucault sneaks in his own version of "argument": discourse.

So long as you continue to oppose 'argument' with power - and conflate power with discourse - you disqualify yourself as a reader of Foucault.

If uncritical acceptance of his doctrines qualifies a reader of Foucault, then I'm happy to decline. But I was never applying to be "a reader of Foucault", Instead I am criticising claims ascribed to Foucault, his method, and the deplorable influence they have on the quality of thought (for example, in our universities).

Furthermore, your claim is false that I would be opposing argument with power. It is open to read:

The explanatory power of the argument is thus made less significant, or irrelevant even, compared to, say, bribery, good looks, or whatever powers there could be lurking beneath consciousness. — jkop

I'm not asking you to 'uncritically accept his doctrines', I'm asking to you get those doctrines right, which you are not. Your critique is inapplicable because it bears upon a phantom.

I get how the assumption of powers beneath consciousness and beyond logic can have such a deplorable influence on people's respect for argument and the quality of thought.

Instead I am criticising claims ascribed to Foucault, his method, and the deplorable influence they have on the quality of thought (for example, in our universities) — jkop

I'm glad the conversation has shifted to an actual writer. What you say, jkop, sounds quite like what a lot of students and teachers of analytic philosophy have said to me since I've gone back to study (mostly analytic) philosophy in my 60's. Not only are they against postmodernism, they do indeed have some sort of disdain even to read the people they believe they will disagree with profoundly. More than one told me it was sufficient reason not to read Heidegger that he was a Nazi, for instance, and many resist Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucualt...

This puzzles me, but I'm an incurably curious person. My reading is a bit scattered and so are my opinions: postmodernism seems to me a very mixed church, once you read in it. On second reading for instance I thought parts of 'Being and Time' were/are brilliant. I started off thinking Derrida was witty and clever in his deconstruction; now I think he's indeed clever but a terribly, at heart, negative writer.

I would like to stand up among this for Foucault. I read him first many years ago when I was trying to understand the history of mental illness and the growth of institutions that deal with the mentally troubled. I've since read two more volumes. I think his method is tremendously powerful and is firmly in the philosophical tradition. He reaches back to Plato and Aristotle to begin to understand the history of sexuality, for instance; constantly questions received certainties but is clear on what he is proposing to put in its place; his notion of genealogy as a self-written history seems strong to me. Analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power, it is mostly conducted in an imagined world of equals engaging in unrhetorical dialectic. I enjoy that myself, but it can't be the whole picture. Foucault to me excavates how power-relationships, including our own self-discipline, help to form and reinforce the boundaries of our thinking. You don't have to think he's the bees-knees to get something out of him. That's my experience.

And I get how your lack of comprehension skills would lead you to that false conclusion.