Nov 21, 2018 07:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Nov 21, 2018 07:43 PM by C C.)
https://thepointmag.com/2018/criticism/s...iscontents
EXCERPT: The humanities, as we all know, are in crisis. Federal funding has dried up and enrollment is on a steady decline; departments are being slashed; adjuncts labor at less than a living wage in hopes of clinging on to the periphery of academe. In response, politicians have called for redoubled investment in math and science, touting enrollment in business, computer-science and engineering as the solution. All the while, critics demand to know how studying Confucius could be more important than learning how to balance a checkbook.
According to this view, the humanities are a bad bet because they’re frivolous, impractical, self-indulgent. But this objection—the predominant one among politicians and other outside judges of the humanities—may well be related a yet more fundamental one, which is internal to the humanities themselves. The humanities, as we are constantly reminded, are “subjective”—so subjective, in fact, that the contributions of self-proclaimed fakes find company with those of chaired professors. This is a complaint we hear not only from disaffected undergraduates but, even more damningly, from other humanists: we need only to look to the recent “Grievance Studies” hoax, in which a team of humanists wrote and submitted twenty spoof articles to top journals in their own field (seven were accepted and seven more were still under review as the team was detailing their findings). If for the liar, according to Frankfurt, “there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable,” the hoax once again made explicit the challenge of deciding good from bad work in a field where there are no determinate facts. The fact that so many of the parodic articles had been accepted by academic journals, said the political scientist Yascha Mounk on Twitter, revealed that many humanists cannot tell the difference between serious scholarship and “bullshit.”
[...] One popular answer to the question of what makes bullshit bullshit is gratuitous jargon. What is the “theory of phase transitions”? Or “turbulent fluidity”? “Nonlinearity”? “Discontinuity”? The best defense, the bullshitter knows, is a good offense, and she flashes complex terminology in order to mask her own ignorance. But does this answer really grasp what’s essential to bullshit—or jargon, for that matter? If I flipped to a random page in a middle-school biology textbook I could read about “heterotrophism” or “anaerobic respiration” or “independent assortment”; in a math textbook I could find sections on “prime factorization” or the “multiplicative inverse.” Yet few call bullshit on math or biology, even though journal articles in these fields are often packed more densely with jargon than Sokal’s parody article.
Besides, we call bullshit even on texts with relatively simple wording. Take for example one passage from Heidegger’s essay “What Is Metaphysics?”:
Carnap, however, had a larger point to make. In denouncing Heidegger and other metaphysicians, he argues that there exist certain “words without meaning”—words that philosophers have been perplexing themselves over for millennia without realizing that they do not refer to anything at all: “the Absolute,” “the Infinite,” “non-being,” “essence,” and Heidegger’s “nothing.” Statements in which these words appear cannot be judged true or false, Carnap says, because they lack determinate referents and therefore do not claim anything at all. Might this be an adequate criterion for judging bullshit? [...]
The problem with this approach to defining bullshit is that humanists often disagree about which words have determinate referents, and even about the acceptable threshold for terminological vagueness. To a Hegelian, for example, it is indeed possible to have serious discussions about “the Absolute”—the term refers to a specific concept within Hegel’s philosophy, and one can distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of it. But Hegel, while a cornerstone of philosophy departments in continental Europe, is systematically passed over in Anglophone ones [...] To a philosopher working in the latter tradition, a discourse on “the Absolute” is utterly meaningless, and Hegel and his exegetes complicit in an industry of what Sokal denounces as “superficial erudition.”
The notion of erudition unmerited—erudition that is no more than superficial—is what lies at the heart of bullshit. This is what makes the problem of bullshit a psychological and sociological question as well as a linguistic and philosophical one. Only great work, we believe, deserves our consideration and praise, and great work in any field presupposes great skill and great effort. Accusations of bullshit, therefore, call into question the existence of a hierarchy of expertise: is there any difference, in the humanities, between being an amateur and being an expert?
[...] This conclusion is rarely discussed on a systematic level, although humanists have proposed individual responses to it. Some, for starters, play the “no true humanist” card: there may be bullshit in some humanistic disciplines or by some humanists, but real work in the humanities is just as rigorous and legitimate as work in the sciences. [...] Meanwhile, others deny the humanities’ need for “objectivity” altogether: So what if there are multiple ways to write a history or if no one can tell you what a line of Cavafy means? The humanities are qualitatively different from the sciences, and as such they call for different methods; it would be unsound to condemn humanistic work just because it doesn’t conform to the scientific model that has come to dominate our assumptions about the production of knowledge. This is an attractive claim, and to a certain degree I am sympathetic to it. But it does less to settle the underlying question than to raise it in a different form: if the humanities do not conform to scientific standards, what standards do they conform to?
Perhaps the question of standards, then, is the first question a comprehensive defense of the humanities must address...
MORE: https://thepointmag.com/2018/criticism/s...iscontents
RELATED: I Am Dynamite! by Sue Prideaux review – Nietzsche as we haven't known him before
~
EXCERPT: The humanities, as we all know, are in crisis. Federal funding has dried up and enrollment is on a steady decline; departments are being slashed; adjuncts labor at less than a living wage in hopes of clinging on to the periphery of academe. In response, politicians have called for redoubled investment in math and science, touting enrollment in business, computer-science and engineering as the solution. All the while, critics demand to know how studying Confucius could be more important than learning how to balance a checkbook.
According to this view, the humanities are a bad bet because they’re frivolous, impractical, self-indulgent. But this objection—the predominant one among politicians and other outside judges of the humanities—may well be related a yet more fundamental one, which is internal to the humanities themselves. The humanities, as we are constantly reminded, are “subjective”—so subjective, in fact, that the contributions of self-proclaimed fakes find company with those of chaired professors. This is a complaint we hear not only from disaffected undergraduates but, even more damningly, from other humanists: we need only to look to the recent “Grievance Studies” hoax, in which a team of humanists wrote and submitted twenty spoof articles to top journals in their own field (seven were accepted and seven more were still under review as the team was detailing their findings). If for the liar, according to Frankfurt, “there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable,” the hoax once again made explicit the challenge of deciding good from bad work in a field where there are no determinate facts. The fact that so many of the parodic articles had been accepted by academic journals, said the political scientist Yascha Mounk on Twitter, revealed that many humanists cannot tell the difference between serious scholarship and “bullshit.”
[...] One popular answer to the question of what makes bullshit bullshit is gratuitous jargon. What is the “theory of phase transitions”? Or “turbulent fluidity”? “Nonlinearity”? “Discontinuity”? The best defense, the bullshitter knows, is a good offense, and she flashes complex terminology in order to mask her own ignorance. But does this answer really grasp what’s essential to bullshit—or jargon, for that matter? If I flipped to a random page in a middle-school biology textbook I could read about “heterotrophism” or “anaerobic respiration” or “independent assortment”; in a math textbook I could find sections on “prime factorization” or the “multiplicative inverse.” Yet few call bullshit on math or biology, even though journal articles in these fields are often packed more densely with jargon than Sokal’s parody article.
Besides, we call bullshit even on texts with relatively simple wording. Take for example one passage from Heidegger’s essay “What Is Metaphysics?”:
Where shall we seek the nothing? Where will we find the nothing? In order to find something must we not already know in general that it is there? Indeed! At first and for the most part man can seek only when he has anticipated the being at hand of what he is looking for. Now the nothing is what we are seeking.
None of the terms in the passage would be unfamiliar to the average middle-schooler. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s contemporary Rudolf Carnap descended hungrily upon this passage in his critique of metaphysical writing, arguing that Heidegger’s terms were “meaningless,” his statements “pseudo-statements,” and his pretensions to philosophy better suited to a creative medium like poetry. But if the presence of jargon does not guarantee that something is bullshit and the absence of jargon does not preclude it, then jargon alone cannot explain what makes bullshit objectionable—or indeed what makes it bullshit.Carnap, however, had a larger point to make. In denouncing Heidegger and other metaphysicians, he argues that there exist certain “words without meaning”—words that philosophers have been perplexing themselves over for millennia without realizing that they do not refer to anything at all: “the Absolute,” “the Infinite,” “non-being,” “essence,” and Heidegger’s “nothing.” Statements in which these words appear cannot be judged true or false, Carnap says, because they lack determinate referents and therefore do not claim anything at all. Might this be an adequate criterion for judging bullshit? [...]
The problem with this approach to defining bullshit is that humanists often disagree about which words have determinate referents, and even about the acceptable threshold for terminological vagueness. To a Hegelian, for example, it is indeed possible to have serious discussions about “the Absolute”—the term refers to a specific concept within Hegel’s philosophy, and one can distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of it. But Hegel, while a cornerstone of philosophy departments in continental Europe, is systematically passed over in Anglophone ones [...] To a philosopher working in the latter tradition, a discourse on “the Absolute” is utterly meaningless, and Hegel and his exegetes complicit in an industry of what Sokal denounces as “superficial erudition.”
The notion of erudition unmerited—erudition that is no more than superficial—is what lies at the heart of bullshit. This is what makes the problem of bullshit a psychological and sociological question as well as a linguistic and philosophical one. Only great work, we believe, deserves our consideration and praise, and great work in any field presupposes great skill and great effort. Accusations of bullshit, therefore, call into question the existence of a hierarchy of expertise: is there any difference, in the humanities, between being an amateur and being an expert?
[...] This conclusion is rarely discussed on a systematic level, although humanists have proposed individual responses to it. Some, for starters, play the “no true humanist” card: there may be bullshit in some humanistic disciplines or by some humanists, but real work in the humanities is just as rigorous and legitimate as work in the sciences. [...] Meanwhile, others deny the humanities’ need for “objectivity” altogether: So what if there are multiple ways to write a history or if no one can tell you what a line of Cavafy means? The humanities are qualitatively different from the sciences, and as such they call for different methods; it would be unsound to condemn humanistic work just because it doesn’t conform to the scientific model that has come to dominate our assumptions about the production of knowledge. This is an attractive claim, and to a certain degree I am sympathetic to it. But it does less to settle the underlying question than to raise it in a different form: if the humanities do not conform to scientific standards, what standards do they conform to?
Perhaps the question of standards, then, is the first question a comprehensive defense of the humanities must address...
MORE: https://thepointmag.com/2018/criticism/s...iscontents
RELATED: I Am Dynamite! by Sue Prideaux review – Nietzsche as we haven't known him before
~