= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Costs and Benefits of Scholarship - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (106)
That certainly agrees with my intuition. In fairness, I've also had the experience of (1) reading something in a postmodern text that looks obviously wrong or not even wrong, (2) reading some more texts that gave me a better idea of how postmodernists use their words, and then (3) revisiting the original text and seeing that it actually had something worthwhile to say. Nonetheless, I'm far from convinced that reading postmodern texts is the most cost-effective way to get these insights.
I'm not sure that I understand. Are you saying that we might give too much respect to postmodernists because they use postmodern reasoning to support ends that we also support?
If so, I actually think that that is a reason to study postmodernism more closely.
Suppose that you had almost no familiarity with postmodernism, but you were good at epistemic rationality. Then you hear someone utter some postmodern jargon, followed by, "And that is why religious dogma is not a secure foundation for morality." You might think to yourself, "I couldn't quite parse all that jargon, but the conclusion was right, so maybe these postmodernists are on to something." On the basis of this second-hand exposure, you go and read some postmodernist texts, working slowly and carefully, trying to understand this potentially-useful method. Instead, you find that you still can't parse the jargon. If postmodernism is really that bad, first-hand exposure will leave you with less respect than you had after second-hand exposure. Its incomprehensibility will be a greater strike against it.
More or less, although I'd cast it in terms of giving too much respect to incoherent arguments rather than to postmodernism. It's an arguments-as-soldiers thing; if we find ourselves nodding along with an argument that leads to a conclusion we like, and the internals of the argument are later shown to have been nonsense, we look at minimum very silly. Worse, we might along the way have internalized some related nonsense.
On the other hand, we should also be careful not to demonize particular postmodern thinkers or conclusions on account of coming out of the postmodern movement, for the same reasons -- a test that many on the empirical side of the Two Cultures divide have failed, unfortunately. Themes and methods characteristic of the movement are, of course, still fair game.
Your secondary-exposure method seems solid in principle, but I'd also say that that's a good time to revisit the concerns about cost-effectiveness that you raised earlier; it's a heavyweight method, and I doubt that the certainty it gives you is likely to be worth the time spent on gaining it. Even a prerequisite as basic as learning the vocabulary of, say, deconstructionism is a daunting task, at least comparable in complexity to reading the Sequences.