NP no facts only interpretations

[Michel Ryckx]

Thanks, Doug, for posting a link to this very interesting article (at least for a beautiful
word:adumbration).

Otto:
"It took me a while to get through the article because I didn't get his point at first reading. Now
it appears to me to be a covered attack on postmodernism (and more), and the assumption that this
rose out of laziness is indeed ridiculous.

Me:
I think the author is not attacking postmodernism.  The article is about the pressure on (young)
scholars.  This pressure has become too high: one has not enough time (mr. Bauerlein speaks of 3
years and a half for a serious study, which is not enough) to make thorough enquiries on a given
subject. There's no question of laziness, but in such an environment, a scholar is forced to assume
some things he or she ought to investigate.  Hence: I think it to be an attack on an environment
(the university) that stimulates, perhaps unwillingly, uncareful thinking.  The example he gives of
E. Sedgwick, taking Michel Foucault's ideas as axiomatic, is, as I understood the article,
unscholarly; it implies those ideas cannot be questioned in said study.  Mr. Bauerlein does not say
that mr. Foucault's ideas are wrong, he only says that them taking for granted, is.  In the second
part of the article, he's explaining why such a mentality exists.

Then jbor:
"In devising this term as a derogatory label to condemn scholars Bauerlein is referring to the idea
that language, and thus "knowledge", is a "social construct". This is a recognition which underpins
academic endeavour in all fields of the humanities nowadays: philosophy, sociology, anthropology,
linguistics, history, psychology, literature etc etc."

Me:
Mr. Bauerlein simply makes a difference between the how and why of scientific truth; and the
epistemological basis for it.  He says that, what he calls 'social constructionism' leads not to an
inquiry of its epistemological basis, but, when the axiomatic thinking takes over, to an 'excess of
confidence' as 'a key to social constructionist argumentation'.  He also says that those questioning
the ideas he referred to, are not attacked on scientific, but on psychological grounds.

jbor goes on:
"As well as all the nonsense about professors in these fields no longer reading anything, it's
absolutely hypocritical of him to accuse academics of ad hominem argument when it's exactly what
he's doing by calling them "social constructionists"."

Where does he write such a thing?  He talks about people not having enough time ('professors under
the gun', 'productivity standards', ...).  I think he means they're not reading enough, not that
they do not read any longer.

jbor:
"He doesn't offer any refutation of the conception of languages & cultural systems as
socially-constructed -- which of course they are -- merely attacks and ridicules anyone who dares to
think that there is some "truth value" in it."

"Which of course they are".  This is in the final paragraph:
"Scholars may have initially embraced constructionism as a philosophical position, but the evolution
of constructionism into a brash institutional maneuvering indicates that it now functions as a
response to a changing labor environment."  He does not deny as you say, languages & cultural
systems as socially-constructed.

jbor again:
"As you've twigged to, the alternative viewpoint, which remains unstated in the article because it's
just so dumb, is that language and knowledge are down to some miracle of divine intervention. It's
easy to figure where Pynchon stands on that particular "debate"!"

If I were nasty, I could say this phrase is a perfect illustration of the mentality described in the
article.  I won't.  But: mr. Bauerlein says one has to make a distinction between how a truth has
been discovered, and the epistemological basis of that truth.  To conclude that the author silently
asserts a divine intervention is intellectually dishonest.

By the way: if cultural systems are socially-constructed, how could you then still maintain that
capitalism is not an ideology?

Kind regards,

Michel.