Interesting. I admit to not being a fan of connectionism, because spatial models of representation are so early 1980s, and connectionist models are just spatial models, but even by most pro-connectionist standards, connectionist models of language have tended to be pretty bad. At least I was right about the empiricist bit, though (not too hard, as it’s really the only alternative… heh).
By the way, I didn’t know there were any structuralists around anymore, particularly after Chomsky’s early work. At least not in “synchronic” linguistics. Though interestingly, your discussion of the commonalities between languages is pretty much exactly in line with what Chomsky says.
I will not defend Chomsky on his estimates of casualties, nor will I defend his linguistics. I come from a very different school of linguistics.
This is certainly not on topic, and probably of interest to no one but me, but what school of linguistics is that? Since you say “very different,” I assume you mean empiricist, but that just makes me curious about which “school” of empiricist linguistics you come from. Also, since your professed background is in computers and programming, I find it interesting that you’re not a Chomskyan, as I’ve always found that the built-in computationalism of his linguistics appeals to computer folk, especially programmers.
But Chomsky does propose a political economy, or at least the outlines of one. If I remember correctly (and it’s been some time since I watched the Chomsky-Foucault debate), he does so right there, after all the talk of human nature and creativity and the like. If he doesn’t there, he certainly does in his works on anarchism. But it’s there that we see the superficiality of both his critique and his proposal. His proposal, as I believe he admits frequently, is without a great deal of detail. His critique is simply that political structures, coercive ones at least, must be justified, and they aren’t, so they don’t have a reason for existing except to enforce existing power relationships (I don’t think he’d put this last bit quite that way, but it’s what he means anyway). With this I both agree, and ask, now what? What comes after this for Chomsky? In practice, what comes after this is East Timor, Kosovo is NATO’s fault, and the Cambodian civil war would never have resulted in the deaths that it did if we hadn’t bombed Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge wasn’t as bad as people say they were. There’s just not much else there (I disagree with his essentialism, which is where I think Foucault wins that debate; that, and much of what Chomsky ends up saying in the discussion of politics is, if I remember correctly, of the form of, ‘Yes, you are correct, and if we accept my essentialism then we can create a just society’).
By the way, I don’t remember Foucault being at all jargonny, or full of Marxist terms, in that debate, even if his perspective is, ultimately, heavily influenced by Marxist critique (his Marxism, it’s worth remembering, came via Althusser and M-P, not Sartre and the doctrinaire communists). If I remember correctly, the only difference in terminology is largely one of depth and breadth. Chomsky, for example, uses creativity to mean something like what we find in generative linguistics: that is, humans are creative beings in the sense that they add something to the input they receive from the world, whereas Foucault argues a.) that this conception of human nature is a recent one, made possible by certain creative acts on the part of human beings since the late 18th century, and b.) it’s much deeper than just giving structure to linguistic input, or any other sort of thing you might get from Chomskyan nativism. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, it’s Chomsky who uses “creativity” as jargon, and completely misunderstands what Foucault means by creativity largely because Chomsky’s jargony use of the term is so limited. The same when they discuss justice. Chomsky’s justice is a simple, idealistic notion from which it’s impossible not to ultimately confirm one’s own biases, while for Foucault there’s something deeper at play (power relations, will to power, whatever). In every case, Chomsky looks at things shallowly, and Foucault takes it at least a little bit deeper. And in every case, I at least think Chomsky comes out looking the worse. I suppose one could disagree, but that’s definitely my impression. And like I said, on at least some of the basics, Chomsky and I are on the same page (as are Foucault and I).
To be fair, Chomsky's estimates of the death toll under the Khmer Rouge and during the civil war were around 500,000 (in each), not 20,000. And it's during the civil war, not during the Khmer Rouge's rule, that he thinks the U.S. did a bunch of killing... which of course we did, but not on the scale that Chomsky likes to claim.
Chomsky still has a small, loyal group of followers within a segment of the left, but by the time he started saying that nothing happened in Kosovo until NATO got there, he'd lost the bulk of his following. Manufacturing Consent is still pretty interesting, though.
In some ways, I see Chomsky as the Rand of the left. He's shallow, he's arrogant, he's so convinced he's right that he thinks only people who agree with him are thinking rationally (rather than being manipulated), and he's a terrible writer. What's more, his fans tend to be young, white males of privilege. The only real difference is that Chomsky's accomplishments in linguistics in the 50s, 60s, and 70s (and to some extent, the 80s) were--are--very important. His review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior will remain a classic in the history of psychology for a long, long time, whatever the fate of generative linguistics. It's not clear Rand made a lasting contribution to any intellectual field.
Foucault does kick Chomsky's arse, largely because it's clear Chomsky has no clue what Foucault's saying, and not because, as some would have you believe, Foucault's generally incomprehensible. It doesn't help that Chomsky's politics are fairly superficial (which is why he's so inconsistent -- there's no real underlying principle behind any of it).
This tendency towards the superficial and overly simplified is also what got us the Minimalist Program. X-bar + change!
Yeah, he led a bunch of post-structuralist radical Marxists, at an institute created as a result of 1968. He wasn't, however, very red-faced. It's almost strange to hear someone suggest so.
Hmm… I wonder if you’ve read any Foucault in a while, if you think his view of madness has the sorts of implications that you are… implying it does, much less that it’s contrasted with Reason. What’s more, seeing Foucault as soicante-huitard is kinda funny, and not only because he wasn’t even in Paris in May, 1968. He did, after 1968, become an activist of sorts, particularly in the area of prison reform, and he certainly surrounded himself with radical Marxist intellectuals (and got heat for it, a lot of it, with real consequences), but he then spent the rest of his life (after he got his chair at the College de France) being as tame as he was before his prisoners’ rights activism of the early ‘70s. He was, in many ways, quite un-red faced. That’s probably because, as anyone who’s engaged his more overtly political works (e.g., those on power) knows, those works make political action highly problematic. Of course, his early, Kantian stuff was distinctly non-red faced. Maybe you’re mistaking some of the more fervent Foucauldians on the left, particularly in the 80s and early 90s, with Foucault himself?
Breastfeeding your baby is going to make it grow up to be less obese? That seems like a hard claim to substantiate through controlled testing. Diet, exercise, and genetics strike me as much more likely candidates to be significant factors in obesity.
It's not easy, to be sure, but several studies (I can link you to some lit reviews if you'd like) have shown a connection between breast feeding and risk of obesity, controlling for a wide variety of potentially relevant factors.
"By your own standards, your only enemies are your fellow countrymen."
Obviously you didn't read anything I said if you heard that. My point is that you should criticize your own country first and loudest, because you're a part of it, and morally responsible for its actions, and what's more, you can make a difference. I didn't say you should only criticize your own country. In fact, I said something quite like the opposite of that.
You are interpreting me the way you are because of your knee jerk reaction in the opposite direction: never criticize the U.S., except in those few instances where liberals screw things up.
T0m, since I gave you reasons for doing it, and you have yet to even address those reasons, calling it getting off seems like even worse than a cop-out. But OK, like I said, if that's inversion, then I'm damned proud to be inverted. It's precisely this sort of inversion that allows democracy to function.
Wait, so it’s moral inversion to concentrate on a.) that for which I am more directly morally responsible, and b.) that for which I might be able to make a difference? If that’s moral inversion, consider me completely inverted.
I see nothing wrong with being harsher and more vocal in the criticisms of one's own country than in criticisms of other countries, even if the policies and actions of other countries are, in some cases, much worse than those of one's own. The reason is quite simple: we live here, we're participants in the democratic process, and as a result we are, in part, morally responsible for the actions of our democratically elected governments. What's more, because we're parts of the process, change is much more likely to come of our criticizing our own country than from criticizing countries in which we're not part of the democratic (or undemocratic) process. In fact, the best way to affect the behavior of other nations is to affect the behavior of our own nation towards them, so that even when we want to change the behavior of other nations, the best route is often to criticize our own country (e.g., in the case of South Africa in the 1980s).
Sometimes it's almost like you and Heidegger are trying to outdo each other in some sort of parody-off. I wish a part of me didn't believe that you two really believe this stuff.
Bob, I'm quite sure you don't know what my position on science and myth are. At most I've expressed here the fairly self-evidence position that when the empirical claims of religion (e.g., that the earth is 6,000 years old, that all humans descend from two individuals who were created de novo, independent of all other species, etc.) contradict well established empirical fact, we have good reason for siding with the well established empirical fact. In fact, in some cases, to do otherwise is to our very real detriment, as in the case of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
My own views on the nature of man are not limited to the findings of empirical science. I am not a fan of the notion that science is the sole arbiter of truth. Quite the contrary. I'm of the belief that science is limited to (as one German might say) reasons, and the nature of beings is not exhausted by their reasons. As Voegelin often engaged that German in his work, I'm sure you can follow where that all is going.
Tom, since no one here has suggested only teaching science (to the exclusion of all else), or has been brutalizing anything, I consider those to be straw men. Perhaps you were referring to people not participating, though. In which case, good to know.
I've said this before, when Tom has brought out the "Brutalizing these people’s religious consciences" nonsense, but pointing out that people are wrong, by any measure of rightness and wrongness, and that they are being manipulated by people who know better, doesn't amount to brutalizing anything.
In addition, nothing in criticizing young Earth creationism implies that science, and only science, should be taught. How many straw men can you fit into one comment?
By the way, people may be able to get by without evolutionary theory, but they damned well better heed its consequences, and do things like take their full courses of antibiotics, otherwise they risk not living very long, and what's more, their negligence could affect me. If they heed the consequences of evolution, and guard against its negative ones, I don't really care whether they believe it's evolution that causes drug resistant bacteria and viruses.
Having known a lot of creationists in my day, some of them quite well, I've always looked at them as being of two types, one of which might reasonably be considered evil. The first type is your average, ordinary, everyday creationist. He or she lives in a world in which creationism is, in many ways, the only possible belief. Not only do these people face a great deal of social pressure to believe as they do, but also to only accept certain authorities' views and pronouncements as true. The only way out is generally a radical break with family, friends, and their social community in general, along with accepting authorities whose views they've been taught are from the devil, essentially. These people aren't evil. They' re sometimes quite intelligent, too. They're just extremely sheltered, and they've been duped.
The second type of creationist writes books, goes on Christian TV shows, speaks at churches, etc. These, along with the religious leaders who promote them, are the authorities whom it is OK for the first type to listen to. They are usually smart enough and educated enough to know the truth, that is to know that they're full of shit in their "scientific" and theological critiques of evolution and modern cosmology, biology, geoscience, etc., but they choose to spread that shit anyway because it brings them money, respect, and a certain amount of fame. These people, and to some extent the religious authorities who promote them, can definitely be consisted evil. They spread ignorance and prejudice for personal gain. If that's not evil...
Yeah, I was just confirming that he wasn't a charlatan.
Not that I think postmodernism and charlatanism are synonymous, mind you. I just recognize when people are using the term postmodernism that way.
Also, Bonhoeffer's theological work, as opposed to his work on living as a Christian, tends to be co-opted by all sorts of Christians, because it's incomplete and unsystematic. It can be interpreted in a lot of ways. That's why it says a lot about a, person who holds Bonhoeffer's work as an example of serious theology -- it means they either haven't read a lot of theology or they have an agenda.
Bonhoeffer was a fascinating man, and hardly a jargon-slinging charlatan (I assume that's what you mean by "postmodern"). His stand against Nazism was truly heroic as well. But one is certainly showing where he or she stand by choosing to use Bonhoeffer as an example of a true theologian.
On “On Civil Society”
Interesting. I admit to not being a fan of connectionism, because spatial models of representation are so early 1980s, and connectionist models are just spatial models, but even by most pro-connectionist standards, connectionist models of language have tended to be pretty bad. At least I was right about the empiricist bit, though (not too hard, as it’s really the only alternative… heh).
By the way, I didn’t know there were any structuralists around anymore, particularly after Chomsky’s early work. At least not in “synchronic” linguistics. Though interestingly, your discussion of the commonalities between languages is pretty much exactly in line with what Chomsky says.
"
I will not defend Chomsky on his estimates of casualties, nor will I defend his linguistics. I come from a very different school of linguistics.
This is certainly not on topic, and probably of interest to no one but me, but what school of linguistics is that? Since you say “very different,” I assume you mean empiricist, but that just makes me curious about which “school” of empiricist linguistics you come from. Also, since your professed background is in computers and programming, I find it interesting that you’re not a Chomskyan, as I’ve always found that the built-in computationalism of his linguistics appeals to computer folk, especially programmers.
"
But Chomsky does propose a political economy, or at least the outlines of one. If I remember correctly (and it’s been some time since I watched the Chomsky-Foucault debate), he does so right there, after all the talk of human nature and creativity and the like. If he doesn’t there, he certainly does in his works on anarchism. But it’s there that we see the superficiality of both his critique and his proposal. His proposal, as I believe he admits frequently, is without a great deal of detail. His critique is simply that political structures, coercive ones at least, must be justified, and they aren’t, so they don’t have a reason for existing except to enforce existing power relationships (I don’t think he’d put this last bit quite that way, but it’s what he means anyway). With this I both agree, and ask, now what? What comes after this for Chomsky? In practice, what comes after this is East Timor, Kosovo is NATO’s fault, and the Cambodian civil war would never have resulted in the deaths that it did if we hadn’t bombed Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge wasn’t as bad as people say they were. There’s just not much else there (I disagree with his essentialism, which is where I think Foucault wins that debate; that, and much of what Chomsky ends up saying in the discussion of politics is, if I remember correctly, of the form of, ‘Yes, you are correct, and if we accept my essentialism then we can create a just society’).
By the way, I don’t remember Foucault being at all jargonny, or full of Marxist terms, in that debate, even if his perspective is, ultimately, heavily influenced by Marxist critique (his Marxism, it’s worth remembering, came via Althusser and M-P, not Sartre and the doctrinaire communists). If I remember correctly, the only difference in terminology is largely one of depth and breadth. Chomsky, for example, uses creativity to mean something like what we find in generative linguistics: that is, humans are creative beings in the sense that they add something to the input they receive from the world, whereas Foucault argues a.) that this conception of human nature is a recent one, made possible by certain creative acts on the part of human beings since the late 18th century, and b.) it’s much deeper than just giving structure to linguistic input, or any other sort of thing you might get from Chomskyan nativism. Furthermore, if I remember correctly, it’s Chomsky who uses “creativity” as jargon, and completely misunderstands what Foucault means by creativity largely because Chomsky’s jargony use of the term is so limited. The same when they discuss justice. Chomsky’s justice is a simple, idealistic notion from which it’s impossible not to ultimately confirm one’s own biases, while for Foucault there’s something deeper at play (power relations, will to power, whatever). In every case, Chomsky looks at things shallowly, and Foucault takes it at least a little bit deeper. And in every case, I at least think Chomsky comes out looking the worse. I suppose one could disagree, but that’s definitely my impression. And like I said, on at least some of the basics, Chomsky and I are on the same page (as are Foucault and I).
"
To be fair, Chomsky's estimates of the death toll under the Khmer Rouge and during the civil war were around 500,000 (in each), not 20,000. And it's during the civil war, not during the Khmer Rouge's rule, that he thinks the U.S. did a bunch of killing... which of course we did, but not on the scale that Chomsky likes to claim.
Chomsky still has a small, loyal group of followers within a segment of the left, but by the time he started saying that nothing happened in Kosovo until NATO got there, he'd lost the bulk of his following. Manufacturing Consent is still pretty interesting, though.
In some ways, I see Chomsky as the Rand of the left. He's shallow, he's arrogant, he's so convinced he's right that he thinks only people who agree with him are thinking rationally (rather than being manipulated), and he's a terrible writer. What's more, his fans tend to be young, white males of privilege. The only real difference is that Chomsky's accomplishments in linguistics in the 50s, 60s, and 70s (and to some extent, the 80s) were--are--very important. His review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior will remain a classic in the history of psychology for a long, long time, whatever the fate of generative linguistics. It's not clear Rand made a lasting contribution to any intellectual field.
"
Foucault does kick Chomsky's arse, largely because it's clear Chomsky has no clue what Foucault's saying, and not because, as some would have you believe, Foucault's generally incomprehensible. It doesn't help that Chomsky's politics are fairly superficial (which is why he's so inconsistent -- there's no real underlying principle behind any of it).
This tendency towards the superficial and overly simplified is also what got us the Minimalist Program. X-bar + change!
On “liberal scholarship (a digression)”
Yeah, he led a bunch of post-structuralist radical Marxists, at an institute created as a result of 1968. He wasn't, however, very red-faced. It's almost strange to hear someone suggest so.
He did look like Uncle Fester, though.
Have you watched his "debate" with Chomsky?
"
Hmm… I wonder if you’ve read any Foucault in a while, if you think his view of madness has the sorts of implications that you are… implying it does, much less that it’s contrasted with Reason. What’s more, seeing Foucault as soicante-huitard is kinda funny, and not only because he wasn’t even in Paris in May, 1968. He did, after 1968, become an activist of sorts, particularly in the area of prison reform, and he certainly surrounded himself with radical Marxist intellectuals (and got heat for it, a lot of it, with real consequences), but he then spent the rest of his life (after he got his chair at the College de France) being as tame as he was before his prisoners’ rights activism of the early ‘70s. He was, in many ways, quite un-red faced. That’s probably because, as anyone who’s engaged his more overtly political works (e.g., those on power) knows, those works make political action highly problematic. Of course, his early, Kantian stuff was distinctly non-red faced. Maybe you’re mistaking some of the more fervent Foucauldians on the left, particularly in the 80s and early 90s, with Foucault himself?
"
Bob,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-topics/
I'm sure you can find something.
On “Bachmann, Obama and lactation hysteria”
Breastfeeding your baby is going to make it grow up to be less obese? That seems like a hard claim to substantiate through controlled testing. Diet, exercise, and genetics strike me as much more likely candidates to be significant factors in obesity.
It's not easy, to be sure, but several studies (I can link you to some lit reviews if you'd like) have shown a connection between breast feeding and risk of obesity, controlling for a wide variety of potentially relevant factors.
"
Hahaha... good one.
On “US Intervention in Libya”
"By your own standards, your only enemies are your fellow countrymen."
Obviously you didn't read anything I said if you heard that. My point is that you should criticize your own country first and loudest, because you're a part of it, and morally responsible for its actions, and what's more, you can make a difference. I didn't say you should only criticize your own country. In fact, I said something quite like the opposite of that.
You are interpreting me the way you are because of your knee jerk reaction in the opposite direction: never criticize the U.S., except in those few instances where liberals screw things up.
"
T0m, since I gave you reasons for doing it, and you have yet to even address those reasons, calling it getting off seems like even worse than a cop-out. But OK, like I said, if that's inversion, then I'm damned proud to be inverted. It's precisely this sort of inversion that allows democracy to function.
"
Wait, so it’s moral inversion to concentrate on a.) that for which I am more directly morally responsible, and b.) that for which I might be able to make a difference? If that’s moral inversion, consider me completely inverted.
"
I see nothing wrong with being harsher and more vocal in the criticisms of one's own country than in criticisms of other countries, even if the policies and actions of other countries are, in some cases, much worse than those of one's own. The reason is quite simple: we live here, we're participants in the democratic process, and as a result we are, in part, morally responsible for the actions of our democratically elected governments. What's more, because we're parts of the process, change is much more likely to come of our criticizing our own country than from criticizing countries in which we're not part of the democratic (or undemocratic) process. In fact, the best way to affect the behavior of other nations is to affect the behavior of our own nation towards them, so that even when we want to change the behavior of other nations, the best route is often to criticize our own country (e.g., in the case of South Africa in the 1980s).
"
Sometimes it's almost like you and Heidegger are trying to outdo each other in some sort of parody-off. I wish a part of me didn't believe that you two really believe this stuff.
On “Science, Non-Scientists, and the Mind-Killer”
Tom, if you think he's my Sam Harris, then your biases are showing.
Bob, follow the link on my name.
"
Bob, this isn't really the place, but if you want to gave a real conversation, you can find me.
"
Bob, I'm quite sure you don't know what my position on science and myth are. At most I've expressed here the fairly self-evidence position that when the empirical claims of religion (e.g., that the earth is 6,000 years old, that all humans descend from two individuals who were created de novo, independent of all other species, etc.) contradict well established empirical fact, we have good reason for siding with the well established empirical fact. In fact, in some cases, to do otherwise is to our very real detriment, as in the case of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
My own views on the nature of man are not limited to the findings of empirical science. I am not a fan of the notion that science is the sole arbiter of truth. Quite the contrary. I'm of the belief that science is limited to (as one German might say) reasons, and the nature of beings is not exhausted by their reasons. As Voegelin often engaged that German in his work, I'm sure you can follow where that all is going.
"
Tom, since no one here has suggested only teaching science (to the exclusion of all else), or has been brutalizing anything, I consider those to be straw men. Perhaps you were referring to people not participating, though. In which case, good to know.
"
I've said this before, when Tom has brought out the "Brutalizing these people’s religious consciences" nonsense, but pointing out that people are wrong, by any measure of rightness and wrongness, and that they are being manipulated by people who know better, doesn't amount to brutalizing anything.
In addition, nothing in criticizing young Earth creationism implies that science, and only science, should be taught. How many straw men can you fit into one comment?
By the way, people may be able to get by without evolutionary theory, but they damned well better heed its consequences, and do things like take their full courses of antibiotics, otherwise they risk not living very long, and what's more, their negligence could affect me. If they heed the consequences of evolution, and guard against its negative ones, I don't really care whether they believe it's evolution that causes drug resistant bacteria and viruses.
"
Since I was talking about creationists and the people who mislead them, I think you can probably infer my opinion on the matter.
"
Having known a lot of creationists in my day, some of them quite well, I've always looked at them as being of two types, one of which might reasonably be considered evil. The first type is your average, ordinary, everyday creationist. He or she lives in a world in which creationism is, in many ways, the only possible belief. Not only do these people face a great deal of social pressure to believe as they do, but also to only accept certain authorities' views and pronouncements as true. The only way out is generally a radical break with family, friends, and their social community in general, along with accepting authorities whose views they've been taught are from the devil, essentially. These people aren't evil. They' re sometimes quite intelligent, too. They're just extremely sheltered, and they've been duped.
The second type of creationist writes books, goes on Christian TV shows, speaks at churches, etc. These, along with the religious leaders who promote them, are the authorities whom it is OK for the first type to listen to. They are usually smart enough and educated enough to know the truth, that is to know that they're full of shit in their "scientific" and theological critiques of evolution and modern cosmology, biology, geoscience, etc., but they choose to spread that shit anyway because it brings them money, respect, and a certain amount of fame. These people, and to some extent the religious authorities who promote them, can definitely be consisted evil. They spread ignorance and prejudice for personal gain. If that's not evil...
"
Yeah, I was just confirming that he wasn't a charlatan.
Not that I think postmodernism and charlatanism are synonymous, mind you. I just recognize when people are using the term postmodernism that way.
Also, Bonhoeffer's theological work, as opposed to his work on living as a Christian, tends to be co-opted by all sorts of Christians, because it's incomplete and unsystematic. It can be interpreted in a lot of ways. That's why it says a lot about a, person who holds Bonhoeffer's work as an example of serious theology -- it means they either haven't read a lot of theology or they have an agenda.
"
Bonhoeffer was a fascinating man, and hardly a jargon-slinging charlatan (I assume that's what you mean by "postmodern"). His stand against Nazism was truly heroic as well. But one is certainly showing where he or she stand by choosing to use Bonhoeffer as an example of a true theologian.
On “How Not to Read with Charity”
Also, on the Bible and science:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/galileo-tuscany.html
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.