Yeah, I think the idea that all university subjects must be in the business of providing objective truth is pretty tendentious, and you don’t have to be a postmodernist to believe that. There’s the much more reasonable point that the applied sciences, social sciences and subjects like history and literature provide a highly simplified pictures of what they’re investigating, and those simplifications are often settled on because of contingent interests.
There might be ways of making all of that about objective knowledge as well, but they aren’t self-evident, and it seems to me kind of preposterous on its face to think someone can’t do good academic work because they adopt the wrong position on this.
There are also serious analytic philosophers who’ve argued for truth relativism or alethic nihilism. I don’t think views like this are incompatible with the existence of universities, or academic research, or whatever, even if they’re wrong.
I don’t think there’s any particular thesis that you can point to that explains why so much postmodernish humanities is bad, because I could imagine an intellectually credible version of the thesis. I suspect the problem is just the valorization of incredibly obscure writing, which is going to make it easier for grifters and bullshit artists to get jobs in the discipline.
It's possible to provide objective knowledge through one's scholarship even while believing that it's impossible to do so. That mistaken belief doesn't necessarily infect the work product, although of course it could.
I don't say in here that the problem with pomo research is that the practitioners don't believe in objective truth. (That may be *a problem,* but that's not really what I'm driving at.) I'm just trying to refute one argument that I've seen many many times that objectivity is impossible.
My rhetorical question at the end isn't intended to be particularly pointed, although I do think it's something that people who deny the humanities aim at objective knowledge should think harder about. If I were to riff on that final rhetorical question some more, the direction I'd go is to say that if the answer to the question is something like "advancing progressive political projects," (which for some people it definitely is!), then that raises a whole set of other political problems for the status of the humanities in academia.
Okay, I guess it just seems trivially easy to give particulars for why many academic disciplines can’t be perfectly objective, or why Boghossian isn’t in this case.
I'm not sure what you mean by a discipline being objective. Is this about objective facts, the objectivity of the people who participate in the discipline, or some third thing?
I think the investigators cannot be perfectly objective, because the subject matter is such that humans could not be perfectly objective about it, because of psychological biases, because of cognitive limitations, and because perfect objectivity would not be desirable. I think a lot of the claims made in many of these disciplines are simplifying fictions, and so strictly speaking false, and so aren’t facts at all.
Yeah, I think the idea that all university subjects must be in the business of providing objective truth is pretty tendentious, and you don’t have to be a postmodernist to believe that. There’s the much more reasonable point that the applied sciences, social sciences and subjects like history and literature provide a highly simplified pictures of what they’re investigating, and those simplifications are often settled on because of contingent interests.
There might be ways of making all of that about objective knowledge as well, but they aren’t self-evident, and it seems to me kind of preposterous on its face to think someone can’t do good academic work because they adopt the wrong position on this.
There are also serious analytic philosophers who’ve argued for truth relativism or alethic nihilism. I don’t think views like this are incompatible with the existence of universities, or academic research, or whatever, even if they’re wrong.
I don’t think there’s any particular thesis that you can point to that explains why so much postmodernish humanities is bad, because I could imagine an intellectually credible version of the thesis. I suspect the problem is just the valorization of incredibly obscure writing, which is going to make it easier for grifters and bullshit artists to get jobs in the discipline.
It's possible to provide objective knowledge through one's scholarship even while believing that it's impossible to do so. That mistaken belief doesn't necessarily infect the work product, although of course it could.
Okay, but then the trouble with pomo research isn’t that the practitioners don’t believe in truth or don’t seek it, but something else.
I also think you’re assuming a lot if you think that the applied sciences and history are really, in some less obvious way, pursuing objective truth.
I don't say in here that the problem with pomo research is that the practitioners don't believe in objective truth. (That may be *a problem,* but that's not really what I'm driving at.) I'm just trying to refute one argument that I've seen many many times that objectivity is impossible.
My rhetorical question at the end isn't intended to be particularly pointed, although I do think it's something that people who deny the humanities aim at objective knowledge should think harder about. If I were to riff on that final rhetorical question some more, the direction I'd go is to say that if the answer to the question is something like "advancing progressive political projects," (which for some people it definitely is!), then that raises a whole set of other political problems for the status of the humanities in academia.
Okay, I guess it just seems trivially easy to give particulars for why many academic disciplines can’t be perfectly objective, or why Boghossian isn’t in this case.
I'm not sure what you mean by a discipline being objective. Is this about objective facts, the objectivity of the people who participate in the discipline, or some third thing?
I think the investigators cannot be perfectly objective, because the subject matter is such that humans could not be perfectly objective about it, because of psychological biases, because of cognitive limitations, and because perfect objectivity would not be desirable. I think a lot of the claims made in many of these disciplines are simplifying fictions, and so strictly speaking false, and so aren’t facts at all.