Over the last few years I’ve gained troll cred mostly by trolling liberal intellectual (“weenie”) blogs from an elusive, erudite, eclectic, generalist, humanist, populist, leftist perspective. I am familiar with all troll traditions and my deployment of the resources available to trolls has been recognized as masterful. (In academic terminology trolling is called “ethnomethodological intervention”.)
My main targets have been centrist machine Democrats, the economics biz, and the philosophy biz. (“Biz” is the demystified term for “profession”: a corrupt cartel of subsidized thinker-nonthinkers obedient to a specific, enforced thinking-nonthinking paradigm.) A biz, of course, is a sociological entity rather than a body of thought, as many philosophers and economists have pointed out to me, but that’s my point: in academic economics and academic philosophy, the biz has dominated and strangled the work, the way property relations sometimes lower productivity, or the way democratic institutions sometimes crush democracy.
Recently it has become much less necessary for me to troll economics, since without further help from me it seems almost certain to collapse into rubble, in synchrony with the world economy it has been misrepresenting. All of the various cute, ingenious kludges and shims and jimmies and adapters and epicycles and bricolages, and sophisticated-unrealistic models and formalizations, and auxiliary and/or counterfactual assumptions, and so on, that they’ve been using all these years in their attempts to jam historical reality into static models, are now starting to look tattered and ugly. You can’t argue with success, but these guys are now failures.
No actual economist will be hurt as economics withers, along with the economy itself, and Summers and Rubin and Geithner will not be prevented from doing as much as they can to maximize the destruction in the service of their orc masters; but economics itself will disappear. When the dust settles, enough people will understand what happened that the biz will be totally discredited, and the orc masters will have to find some other science to use to spread confusion and preclude popular understanding of what’s going on in their lives.
Philosophy is another question entirely:
I, too, dislike it. There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Philosophy makes nothing happen: it survives in the valley of its making where executives would never want to tamper; a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it.
So the question with philosophy is different than the question with economics. If the philosophy biz in its methodological Siberian forest collapsed into rubble, how would anyone know?
Next week I will explain more clearly why contemporary Anglo-American-Norse philosophy rankles my ass (and should rankle yours), whether or not you call it “analytic philosophy”. (“Opportunity cost” and “crowding out” are key terms.)
Key responses:
Harry and Chris: why, oh why, do you permit comments on threads pertaining to matters philosophical?
— First Secretary of the People’s Philosophy Union
This thread should have been terminated long ago – I’m closing it now.
— Attendant Lord
Trollblog 
March 6, 2009 at 10:52 pm
What about after you’ve destroyed philosophy, though? What about once trolling has destroyed everything but trolling itself, leaving itself alone standing as lord of all it surveys. Then it will procede to attack itself for its own pretentions, its own destruction of other forms of discourse (the indictments it made of economics and philosophy), and will finally collapse under its own contradictions, leaving nothing but a desolate wasteland haunted by the howling winds and the ghosts of extinct disciplines. Is that what you really want?
March 7, 2009 at 12:59 am
Spare us the false humility. You’re just fishing for compliments here.
March 7, 2009 at 1:08 am
🙂
March 7, 2009 at 3:17 am
1: Yes.
2. Of course.
3: Fuck off and die, moron.
March 7, 2009 at 5:16 am
Troll? Nah. The real thing are criminals and near-criminals.
March 7, 2009 at 1:43 pm
🙂
March 7, 2009 at 5:35 pm
(hopefully not double posted; didn’t see it first time)
“in the service of their orc masters”
Hey, what is this, neo-Tolkienian prejudice against orcs? I assure you that orcs would never propound fake economic theories in order to loot. They’d just loot.
Yeah, some of the posters on CT are pretty annoying. I don’t read those kinds of blogs in order to troll, myself — trolling just sort of happens sometimes as a byproduct of me being who I am and them being who they are. Really I like that kind of chat, the kind where I can start with a list of thought experiments and turn them into fanfic, or write a jokey poem about literary theory or something. It’s too bad that almost all the people who are amused by this kind of thing are academics these days.
What I find most amusing are the recently repeated accusations of trolling for popularity. The “pick up chicks” comment — there was something like that at EotW too, if I remember rightly. It’s of course inconceivable to them that anyone would write anything out of conviction.
March 7, 2009 at 7:51 pm
So what do you think of Nassim Taleb?
March 7, 2009 at 8:51 pm
It’s not exactly a ‘biz’. I mean – sure, it is, but it’s more like a mafia organization. Any hierarchical structure operates this way, and it always will.
March 7, 2009 at 9:27 pm
I’m new here, so let me saying your logic is stunning and you are a pleasure to read (yes, I have a master’s degree with a concentration in Economics and have been writing essentially about the same phenomena since the early 80’s).
“You’re just fishing for compliments here.”
Carry on!
Your new fan,
Suzan
March 7, 2009 at 10:23 pm
The mafia is a biz, obvs.
March 7, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Taleb, Mandelbrot, Georgescu-Roegen, Hodgson — a lot pof people have been trying to explain temporality and indeterminacy to economists for a long time.
March 8, 2009 at 12:25 am
🙂
March 9, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Positivists destroyed big P Philosophy (and Big M Metaphysics), like pre WWI. Quine continued the destruction (philosophy’s not so feasible when you have no Mind, as QuineStein averred). Most economists tend to be positivists or naturalist, anyway (like your hero Veblen, hardly some cuddly liberal-do gooder)
Postmods, theists, and these odd Wittgensteinian-Neo Kantian clowns (many from Steinford or the Uni. of Chi. racket) keep reanimating the beast.
March 10, 2009 at 2:50 am
What you say is vaguely true if you accept the positivist-Quinean definitions, but nothing came of all that, not even the destruction of philosophy. People kept making good livings pumping out Quinean, post-positivist, post-Quinean philosophy by the quart, gallon, and acre-foot, and it’s all crap.
Prescott’s [Preston’s!] Analytic Philosophy: Histopry of an Illusion” explains that Ap was always already self-refuted, and that they’ve spent almost a century already trying unsucessfully to figure out WTF they’re supposed to be doing.
Meanwhile there were other things called philosophy, but not by the AP-Quineans, whichh are still around unrefuted excpet by AP question-begging.
I keep saying, read Gellner and get back to me. He’s a guy I like you might like. You really need to read more.
March 10, 2009 at 10:45 am
You need to avoid the grand generalizations. OK, you don’t like Quine: but you could offer your rebuttal of Two Dogmas (TDOE online now, and not $120 like Prescott’s [Preston’s!, my error] tome), or at least a paragraph or two, some specific criticism. You think analyticity or “a prioricity” can be defended? Or is it some lingering… Cartesian view of mind perhaps? Crypto-marxism?
Quinean naturalism seems similar to orthodox marxist materialism in ways (not considering KM’s economic theory): it’s the death of soul implied by Quine’s schema (or orthodox marxism) that usually bothers the sunday schooler (like say a Kotzko), that, and the avoidance of speculation (like psychoanalytical sort), or the usual hegelian-romantic BS.
I don’t think you (or the webloggers) entirely understand what the AP people were doing. Quine is not a Russell, anyway, and had a pragmatist element; you seem to approve of the Deweyan or Rortyian type of schemas, so, ceteris paribus, you should approve of Quine’s pragmatist aspects (or functionalist at least).
Or is your hatred for AP merely political? Quine was a bit conservative reportedly, but did don’t recall him quoting Mein Kampf, or say signing up for the Putsch-partei as did Heidegger (and as Lindberg types did in USA).
March 10, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Read the book in a library. Prescott [Preston!] didn’t refute Quine. He just says that AP back to the founders (Moore, Wittgennstein, Russell, and the Vienna positivists; I don’t think that he includes Popper among the latter) has always wondered why it existed at all — given its special-sciences definition of knowledge, what was philosophy knowledge of?
Quine’s “Two Dogmas” was a refutation of basic doctrines of already-existing analytic philosophy, and worked within given analytic assumptions that I reject. Chief among them is that exact, rigorously argued knowledge is always to be preferred to broader, less rigorous thought. Get a list of thinkers from the beginning until now which APs call “not really philosophers”, “folk philosophers” or “essentially just a precursor of real philosopher X” — the way James was a precursor of Russell. To me many of them are real philosophers, still worthy of attention.
Another is a general anti-culturalism — the idea that culture (and subjectivity, and normativity) are primarily or exclusively impediments to or defects of thought — or objects of thought, but primarily as types of untruth and illusion to be studied. Another is propositionality — that philosophy exists only to produce true propositions. Various sort of framing statements, constructive proposals, proposed first principles, insightful aphorisms, etc., can’t be true in any strict sense.
After their supposed destruction, metaphysics and ontology seem to have revived with a vengeance — another thing I don’t like. And a lot of formalism and metaphysics in philosophy, economics, and elsewhere seems intended to ignore, repress, or evade the fact of historicity. In this there has been a decline even since logical positivism — Reichenbach had a reasonable understanding of temporality. A vigorous and fruitful discussion time and history seems to have been brought to an end ca. 1950, with Donald Campbell being the sole survivor, and outside philosophy.
March 10, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Another is a general anti-culturalism — the idea that culture (and subjectivity, and normativity) are primarily or exclusively impediments to or defects of thought — or objects of thought, but primarily as types of untruth and illusion to be studied.
Bully for anti-culturalism. Anyway, positivism would require you to start by defining abstract terms like normativity, culture, historicity, etc. There’s no jargon chanting allowed. Normativity is not an object like, say, a Norton Commando is an object. So you’re speaking of human actions, and brain functions, really (unless you believe in mental events apart from the brain ). Something like ethics might be feasible (though debatable, given naturalist determinism and so forth–a point even Wm James agreed to), but there’s no innate Justice form we can point to. Utility and the old Benthamite jazz pretty useless as well, I believe–same for Rawls, though Rawlsian distribution could conceivably be made to work (say, with Chairman Mao around to enforce the contract).
Positivism of the older Carnapian sort (tho Quine might agree) would entail some very cool book-burnings, and that wouldn’t just include say belle lettres (Ok we keep a few bards–Shelley, Ez Pound, etc.) or pop culture mierda, but the theology library (monotheism or otherwise), useless bureaucratic social science, and the Zizek reading room (perhaps keep some german idealists for kix, but Freud and Lacan…. en La Conflagracion de Enemigos de Razon…!). Then peoples could discuss economics and applied sciences, or at least Praxis.
March 10, 2009 at 4:46 pm
The positivists and probably later analytic philosophers felt that by purifying the language of the kinds of things that you’re talking about, and by speaking only in metaphysically naturalist or physicalist terms, there would be an immense payoff and our discussion of politics, society, persons, law, and “normativity” would be splendidly improved. (Structuralists, Freudians and other psychoanalysts, and Marxists all thought the same, and some continental thinkers mushed the three of these together in a vaguely positivist way to produce a most godawful mess).
There was no real payoff of that type. Particular points from structuralism, Freud, Marx, and positivism had some value — as people point out, I sometimes talk like a positivist (so did Foucault). But the overarching systems were just more of the same, and by and large not a new improved version of the same.
The virute of analytic philosophy, if it has one, is that it makes substantive discussion of these kinds of things effectively impossible, leaving the field to others. All you can do is rigorously reargue the same old received ideas in newly-tweaked forms, or invent fantasy doctrines for vegan supoermodels. But alas, the AP dog still controls the turf.
BTW, Ezspeak died about when Black Mountain College closed down (1956). You may be the last living speaker
March 10, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Your criteria for the white hats and black hats of the intelligentsia puzzles. According to EmoSpeak, Bertrand Russell’s an arch fiend, but Popper’s cool; Wm. James a great generalist, but Quine’s with El Diablo.
Popper for one leaned more towards conservativism than did Russell; he waffled on ‘Nam, and was pals with the Hayek crowd, if not Ayn Rand. I respect Popper–he was not supportive of “historicity” btw, and detested Wittgenstein–but he was no progressive.
However glib, British, or arrogant BR seems to many hepcats, he opposed both fascists and stalinists. He ridiculed American yokels and biblethumpers. He dissed the academic bureaucracy, and capitalism. He might not have much cred with current postmod PC-stalinist crowd, but that’s to his favor. He did great work in logic, mathematical foundations, and phil. of language, apart from his later journalism and political writing. His political position not far from that of say Orwell.
He may have had a certain arrogance or Dr. Pangloss aspect to his character, but most Russell-bashing seems about the equivalent of American movies featuring Brit. villains: the Iago-meme (or Blofeld, Hannibal Lector, etc). ‘Mericans react to the British intellectual tone, to the oxfordian vibe, to the formality itself and really don’t care what Lord Russell has to say (same for like Dawkins or Hitchens, but Russell they are not). That’s how the continentalist left operates: it’s about like “would you want to see Professor X in a art movie ?–or is it boxing ring” Brits are generally not guru material like say a Sartre was, or Zizek is. Who cares what BS a Zizek has to say? He looks the part of the radical leftist, talks about porn, makes obvious anti-semitic remarks, hangs out with 3rd world marxists. It’s Radical chic, reiterated (though arguably worse, with the Lacan, Foo-cault, medusas with machine guns etc).
March 10, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Russell quit doing philosophy by his own standards around 1930 or so and became a journalist. I did like his boook “Power”, but he didn’t continue in that direction. I grew up on his pop writings but they have severe limitations.
Popper (and Gellner) I like for the reasons that he’s been expelled: willingness to do big-picture philosophy. Popper had the Open Society, falsifiability (which grounded an egregiously normative idea of science, but normativity is a good thing), contingency, and “one-two-three worlds”. Gellner had similar breadth. Like Dennett, I disagree with, but can talk to these guys, and can learn from them. (Highly, highly recommended: Gellner, “Language and Solitude”).
Toulmin, Michel Meyer, Rorty, Putnam / Sen, Wilshire, and McCumber, with a little intensification, pretty much explain why my ass is rankled. All but McCumber and Wilshire were analytic philosophers at one time.
March 11, 2009 at 2:57 am
[…] is seldom ascribed to eccentricity, a grudge, or mental illness any more, but for most, my vendetta against philosophy is still suspect.Why should something as ” quixotic”, “mostly […]
March 11, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Does analytical philosophy really need to be “taken down?” Who, besides analytical philosophers, really gives a shit anymore about analytical philosophy? And I say this as someone who majored in analytical philosophy. What a giant waste of time.
March 11, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Better some “bare-bones positivism” than affirming dogma of whatever sort (whether ju-xtian, or the wannabe-marxism of the weblog gang).
Evidentialism perhaps a more suitable term. Toulmin may have objected to academic formal logic of the Frege-Quine variety, yet still upholds evidentialism (his system of warrant/claim/backing really a type of inductive logic, and Toulimian arguments still hinge on evidence and data, except when like MLA-bots are doing the scribbling).
Analytical philosophy was not just formal logic, anyway. Carnap and Popper were more interested in philosophy of science, problems of induction, verification, probability, etc.
Evidentialism asks that people justify their beliefs. One withholds belief (or assent, in DeweySpeak) when all the facts are not in, or when probability’s an issue, when there exist good reasons to doubt a claim: like, say a claim that the Bible is infallible, or the supposed truth of the labor theory of value (or the claims of laissez-faire apologists for that matter).
Evidentialism does play a part in ordinary decisions obviously, and has significance beyond academia. What are reporters doing? They gather facts and evidence, and make claims based on the evidence: that may seem a bit quotidian to continental hepcats, but essential in many, if not most contexts. Postmods would have the daily newspapers written via stream of consciousness; The Postmod courtroom–Herr Doktor Zizek, not bound to vulgar empiricism, simply pronounces guilt on the Oppressor. Turn ’em into fertilizer, comrade.
March 11, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Stras, it’s that. But it occupies space where more valuable people could be, and has been steadily driving out better stuff for 50+ years. The philosophy itself is null, except in terms of indocrinating a cohort in a decadent form of neutral specialization, and secondarily in driving a lot of fine people from philosophy — and I think that philosophy could be of great value. AP is a sort of dummy placeholder.
March 11, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Horatio, my target is the people who have dominated American, British (and Norse) universities since 1970 or so. I have plenty of beefs with Russell, Moore, early Wittgenstein, Austen et al, Popper, and the positivists, but what really pissed off, after I’d just started to get used to these guys (not entirely happily) when the field was taken over by Quine, Sellars, Kripke, Goodman, Davidson, early Putnam, the heirs of these, and [John Doe 1…n]. Everything seemed to become abstract, meta, metaphysical, formalistic, austerely unreadable, anti-popular, cramped, stunted, hypothetical, unrealistic, and scholastic.
March 11, 2009 at 6:40 pm
In terms of your anti-academic perspective and politics, I agree to some extent: Quine’s not interested in creating a kinder, gentler ecotopia.
In terms of your generalizations about the subject matter, I don’t agree; you can’t really lump AP together like that. Goodman and Quine were doing something quite different than what say Putnam, Kripke produce. G & Q were following from Wm James (and Peirce); the radical empiricist strain of AP–Quine, really–should not be mistaken for the metaphysical realism AP (ala Kripke, Putnam, though he changes his views like every 5 years).
Wm. James had nothing but scorn for idealist metaphysics; James obviously backed experimentalism, helped establish early behaviorism, supported language reform, positivism to some extent. You sound a bit marxist-romantic at times (or Osiris forbid, theistic). There was a certain anti-humanist aspect to AP: that’s what bothers the Che Guevaras of academia, or the theological sorts. I’ll take bad behaviorism over romantic marxism, sentimental xtians, and multiculturalism, anyday. We should remember the failure of the touchy-feely gestaltist BS as well.
Academia itself has not been taken over by AP. UCLA, UCI, Berkeley, most state schools are ruled by marxists, postmodernist aesthetes, scientific bureaucrats (yes, some probably quote Quine).
March 11, 2009 at 7:21 pm
You goddamn well CAN lump AP like that. Taking one or two ideas from James doesn’t make you “like James”; not a single one of the AP guys is like James, except, very weakly, Rorty, who left (voluntarily or otherwise).
You ought to quit trundling out your own Che Guevara ecotopian Christian Marxist postmodern obsessions and respond to what I’m actually saying.
Quine is like James the way Sartre is like Acquinas. Not much at all, though an argument that they are will enliven a cocktail party.
March 11, 2009 at 7:24 pm
You might read Feyerabend’s writing. He had an anti-academic perspective, especially in regards to the scientific research business (or ‘scientism” as the pomos say). Feyerabend did not lack for science and philosophy chops either– at least equal to Popper, or Kuhn. He studied with Popper, then broke with him. He thought Wittgenstein a dilettante (if not fraud and crypto-fascist).
PF was leftist, perhaps, but not the continental or parisian marxist sort. I don’t always agree with Feyerabend’s views–he tended to a certain anarchistic populism at times which seemed a bit naive–but he knew the score on the University bidness. He’s par-tay material (at least black flag par-tay material).
March 11, 2009 at 7:30 pm
How about I read Feyerabend and you read gellner? Deal?
March 11, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Maybe. How about you read Quine where he quotes James, and Peirce, and refers to a pragmatist criteria of Truth (ye olde cash value, more or less)? I don’t necessarily agree (Pragmatism also works for the Oppressor, most of the time) but WVOQ did have an understanding of Prag., at least of the naturalist, experimentalist sort. His ideas can be used against dogma. I dislike naive, vulgar Darwinism , but I really hate stalinism (or worse, theological stalinism…) .
Or peruse Chomsky’s rants against Skinner for introduction to the issue (and BFS’s pal Quine). Chomsky raises some decent if obvious points. I agree with NC, for most part, yet I believe Chomsky merely replaces the pragmatic-behaviorist schema with the old Rousseauean liberty, and PC leftist democracy. Liberty is not inherently valuable.
March 12, 2009 at 5:01 pm
This philosophy stuff is way over my head, and besides, the title of this post promised that we would be killing off philosophy next. I want to talk about the decadence of modern economics, specifically as regards Delong’s debate in the Economist.
Delong is debating Prof. Luigi Zingales, who is apparently a highly regarded University of Chicago economist. I’m not much more sophisticated about economics than I am about philosophy, but Zingales’ comments were plainly flat-out crazy. One ludicrous straw man after another.
How does this happen, that an academic discipline can become so debased that it’s obvious to a dilettante like me?
When I talk to global warming skeptics, I’m ultimately forced to revert to appeals to authority – the actual science is way over my head. But Jesus, how can someone like Zingales be treated as a legitimate intellectual?
March 12, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I’ve been asking that for years. I’m no more familiar than you are with the inside of econ, I just read a lot of generalist writing about econ, much of it by credentialed economists.
With the Chicago School, what strikes me is the dogmatism, the meanness, and the blithe, cocky unawareness od other human beings. But only now does it seem that it’s provavbly technically wrong too, by economists’ standards, and even so, because of their corruption and dishonesty, most of them will fight to the bitter end.
All of our problems are caused by high texes and government interference. That’s all the want us to know.
March 12, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Provably technically wrong? You’re really quite an optimist, John. If society survives, then decades from now people will be saying the same exact thing, just as people are still going on about creationism long after that was “settled”.
Perhaps I should take “by economists’ standards” more seriously as a modifier. After all, you can’t really go on about creationism as a biologist. But that’s because biology is a science — economics isn’t. I don’t see any reason why economics can’t continue to be whatever the upper class wants it to be.
Your chances with philosophy are better, because no one really cares what philosophers say.
March 12, 2009 at 6:59 pm
I believe that the Austrians took a big bite with the depression, but it’s true that they’re still here. So are the gold bugs, and Austrian gold bugs can even claim to be populists.
I do believe that this is going to be bad enough to shake up the field, though I doubt that any individual economists will either change their minds or voluntarily shut up.
March 12, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I guess that I don’t believe that this is going to be bad enough to shake up the field, not unless we seriously have Great Depression II.
You have to look at the capabilities for institutional maintenance. Rich people don’t just create think tanks that give individual economists jobs, they endow academic positions, support entire economics departments, in order to ensure that certain parts of the field can not die out. Professors have to publish, and those people have to all get into the literature somehow. So yes, they can essentially buy enough of a discipline so that their particular interests will always be represented as part of a he said/she said in the media.
The only way that this kind of economics could die out is if Great Depression II actually makes rich people so poor that they have to give up on some of their more expensive luxury purchases.
March 12, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I more or less expect GD 2. It’s already the worst since GD 2, and noone knows where the bottom is.
The passivity and resignation are appalling. People have lost a third to half their retirement money, and as much of the value of their houses, but nobody seems mad. And no one’s being blamed except Obama, Clinton, and the colored folks, because liberal Democrats are incapable of blaming anyone.
March 12, 2009 at 8:20 pm
A person’s “ideological schema” might have some bearing on his view of economics. Why should a wealthy conservative broker who raked it in when crude oil or gold markets rallied care about the lending crisis, unless it has some bearing on his own financial status? Obviously, many Sally- Fields leftists seem to suggest there are economic obligations of a sort, whether at level of individual or state (e.g consider the recent CA budget whine fest). Herr Doktor DeLong himself often sounds righteously indignant at times discussing some index or another, and that indignation seems based on some idea of economic justice, not merely efficiency or equilibrium.
Once one realizes (whether from reading Hume, Darwin, or Quine. etc) there are no convincing arguments for dualism, or for normativity, robber-baron capitalism may look fairly appealing (at least until everyone sits down to play the Veil of Ignorance game with Rawls, or is it marxistas). Pimp, or die.
March 12, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Horatio, you do realize, I hope, that your firm anti-ethical conviction comes from nowhere, (or from your butt, whichever).
Likewise your belief that other people’s convictions require convincing arguments, whereas yours can be stipulated.
March 12, 2009 at 8:56 pm
More of your liberal alarmism (not to say lightweight defamation) In fact, genius, that’s right from Hume’s fact/value distinction, which you have yet to grasp. You repeatedly insist upon ethical obligations which cannot be defended (whether rationally, or scientifically).
Karl Marx hisself detested the liberal reformers (and utopian socialists) who misread economic problems as some quasi-theological or moral battle. I don’t have my copy of Theory of Leisure Class handy, but I don’t recall Veblen resorting to SallyFieldsSpeak; Veblen actually interesting because of a certain Darwinian approach to classical econ., really (like questioning the Rational Man standard, for one).
March 12, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Who said I’m a Marxist? When did Marx become an authority for you, for that matter? Hume’s fact value distinction does nothing but separate value, normativity, whatever, from any supposed proof or scientific grounding. It did not refute normativity, except to you and yours. Non normative science was a fad for a century or two, but who cares any more, except for you and administrative-liberal process dweebs?
SallyFieldsSpeak is hardly less valid than HoratioSpeak. Everyone has ungrounded, unproven commitments, and yours are far different than mine.
March 12, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Conclusionary. I did not say you were a marxist; merely pointing out a value-free approach. Really, having read your visions over last few months, I don’t think you’re a pragmatist or naturalist, but sort of liberal moralist. Halle-loo-jah, brrtthhr.
That’s not exactly Hume’s point on the fact/value problem, either. EthicsSpeak does not refer: values, whatever they are (if anything) are not objects. When someone say something like “Madoff is a New Yorker” we can understand it, however superficial that may seem. That’s a true statement. When someone says “Madoff is evil,” that’s vague, if not meaningless. Not really true, except perhaps with a great deal of explanation. That may seem trite, but something to remember when starting into discussions of “normativity.”
Paraphrasing Stein in Conrad’s Lord Jim, “one must immerse oneself in the destructive element.”
March 12, 2009 at 9:53 pm
OK, while we’re impaling the malefactors you can sit off with the new agers and the hippies and the Marxists and the transgressionists and the positivists, and the administrative liberals and wave your lily-white hands and say, “No! No! No! Retribution and moralism are wrong.”
Cool with me. And you can write your independent opinion, dissenting from most of the others’ reasons for objecting to the impaling, but asserting that my neglect of Hume and Quine renders the impaling invalid and null.
I don’t actually think simple moral judgments make the world go around or can lead to a cogent analysis of anything, but the taboo against morilazation strikes me as debilitating generic educated administrative liberal post-political bullshit.
March 12, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Doing your bizarre classifications again. I’m against new-agers, mystics, believers, biblethumpers. Always have been: you’re the one quoting Prigogine, etc.
Marxist analysis should not just be rejected out of hand. He was prone to great generalizations (following his master Hegel), and made mistakes. Yet we can learn from his mistakes (the labor theory of value, possibly class struggle itself). Marx was, I believe, profoundly cynical and had no faith in democracy (or, really, any politics. In a sense his writing, even when empirical and economic, hints at pathology, or social pathology–not merely malthusian, like a shortage of resources, or famines, etc., but a world of human-animals. Something like a Hobbesian state of nature (and KM was acquainted with Leviathan) .
Reality’s far more fucked up than most realize–politically, and psychologically. Reading the daily drivel of the blogger economists, the political people, churchies, the unf’ed cafe liberals, you’d think we were all living in some Emersonian (as in Ralph Waldo) pastoral bliss, when we’re probably a year or two from full scale riots or another war.
March 12, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Me bizarre, and not you? I know that you’re embarrassed by the company you keep, but that’s not my problem.
March 15, 2009 at 3:00 am
I think the problem with philosophy (and many others things) is that it’s illegitimately divorced from any kind of activity. It arrogates itself to a position second only to God. And I think today, philosophers have exploded each others arguments over the years, they much of their work is simply an apology for their existence. It’s true that in the past, and perhaps to some extent even now, philosophy has produced many things of value, such as mathematics. However, what is indefensible today–not abstract thought for the sake of abstract thought–is the continued pretense that the Ultimate is being sought since it seems the Ultimate boils down to truisms.
Philosophy can do two things honestly. In the Academy it can drop the fraudulent pretense of revealing God (using the term figuratively), a task, in infinitely humbler form, taken up by the natural sciences. And outside it it can be regarded as providing (invariably tentative and always questionable to some degree) principles guiding action, such as the dramatic conventions used by Hollywood screenwriters.
Incidentally:–on a personal note–I have found arch analytic villains, St. Bertrand in particular, the most valuable in my intellectual development in spite of the fact they seem to me to be wrong in virtually every case I feel what they’re saying makes sense. One could say I’ve adopted and instrumentalist attitude to their work, using it to aid in the clarification of my thoughts and the development of my forensic skill. Furthermore, Russell is invaluable in deflating the grand claims made by traditional metaphysicians regardless whatever arrogance may be evidenced in his own work.
March 22, 2009 at 5:11 am
Thanks for the tip on Prescott [Preston!] and Gellner. Prescott led me to Joseph Margolis and I’m now reading Historied Thought, Constructed World online. Wish I’d found it ten years ago.
Do you have any opinion on Walter Kaufmann, not the Nietszche stuff, but, say, Critique of Religion and Philosophy or Without Guilt and Justice?
Also, on Popper and Hayek, I seem to remember reading in Beyond Wittgensteins’s poker by Peter Munz, who claims to be the only person who was taught by both Wittgenstein and Popper, that Popper disagreed with Hayek, but wouldn’t criticize him publicly because Hayek had been instrumental in bringing him from New Zealand to England. He felt it would be bad manners.
March 22, 2009 at 4:55 pm
I’m not much more sophisticated about economics than I am about philosophy, but Zingales’ comments were plainly flat-out crazy. One ludicrous straw man after another.
I don’t think Zingales’ arguments were crazy. The question was very poorly framed anyway and allowed Zingales to dodge the question of whether we’d actually be better off without stimulus (we wouldn’t). But he’s right that this is not a “Keynesian” crisis in the sense of the debased popular current notion of Keynesianism — basically, run a big giant government deficit and ignore institutional roots. It is, however, a crisis that Keynes himself would have understood instantly.