> Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity Sorry, but the pseudophilosopher here is the author of the article. He can't disambiguate between truth as some property of the universe/time-space/actual historical occurence, and truth as it matters to us, and thinks that just because Foucault doesn't spell the distinct…
> It's the century plus old distinction between analytical and continental philosophy The article's claim is not that this distinction doesn't exist or that it is not a useful distinction, but that "pseudophilosphers" tend to equivocate between "truth as some property of the universe" and "truth as it matters to us". That seems to me to be an interesting position that is worth considering. (btw. the claim that "The d…
The Thinker takes a bold and shocking stand, which is compressed, by the rules of memetic natural selection, into the boldest and shocking-est possible framing: "People don't actually care about their children." Or "Truth doesn't exist." Or "We should kill poor people to increase the average level of happiness."
People are instantly nerdsniped by the idea. The implications! Could it be true? The curious reader finds there is always a deep and sophisticated literature backing up the crazy-sounding claim. Only after investing a huge amount of energy can the scholar even hope to unpack the fact of the matter, which is: the Thinker never really meant that claim, not the way it's stated, not using those words the way most people mean them. It always, always, always turns out that the Thinker was either being intentionally provocative with the big-bold-claim, or else using language in an idiosyncratic jargon-ified way.
(Sometimes there is no single Thinker, and instead the big-bold-claim is a meme that bubbles up organically out of a whole school of thought, and is memetically selected for promulgation on the basis of its outrageousness.)
If Foucalt had just written: "The agreed-upon 'truth' of the social, subjective stuff that people tend to loudly disagree about is often decided by who is in power, and who is advantaged by the 'truth' coming out one way or another," well, that's not a body of thought, that's a low-performing tweet. He needs to make it seem big, important, sweeping, general, touching upon every facet of human endeavor. This is not necessarily to say that Foucalt is some kind of intellectual grifter; this is simply the pressure that the universe exerts on all thinkers. To be more general, more important. But, as the Thinker is forced to make their big idea more general and more important, it loses the simple and obviously true (and fundamentally anodyne) tweet-length core.
tl;dr: Memetics ruins everything.