Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking

> Long boring sentences

OMG Willard Quine!

I was told he was an excellent writer. I accept that his reasoning/arguments were very lucid; I did not find his writing lucid.

> our language is lacking in clarity

I take it you mean English. English is highly allusive and ambiguous. Many words that mean completely different things are spelled the same. Many concepts are referred to by severaal different words, typically imported from different languages, and carrying different connotations. It's a wonderful language for describing things, but not so good for pinning things down.

There's a reason that the language of International Law is French (and just because you speak French, that doesn't mean you have to write like Foucault). German is a pretty matter-of-fact language, very well-suited to philosophical discourse.

If I read someone like Fred Ayer, I have the sense that it would have been easier to understand him if he wrote in German. Wittgenstein's Tractatus I have only ever read in English; but it was originally in German, and even though the Tractatus is more difficult than Ayer, I find it hugely more lucid.

>Usually, the prose is infused with arcane terminology and learned jargon, creating an aura of scholarly profundity. We can call this phenomenon obscurantist pseudophilosophy.

Is this a joke? I honestly can't tell if it's a joke.

This whole article might be.

> While pseudoscience is particularly prone to causal fallacies and cherry-picking of data, the most common fallacy in obscurantist pseudophilosophy is equivocation. This fallacy exploits ambiguities in certain key terms, where plausible but trivial claims lend apparent credibility to interesting but controversial ones. When challenged, the obscurantist will typically retreat to the safe house provided by the trivial interpretation of his claims, only to reoccupy the controversial ground once the critic has left the scene.

I found this to be a very helpful description of a specific kind of sloppy argumentation I have seen a lot of (usually about politics) in the last few years. It seems like it's made worse by anonymous online group arguments - one person will make one trivially true claim, another person will make a farther-reaching, incorrect claim and say it is proven by the first, a third person will defend a critique of any bad claims by just defending the first trivially true one, and bad ideas thrive in the space between all these people.

> well regarded philosophy journals (in my academic neck of the woods) have ridiculously low acceptance rates (2-3% often)

This just shows that academic philosophy is a very exclusive club. It doesn't say anything about the standards involved.

If anything, an extremely high rejection rate tends to enforce intellectual conformity and conservatism on a field that you would think is least in need of those qualities.

It's hard to believe that there are still people writing the old "post-modernist philosophers are bad for civilization!" rant.

One thing that always surprises me about these posts are that they always fail to get the arrow of causality right. In general postmodernist philosophy is a descriptive philosophy, not a proscription one. That is Foucault and the many other philosophers this author wants to write off as pseuds aren't stating "we should live in a world where all truth is in question" but observing that we do live in this world.

The rise of "astrology, homeopathy, flat-Earthism, anti-vaxx" in recent years for me is a strong argument that these thinkers were largely correct. People aren't reading Foucault and becoming anti-vaxx, and people who think Fox news is reality aren't doing so because they read some Deleuze.

While it is of course folly to try to paint all of these thinker with a broad brush, the general themes that they describe is that in our postmodern, late capitalist society we're seeing systems of meaning and value begin to break down. And again, they largely aren't saying that they should break down or that this is a desirable direction to go. Just observing that this is happening.

If these philosophies had made any predictions it's that as global capitalism grows more manic, we'll see the continued breakdown of systems of value and meaning, were people become completely enmeshed in a world of symbols detached for any real meaning. Not only the rise in "..., anti-vaxx" but also things like "fake news", the commodification of identity in social media, the surrealism of the radical "right" in the US, all of these things are the logical conclusion of what you would expect given the descriptions these thinkers have of who society works.

The bizarreness of rants against these thinkers is somehow blaming them for the very state of society, culture and knowledge that they predicted. It's like blaming epidemiologists for a pandemic. If anything we should view postmodernist thinkers as absolutely validated.