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Isn't Popper required reading material at every decent university?
You’d hope.
I also read what another commenter linked below, but cannot say what all that really means. To formulate clearly, I understand what the text says piece by piece, but fail to get the “correct” sense it was supposed to deliver. Maybe I need some decomposition (sorry if it turns to be a silly joke, couldn’t resist ;)
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>xkcd I just read the article on Deconstruction and... either I am a complete philosophy/humanitary idiot or that entire area is full of con artists who just spit smart words out their mouth to bring their bread at the table. Regardless of that, I never respected anyone who doesn’t use formal definitions in serious analysis. I hated (disrespected) philosophy at school and I do it now even more, seeing how they chew t…
It is actually kind of funny, I know what deconstruction is, and I would call the two quoted paragraphs pretty clear. They don't do a horrible job of describing what it is. I think it just takes being steeped in the jargon of the field to read that. But, it is a pretty ok explanation. If you think this is somehow bad, I would argue you should try to read any of the wikipedia pages on homotopy type theory without back…
The same you may find of course for “intelligible over sensible” etc, but then there are 53 schools, 734 works and billions of words to read, before you get that all of them just tossing meanings to claim their right. If something cannot be drawn as a diagram (whatever complex), it is not worth studying, because you cannot spend 50 years to understand something like “well, not sure what that means”. It almost feels like philosophers simply are bad at math/logic and have to use vague words and broad examples to prove their theorems or build axioms. After few iterations of “looking up” everyone is lost in trees forever, since there is no common sense of a forest, whose meaning could be fixed independently of given language or jargon differences. Thought turns into master and thinkers turn into its slaves? Who can prove that they understand this complexity and not simply trained their bio-NNs to claim it to themselves with no inner resistance? Can they reveal an impostor from that xkcd quickly? He-he.
Boring long-running sentences of form “bla bla ... (bla, bla, bla, bla) bla bla bla, bla bla (...) ...” only make it worse. I never seen it in good tech/math docs, but for subj it was a big red flag “never touch it”.
Ed: grammar
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’d hope.
Which particular book do you recommend, regarding my quote? I also read what another commenter linked below, but cannot say what all that really means. To formulate clearly, I understand what the text says piece by piece, but fail to get the “correct” sense it was supposed to deliver. Maybe I need some decomposition (sorry if it turns to be a silly joke, couldn’t resist ;)
Having said that, postmodernism is (in my view) totally misguided. The obfuscated language is intentional, as among its epistemological assumptions is that reason is not only limited, but has only limited access to reality (well, or creates reality), and at any rate is insufficient.
Recommended readings:
* The Sokal Hoax [1]
* Intellectual Impostors by Bricmont and Sokal (Fashionable Nonsense in the US) [2] for an expansion on the Sokal Hoax, and many examples on pretentious and preposterous abuse of scientific terminology by postmodern philosophers
* Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault by Hicks [3] on the history of postmodernism, arising from counter-enlightenment philosophy all the way from Rousseau via the insufferable German idealists, including Hegel with his dialectical reasoning, which supported both fascism and Marxism.
Postmodernists often take specific reasonable criticism of or problems with science or realism, and then blow them up and generalise them unjustifiably. It is worth taking some of the criticism to heart, but the postmodernists aren't even the ones formulating those problems in the most cogent way. So, my advice would be to waste some, but not too much time on postmodernism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-098325...
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This reminds me of a classroom debate from school: If you, the day before a major surgery, saw your doctor reading through a medical textbook on the topic of your surgery, would you be more or less confident in their abilities? Some said they wouldn’t trust the doctor, as they held some notion that the doctor should just know these by virtue of their being a doctor. That if they don’t it is a sign of their ill prepar…
Or you might think that a doctor who does a surgery like this every day, has done so for years, and for whom brushing up would thus be redundant is the doctor you want. Granted, that requires that it be a reasonably common surgery and that you trust that the doctor gives sufficient consideration to non-surgical treatments instead of pushing patients towards surgery. Perhaps a decent analogy would be a dentist capping…
I guess they'd see consulting a textbook in a better light than most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’d hope.
Which particular book do you recommend, regarding my quote? I also read what another commenter linked below, but cannot say what all that really means. To formulate clearly, I understand what the text says piece by piece, but fail to get the “correct” sense it was supposed to deliver. Maybe I need some decomposition (sorry if it turns to be a silly joke, couldn’t resist ;)
Short answer: it’s impossible.
Medium answer: the attempt itself is counterproductive and misunderstands how we use language.
Long answer: aside from being impossible, the impulse is related to Platonic essentialism, which is the philosophical spawning ground of authoritarianism and has stifled honest inquiry for circa 2k years.