On 11/6/07, Ian Kluge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Dear Gilberto,
>
> RE: >
> > How could we know they are "good guesses" i.e. guesses at least somewhat
> > close to the truth, if we do not know what the truth is - or even worse,
> do
> > not believe that there is a truth to know in the first place?
> >
> > All we get here is an endless quagmire to guesses . . .
> >
>
> you write,
>
> "Well, we can still get minimally satisfactory outcomes even if we
> don't have reliable unambiguous communication. For example, suppose
> you don't know Japanese and you are in a Japanese restaurant where
> they don't speak English. You could point and and wave and gesture and
> probably get something to eat even you don't really understand the
> menu and the waiters don't perfectly understand what you want."
>
> This is Rorty's 'solution' - but that doesn't solve the problem because
> there is no way to definitively determine what "minimally satisfactory"
> actually means -
I'm not sure what you mean by "solve the problem". Richard had
previously asked the question of whether deconstructionism implies
communication is impossible. All I'm saying is that the above
hypothetical situation is an example of ambiguous communication which
still yields satisfactory results (where in this example,
"satisfactory" means... more or less... that you have gotten some food
at the restaurant).
>
> You might also get them to boot you out or call the police, or, if you point
> to a menu, they might think you're a mental patient who steals menus from
> restaurants - or maybe just wants to stand there holding one menu while he
> blisses out in another dimension.
>
Sure. The fact that those outcomes are possible seems to lend some
weight to deconstructionism. And the fact that those outcomes are rare
suggests that in spite of a certain amount of ambiguity, some limited
communication is still possible.
> Common sense tells us we have to stop interpreting at some point - but this
> point is purely arbitrary and is not available to deconstructionism, i.e. a
> deconstructionist could starve to death in a restaurant if he applies
> Derrida's principles.
>
> That is why, in his last redoubt, Rorty holed up in the position that
> "consensus" was the only way to avoid deconstructionism's extraordinary
> difficulties on this issue. This "consensus" could be the consensus of
> experts, as well as (and he says this) nice progressive liberals like
> himself whose greatest horror is causing pain to anyone.
>
But then the question of who is or isn't an expert is going to be a
political question just like the deconstructionists suggest, no?
> You write,
>
> "Or for a different example, which I wouldn't necessarily endorse as
> true, but it works as an example... consider the book Men are from
> Mars, Women are from Venus. Men and women obviously manage to
> communicate well enough in an everyday sense, But in another sense,
> there are still some limitations and ambiguities which lead to
> communication problems."
>
> Here you illustrate what I said before: if we try to salvage some
> commonsense from deconstructionism, we get nothing new, platitudes, - and
> there was no need to write books about it; nor was there any reason for all
> the intellectual excitement. If I wrote a book to explain that men and women
> sometimes misunderstand each other, no one would invite me to lecture at
> Harvard or Princeton . . . Derrida's writings clearly indicate that this
> kind of platitude is not what he means.
Again, I was trying to address Richard's question of how communication
isn't totally impossible even if meanings are ambiguous. And I would
argue that taking deconstructionism to far out extremes becomes a
straw dog argument.
>
> Deconstructionism only becomes intellectually exciting when we take it at
> face value, when it seems to say something radical - but then it turns out
> to lead to nonsense as illustrated above. See the Sokal hoax for a
> confirmation.
I like the whole Sokol hoax story but I would draw different
implications from it. For me it says that literary critics should
stick to literature and stay away from physics. And it also draws into
question the peer review process which is applied by a variety of
academic journals. But I've also known engineers and natural
scientists who have also been critical of the peer review process. I
think Sokol provided a sobering and persuasive corrective to certain
intellectual trends. But I don't think he proved that all of
deconstructionism should be demonized.
>
> Something a commonplace as 'men and women sometimes misunderstand each
> other' is not deconstructionism's point. Its point is that all communication
> is inherently problematic and ultimately, impossible since every statement
> is subject to endless self-subversion.
>
> You write,
>
> "I guess I would want want to inject the comment that I'm willing to
> believe Derrida and the postmodernists are not morons. So whatever
> they mean when talking about the problems of reading a text, it
> probably includes our everyday experiences of going out in the world,
> talking to people, and receiving what we think of as reasonable
> behavioral responses much of the time."
>
> As individuals Derrida and the postmodernists are not morons, but as
> philosophers they have trapped themselves in a position that leads to wholly
> untenable consequences, i.e. extreme scepticism and relativism in
> epistemology, ontology and ethics.
>
Why are those positions untenable?
> A real example in regards to ethics. Derrida's good friend and fellow
> deconstructionist, Paul de Man, was a member of the Belgian Nazis in WW 2
> and published numerous articles against Jews and advocated their elimination
> from Belgium. Derrida used deconstructionist methods to 'prove' that these
> articles were actually cleverly disguised works of resistance and protest,
> i.e. he deconstructed the articles to show they supposedly meant the
> opposite of what they clearly said. IOW, ethically, deconstruction as a
> method of analysing discourse/action can make anything - anti-semitism -
> into anything else - philojudaism - i.e. turn Mother Teresa into Dr. Mengele
> and vice versa. That's relativism with a vengeance and is dangerous to say
> the least. Derrida was clearly not thinking about what happens to his
> philosophy when he went into the world.
>
>
> Scepticism and relativism (see my "Relativism and the Baha'i Writings") are
> so problematic that they have never gained a foothold in philosophy despite
> periodic resurgences - after which they fall back into the shadows.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Ian Kluge
>
>
>
>
>
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