Probably true in most cases, but there is a place for strategic ambiguity if it's done right. Heraclitus, Zen Koans, Biblical poetry, Hegel- ambiguity can allow a work to be more dynamic.

E.g., given his background in theology, which let him see how the Bible was interpreted and reinterpreted over millennia, his love of Heraclitus, and his expectation that his own words would be studied by future generations, I get the feeling that Hegel sometimes intentionally wrote like such an asshole.

Maybe philosophers writing in mystical poems will make a comeback some day... we could turn to the renewable energy source of Russell spinning in his grave.

A surprising answer! Good for you.

Nietzsche has that line, "Most philosophers are bad writers because they show you not only their thought, but the thinking of their thought."

He might have been bullshitting though.

I'll say this though: the style you're describing can be perfectly appropriate as a pedagogical tool, and it's one reason what sprung to (your) mind was wisdom traditions, where someone is definitely the master or teacher and someone else is the student.

That is not appropriate here, where we are all collaborators, and that's why you won't find this kind of thing in science either. What we do is a cooperative venture. There are no masters here to gnomically bring us to enlightenment.

BTW, I'd love to give you a clearly stated thesis I feel comfortable defending on this topic. I have been equivocal because I don't have a well-developed theory re: the history of ideas writ large. I don't mind defending speculative history, e.g. this post, but the topic of how philosophy progresses seems more difficult because lone individuals can have such a huge effect on the discipline.

However, one thing I would note is that the problem you mention here:

Let's put it another way: suppose you're making some argument and you have in mind a particular interpretation of the 60s that would support your claim; but instead of presenting that version, you present a scrupulously neutral presentation of the 60s at the point where your tendentious interpretation would hook into the larger argument you're making. The reader either gets what you're (not) getting at or they don't.

But what you've done is suppress your reason for referring to the 60s at all by moving to the scrupulously neutral version, and you've done this instead of just not reaching for the 60s in making your argument. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too, and violating Grice's maxims. It's not about whether the point you're making is persuasive or worth considering or 'legitimate' in some sense; it's the roundabout way of (not) making the point that is at issue.

..seems like it stems from the common tendency to conflate "truth" and "objectivity." This is hardly surprising given the continued influence of logical positivism, which advocated the position that objectivity does get us closer to truth, and that complete objectivity becomes equivalent to truth at the limit.

I don't think this is true though. Statements can be objective, but also flat out false, while it's also possible to give a biased account of a phenomenon that is true. We tend to think of truth in terms of a binary, something is true or it is not (the law of the excluded middle), but objectivity is something we define by degree. IMO, your example is a good indication of how people tend to undermine themselves by seeking a standard of "objectivity," that it isn't worth aspiring to. Sometimes trying to be more objective can actually drive us away from truth. The "view from nowhere," is a contradiction, one doesn't see without eyes and one doesn't understand without judgement.


So, I think you make a good general point about ways in which arguments can be poorly formulated-- poorly written, but I think it also touches on a larger issue, that there is a tendency to pursue objectivity at the expenses of accurate representation. E.g., I think "The Twilight War," is in generally a quite accurate, well-researched description of the contentious relationship between the US and Iran since the Iranian Revolution.* However, it is also quite biased, it largely looks at the relationship through the lens of how the US saw the conflict, using largely declassified/leaked US documents, interviews with members of the US government, etc. The books is also biased because it ignores the larger context in which the events it documents occurred. Due to its scope it can't explore the foreign relations of either nation as a whole, the Iran-Iraq War, etc. But, would we be better served by a book that attempts to get closer to the truth by eschewing interviews and documents, or issues of "intent" and instead limiting itself to quantitative analyses on relevant metrics? Absolutely not. We're describing international relations, not a math problem.

(For the interested, "Guardians of the Revolution," and "The Shia Revival" are good English-language takes from the Iranian perspective).

The quotes below might be relevant as well:

Explaining human behaviour prompts us to reflect on the nature of objectivity, because it raises questions about the form objectivity takes once we go beyond the natural sciences. Consider the case of an anthropologist studying a rain dance. We can safely assume that rain dances could not actually cause it to rain, and that the lack of correlation between the dances and rainfall would be evident to any disinterested observer. Yet the dance is always performed at times of drought. What are we to make of this? Assume that there is evidence that, in times of drought, social strife and uncertainty about the nature of authority increases. Because the dance does not bring success in what the dancers consider to be its aim, we might argue that the reason for the dance should be given in functionalist terms: it secures social cohesion at a time when this is at risk. But there is also a sense in which this explanation is a wholly inappropriate: the dancers perform the rain dance only when they want it to rain, and their reason for performing it is clearly that they believe that it will increase the chance of rain. Are we sacrificing explanatory plausibility in proceeding with a functionalist explanation?

Suppose we are trying to explain the rain dance to someone who is completely unfamiliar with the phenomenon: could we be said to have offered something informative if it did not even mention the intention on the part of the dancers to make it rain?

Yet there is something unsatisfactory about denying any objectivity to the non-functionalist anthropologist’s localized account in this way. To highlight the issue, consider the case of a particularly crude functionalism, where it is simply a matter of imposing a universal grid on a broadly identified class of rituals, without any investigation of particular cases. Chemistry might be taken as a model here: if someone mixes hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide, we know the reaction will produce sodium chloride and water. There is nothing of an individual nature about the reagents, and we do not need to investigate the particular physical reaction to understand what is happening. So too the idea is that variations in rituals are superficial, and their core is always functional: social cohesion is paramount in any society, and rituals are one of the most effective ways of achieving this, especially in a primitive society.

...

The claims of functionalism to objectivity rest very centrally on the analogies between the way in which it deals with its subject matter and the way in which the natural sciences deal with their subject matter.

...

A second kind of response to the problems raised by functionalism is to abandon the claim that this is the only kind of account that can proceed objectively, and to insist that objectivity might actually require us to adopt the values of the participants. To return to the rain dance example, the argument is that the functionalist account fails to – indeed cannot but fail to – capture the thought that motivates the participants in the dance. One way in which this contrast is sometimes expressed is in terms of the distinction between reasons and causes: giving the reasons someone has for doing something (or interpreting the behaviour) and giving the causes of their behaviour are two different things. The difference is between appropriate interpretation of the behaviour and appropriate explanation of it. The former has to answer to how the actors themselves conceive of what they are doing, whereas the latter does not.

The idea that objectivity in modern science consists in the elimination of arbitrary judgements is a useful move beyond that of objectivity simply consisting in the elimination of prejudice or bias... The problem facing properly trained scientists is not usually a general one of bias or prejudice, but something specific to the kinds of investigations they carry out. [E.g. having to remove artefacts from an electron microscope scan, standardizing a model of the human skeleton to remove individual defects or evidence of aging/past injury, etc.]

For example, during the heyday of logical positivism, some textbooks on mechanics came out that proudly proclaimed that they lacked any diagrams. Everything would be explained in terms of equations, because equations, being more abstract, and allegedly less subject to being shaped by the human sensory system, were thus more objective (and so closer to a "true" representation). However, there is no obvious reason I can think of why a bunch of algebraic statements should be a "truer" representation of what the world is actually like than a diagram.

I guess this sort of gets at what @Isaac was saying before about some presentations being more convincing. Maybe mathematical arguments are more persuasive, this is certainly a reason why the social sciences and modern management leans into quantification and data collection so heavily. The question is, should they be? Might the process of turning complex social phenomena into a series of values in some SQL database actually get us further away from accurate representations?




I'm not a huge Clayton fan so much as I think his book addresses issues of major import for the sciences that had not previously been addressed in an accessible way.

In terms of things being "more likely to be true," I tend to think of this in the Bayesian/subjective probability sense, i.e., "what level of certainty can we put on each hypothesis," and "how are our hypotheses related, does evidence against one cause a cascade that makes us doubt other hypotheses."

However, unlike Clayton, I don't think Bayesianism solves all the problems we're facing. These problems seem fairly intractable, to the extent that I've started to wonder if it would be worth simply advancing as sort of "virtue epistemology" for the sciences. Something Aristotelian like "if you want to be a good scientist, these are the traits you should aspire to." Rather than keep searching for a foundation that doesn't exist, and building new foundationalisms on sand, we admit that the problem is open ended and instead try to build a set of different foundations that we can use in a context dependent manner.

seems like it stems from the common tendency to conflate "truth" and "objectivity." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I have no idea how you got that out of what I wrote or what you quoted. I was making very close to the opposite point, that you need to commit to an interpretative presentation for the history lesson to hook into a larger argument. Reciting only facts leaves out how those facts contribute to the argument and why what they contribute matters (unless that's clarified elsewhere, obviously). It turns reasons into non-sequiturs.

Here, for free I'll give you another reason you might not express explicitly what makes particular facts relevant to the case you're making: they're not. This can be play out a couple ways but the result is the same: the connection between the facts recited and the point you're making doesn't show up because there isn't one.

I have no idea how you got that out of what I wrote or what you quoted. I was making very close to the opposite point, that you need to commit to an interpretative presentation for the history lesson to hook into a larger argument. Reciting only facts leaves out how those facts contribute to the argument and why what they contribute matters (unless that's clarified elsewhere, obviously). It turns reasons into non-sequiturs.

I was agreeing with you, sorry if that wasn't clear. My point was, people turn their arguments into lists of facts because of a widespread perception that objective = accurate. The type of bad argument you're describing is the result of forgetting why we want to be objective in the first place.

I was just adding that this is a bad thing to do not only because it isn't persuasive or clear, but also because objectivity itself gets you further away from accurate representation. More a "yes and," point.

Thank goodness! Yes that makes perfect sense, and I see now you were filling in a possible motivation.

I was deeply confused. Apologies if I misread you.

Interestingly enough, I was reading a book on the "Continental vs Analytical," divide last night and it had a some similar examples to the post that sparked this thread. To paraphrase:

One simplistic way to put the divide is to say that analytics focus on problems, "the problem of identity," "the problem of free will," while continentals focus on proper names, "what does Heidegger think about identity," "how should Derrida's critique of Hegelian free will inform discussions today?" etc.

This is simplistic because continental philosophers do indeed focus on and specialize in problems, and analytics have started paying more attention to biography, but it does reflect a real distinction.

For the continental traditions, which sees man as essentially limited, fixed within his historical context, it makes no sense to "talk only about the problem," or "focus on just the argument." To do this is to presuppose a level of objectivity that isn't possible; a view from nowhere which must always be beyond man's reach.

Thus, how different camps progenitors are claimed by each camp, attempts to turn the idealist pragmatics into "analytics," is then exactly the sort of thing that is of key importance.

Of course, the for analytic, this seems in danger of "devolving into literary critique," or worse "being suspiciously French." :lol:

IDK, mostly stuff we already covered, but it was interesting how the history of the split is explained in terms of the (comic) British bipolar ambivalence about Europe (i.e., the fact that it seems like it's bound to demand that all citizens do their part to row it out into the Atlantic, or failing that, expand the Channel one of these days). This just sort of spread to the rest of the Anglophone world through common texts.

On Husserl's the Origin of Geometry:

Simply stated, Husserl's central argument is that if
the origin of geometry is forgotten, then one forgets the historical nature of such disciplines. But why is that important? It is important because geometry expresses in its most pure form what Husserl calls "the theoretical attitude', which is the stance that the natural sciences take towards their objects.

Husserl's point is that to reactivate knowledge of the origin of geometry is to recall the way in which the theoretical attitude of the sciences belongs to a determinate social and historical context, what Husserl famously calls the "life-world" (Lebenswelt). Husserl's critical and polemical point is that the activity of science has, since Galileo, resulted in what he calls a "mathematization of nature," that overlooks the necessary dependence of science upon the everyday practices of the life- world. There is a gap between knowledge and wisdom, between science and everyday life.

This is the situation that Husserl calls "crisis," which occurs when the theoretical attitude of the sciences comes to define the way in which all entities are viewed. The task of philosophy, in Husserl's sense of the word (i.e. phenomenology), is to engage in a critical and historical reflection upon the origin of tradition that permits an active and reactivating experience of tradition against the pernicious naiveties of our present image of the past.



Matters are not so different in the early Heidegger's conception of Destruktion, the deconstruction of the history of ontology, which is precisely not a way of destroying the past, but rather of seeking the positive tendencies of the tradition and working against what Heidegger labels its "baleful prejudices."

Yeah that was part of the motivation here. I was acknowledging my historical preference for Anglo-American philosophy, with its rejection of historical approaches, and inviting arguments from a more continental approach. It's right there in the OP.

There ended up being no clash of schools but it became clearer for me what norms of discussion, or perhaps reason, were being violated, so that's something.

Husserl's critical and polemical point is that the activity of science has, since Galileo, resulted in what he calls a "mathematization of nature," that overlooks the necessary dependence of science upon the everyday practices of the life- world. There is a gap between knowledge and wisdom, between science and everyday life.

This is the situation that Husserl calls "crisis," which occurs when the theoretical attitude of the sciences comes to define the way in which all entities are viewed.

Compare:

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, since René Descartes posited his influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other". — Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, 1983