"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.
Making these obviously bogus claims so you can attack someone else for, of all things, dishonesty, is pretty shocking even for this thread. I'm not saying that out of disrespect for philosophy, or postmodernism for that matter [1]. What you wrote is just such a breach of basic fairness and exactly what that site guideline asks to avoid.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> How you can claim to read someone else's mind like this is beyond me, or even for that matter claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad curriculum 30 years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.
I studied analytical philosophy in college, like he did. I didn't take a single class on postmodernism. I bring that up because these terms are universal and not tied specifically to PoMo (or even continental) philosophy. That's where my doubt comes from: someone who studied philosophy should know these terms, and should know that popular awareness of them is limited to the spooky PoMo stuff.
I believe you and find that interesting but it seems to me you're talking about your education, not pg's. Those terms aren't universal and, as I'm sure you know, there's also a strain in analytical philosophy that takes pride in not knowing anything about that stuff. Besides that, skepticism about postmodernism generally was as widespread then as it is now, especially among technical people, and I'd be shocked if that hasn't always been his view. Certainly it was 10 or 15 years ago, whenever it was that I first read him refer to it.
It's obvious on face value that criminal prosecutors aren't (necessarily) criminals and that WWII historians aren't (necessarily) neo-Nazis.
If you're going to accuse people who know about a subject of being that subject, be less oblique about it.
What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense.
In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," it's a shockingly dishonest rhetorical tactic.