There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease.
Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy? That tells us something about the culture we live in, and is worth thinking about it. Ironically, it's the concepts in Continental philosophy that allows us to talk about it the best, even if by doing so we end up disagreeing with its most notorious thinkers. Just my two cents.
I should point out that I did say (with added emphasis):
> Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush)
In other words, a lot of it really is that bad – but not all of it.
I myself have to admit I've always been rather fascinated by Foucault, and I think a lot of what he has to say is rather interesting and of contemporary relevance–especially his viewpoint that sexual orientation is a set of contingent cultural constructs, rather than some essential reality of persons
Žižek too – I've read some of his essays, sometimes he makes some insightful points (to me at least) – although I haven't read his philosophical works, and his essays I've read, I'm not sure if they should be classified as "philosophy" per se
> Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy?
How does it answer the classic objection that relativism is self-defeating?
I don't think "relativism" is the biggest complaint though. The biggest complaint is obscurantism–which risks dressing up the trivial as profound, and hiding falsehoods behind fancy language. And imprecision–analytic philosophy is very much about precise definitions and precise arguments, which makes it easier to judge whether an argument succeeds or fails, and to work out whether the parties to a dispute are actually arguing about the same thing or just talking past each other–Continental philosophy tends to be much more impressionistic in character, making it harder to work out what people are saying, and to judge the quality of their arguments
But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence. If we could, then and only then can we accuse thinkers of being fluffy and imprecise obscurantists. However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with! In other words, that is a feature, not a bug of the philosophical tradition.
Well, Nietzsche himself insists that his "perspectivism" isn't a mere "relativism" or "subjectivism". But, exactly what the difference between the the former and the latter is, is complicated and murky and debatable, and I don't think we should exclude the possibility that counterarguments against the latter may end up succeeding against the former as well.
> But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence.
I think it is hopeless to read Nietzsche, for example, as presenting some sort of ordered philosophical system, like Aquinas' Summa or Spinoza's Ethics. But, I think, Nietzsche is under-appreciated as a poet. And reading some of his works as poetry and fiction – you can extract some ideas from them which are very amenable to being put in a precise form. For example, eternal recurrence – he probably didn't mean it literally, but there certainly are cosmological theories in which eternal recurrence is entirely literal, and I think one could fruitfully work out the philosophical implications of such a theory using traditional analytic methods
> However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with!
For me, it really comes down to this – I've read some Nietzsche, and I enjoyed it – even when he's wrong, he's entertaining. I tried reading Derrida – and I gave up. Nietzsche convinced me he had something worthwhile to say; Derrida failed to do so before he ran out of my attention.
Personally, I find it extremely troubling to take sexual philosophy from someone who advocated for 12 year olds to be considered "of age" to have sex with anyone, and himself molested prepubescent children in Tunisia.
A philosopher’s personal misdeeds don’t-in general-count as evidence against their theories. If the theories directly serve to justify their misdeeds, that might be some reason to discount them-but Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation is a historically contingent social construct has no direct bearing on the issue of sexual abuse of minors, so allegations that he engaged in that aren’t relevant to them
I will definitely take a look at Stark's and Kaufmann's work.
Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them
The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.
Feyerabend's "Against Method" comes to mind here. I haven't touched his work in a long time. It seems I've some reading to do.
“Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words [..]”
I had to look up ontological choreography and it‘s just a concept, not unlike the weird jargon in CS. Is there at least a tiny speck of a sliver of possibility that we lack actual perspective and competency in these fields?
The term "ontological choreography" comes across to me as something like an arrangement or dance of meanings and appears to have been coined by someone whose concern was normalization of LGBTQ families via surrogate parents and possibly other technology. I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
Reading "Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words" is something precise enough that I could probably make software to create an embedding and feed it to a neural net given time and a few more details. It sounds like it's not so distant from what I did more than 20 years ago making a simple Markov chain in a few lines of Perl. The only ambiguous part is what the neural networks actually do with the Markov chain of words, because that's not stated in your quote.
> I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
The word "I" is important here. I could not do anything with this either: "Let X be a compact connected Riemann surface of genus g, equipped with a holomorphic differential ω having a non-zero integral over X [..]"
I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
Some topics just cannot be grasped with tweezers. You just have to try to be precise with the fuzziness and that's not easy.
Compare that to the following sentence taken from the field of "feminist technoscience": "Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET..." [0] Even if we can provide some kind of meaningful definition of "masculine-coded technology" such that ARPANET counts as one – is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate than the equivalent questions for "word embeddings" and "neural networks". And that's why it isn't really fair to compare machine learning, as a discipline, to feminist technoscience – the truth and usefulness of the former is rather beyond dispute, the same things are much much more open to question for the later.
> I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
There are some approaches to social studies, which while they might not be "reproducible in Perl", seem on a much firmer footing – I mentioned before the rational choice theory of religion, advocated by the sociologist Rodney Stark. It is far easier to derive testable hypotheses from it, for one thing. People write whole books attacking it (whether successfully or not) – like Steve Bruce's Choice and Religion – precisely because it makes claims which are firm enough to be attacked.
> Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute;
That's what I call things that can be picked up by tweezers, concrete issues that have clear and unambigious manifestations that we all - or virtuall all - agree on.
Those are the easy things. It's very comfortable to pick them up and turn them around and analyze them. There is no ambiguity, no pesky fuzziness. I understand why certain personality types gravitate towards it and I belief myself to be such one, but I'd say be careful about proclaiming them the only things worth studying.
Sometimes things are not that clearly demarcated and even in a rigorous field such a abstract mathematics the concept of "usefulness" is not of primary concern. Also sometimes the reality of a thing itself is not obvious and needs to be studied. Sometimes it's not even clear what we are looking at - try reading anything by Heidegger. Philosophy is a field riddles with those kind of studies.
> is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate
Throw me a bone here, but is the fact that it's not yet clear if it is true or useful, but cannot be ruled out immediately a signal that there's more to it than we currently know? Again, not saying "biomedical homological technofeministic cyborgism wrt ecosystemical unidirectionalism" (me having fun now) is equivalent to studying the properties of neural networks, but just pointing out that reality is multifaceted and that you cannot just skip entire domains of reality just because you cannot replicate it in, again, perl (or math). It's uncomfortable, it lacks precision, but we have to start somewhere and math ain't cutting it.
The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research.
I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code.
It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration.
Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing.
"Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmother, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?
It might be a value driven claim, but it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter. At least assuming social justice issues aren't severe enough to cause a civil war to be fought or some such.
It is also easy to imagine otherwise, eg. murderous AIs killing off humanity and other AI dystopia that many people are concerned about these days. I don't think they're likely, but as far as imagination goes, it's possible. And if that actually happens, it's arguable that wasting time over "useless" concepts in the humanities is a better survival strategy for societies.
Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.
I absolutely don’t think the humanities and social sciences are useless-I think they have a lot of value.
But nowadays there seem to be two main approaches to them: (1) the modernist traditional social sciences approach, which tries to approximate the rigour of the natural sciences, to as great an extent as the subject matter will permit; (2) the postmodernist critical theory approach-which is inclined to denounce that rigour as harmful/oppressive/etc. Big fan of (1), absolutely see its value; very sceptical of (2).
So I end up working in $BigTech and making half-serious jokes about how capitalism is the cause of modern woes on Facebook...
If I wanted to normalize LGTBQ families with "ontological choreography" I can't get enough meaning out of that to even know where to begin to help.
This is a lump of mostly unrelated things, to the point where people who are likely to religiously embrace some of them would be just as likely to be horrified by the others. And don't even get me started on the "rejection of the divine" - what passes for rigor in religious apologetics can easily rival the worst of modern social studies.
Indeed, isn't it very much the opposite - that, after a period of rationalism promoted as a virtue, we have entered a period of new dogmatic spiritualism?
Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on.
I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time.
Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine.
But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others.
And now we're here.