Obscurantist Puns

A common criticism of thinkers like Butler and Haraway is that they position themselves beyond criticism by making their writing so dense and obscure that they can dismiss any objection to their points as a misunderstanding of the original text. There are also certain topics like gender and race where people might be afraid to criticize you because, if they are wrong, they could be labeled a sexist or racist. It’s my understanding that Sokal relied on these techniques to get his fake paper published.

I think that, in general, Butler and Haraway actually do (usually) have interesting things to say and their style comes from a combination of heavy allusiveness, complex topics, and lack of concern for nonacademic readers. However, I was wondering if there were any thinkers who do embody all of Sokal’s criticisms, people who are widely known for being charlatans who try to trick their audience with jargon.

TLDR: are there any thinkers who are widely known to use word salad to hide ridiculous or meaningless opinions?

https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/qudrcl/why_cant_i_understand_derrida_speech_and_phenomena/hkqb1b9?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

We've all seen this song and dance a million times, but this one had some particularly enjoyable highlights:

>I have a degree in psychology and a lot of psychology's history contains some very bad science. If these people understood human psychology more in line with Behaviorism or Cognitive psychology they might have something to say, but they're hung up on this old discredited system of psychology that never had much empirical backing to begin with anyway.

>Basically, anyone that takes Derrida seriously is a specific type and you can infer a lot about them, because more rigorous spaces just ignore Derrida the same way they ignore Ayn Rand.

>Far from being honest inquirers looking for the truth, any disagreement with this sort will be met with personal attacks and insinuations, usually within the perspective of some post-Marx oppression narrative where they turn you into the bad guy. If you disagree with these sorts, you're an oppressor. It's not fun to try to take them seriously because they won't take you seriously--not that there's much to take seriously there anyway.

>Sabine Hossenfelder is WONDERFUL and she's an absolute model scientist

>Science, as a method, will always be the right way for empirical understanding of the world. The ideological bloviating of Critical Theorists who hold charlatans like Freud, Marx, etc in such high regard will never even come second to proper, rigorous "analysis." Critical Theorists don't analyze any more than theologians do. It's a secular priesthood.

There are many more gems but it's impossible to track them all down since he blessed everyone by injecting himself into basically comment chain in the thread.

From the article (https://psyche.co/ideas/pseudophilosophy-encourages-confused-self-indulgent-thinking):

"A central theme in Foucault’s writings is a critique of the notion of objective truth. Although there are controversies about interpretation, at least on the face of it Foucault maintains that truth is socially constructed and subject to ideological influence, and therefore not objective. However, his arguments for this claim focus entirely on the way in which what is assumed or believed to be true is influenced by what he refers to as ‘power’. It is, of course, a plausible claim that our assumptions or beliefs are susceptible to ideological influence, especially in emotionally charged areas such as politics, but also in supposedly rational areas such as science. But Foucault doesn’t explain how this rather mundane observation is supposed to imply or support the philosophically controversial claim that what is true, or which facts obtain (concerning the shape of the Earth, for example), is susceptible to ideological influence. Instead, by using the word ‘truth’ in an impressionistic fashion, the distinction between belief and truth is smudged over, allowing Foucault to make seemingly profound statements such as:

>[T]ruth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to disambiguate this statement and see what remains.

This kind of fallacious critique of the notion of objective truth is a particularly pernicious aspect of obscurantist pseudophilosophy in general. Often, it’s due to simple misunderstandings (such as confusing truth with belief or knowledge), but sometimes it’s due rather to wilful obscurity (as in the case of Foucault)."

While I'd consider my prior post on here to be a success, there was a recurring theme of rightoids sneering at my mention of there not being a single school of Marxism out there that advocates revolution via "cultural bullshit". I was met with a great deal of Hnnh, but have you considered the Frankfurt School?

The Frankfurt School is the final defense of a group that has lost the argument on virtually every other issue and so there's an over-emphasis on some thin conspiracy that's held together by this spooky core of thinkers from Frankfurt. At the root of every insane belief about Communism that inevitably involves some top-down implementation of Marxism by bureaucrats in bourgeois democracy, the fact that many of the people accused of being "Communist" are in fact just bussinesspeople pursuing their own self-interest is justified with "Well the Frankfurt School changed things."

So first, let's talk about what the Frankfurt School actually was:

They were left-wing (some openly communist) thinkers that fled Hitler's Germany. Among the big names are people like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and so on. These people were critical of Capitalism for the social ills it inflicts on the world and Marxist-Leninism for being a supposedly inflexible system of social organization.

Now let's talk about the Frankfurt School of Rightoid Fever Dreams:

Many on the Right believe the Frankfurt School was a conspiratorial cabal of Semites who saw the "failure" of Marxist revolution in the west and so decided that the only path forward was to abandon any notion of materialist thought and instead focus on "culture" as the path towards ensuring revolution. How this works is rarely elaborated on, but more openly racist segments of the right argue that they encourage the effeminization of western males, the duplicitousness of women, and then the frenzied immigration of virile third world hordes to fill the void of a declining west because third worlders have a natural inclination to be ruled over by Socialists.

In simple terms, this is everything wrong with that bullshit claim:

• The foundation of Marxism is Dialectical Materialism.
  • What this means is that Marxism holds, at its core, that history is moved forward by material reality. In his time Marx was critical of German Idealists--Idealism being defined that Objects don't exist in and of themselves but in how they appear to us. To make a long story short, Idealists were typically Romantics who

In 2013, the Pew Research Center conducted a study on the global acceptance of homosexuality and found a widespread rejection of homosexuality in many nations that are predominantly Muslim. In some countries, views were becoming more conservative among younger people.[182]

A 2007 survey of British Muslims showed that 61% believe homosexuality should be illegal, with up to 71% of young British Muslims holding this belief.[184] A later Gallup poll in 2009 showed that none of the 500 British Muslims polled believed homosexuality to be "morally acceptable". This compared with 35% of the 1001 French Muslims polled that did.[185]

https://www.google.co.jp/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_in_Islam%23Opinion_polls&ved=2ahUKEwjt0ZT3-P3dAhWDbbwKHanGDtcQygQwAHoECAQQAg&usg=AOvVaw26ogvPbLUvexCZkwLskjvx&cshid=1539245698118

I have a hard time understanding him. I'm not trying to insult him by asking this question, but I am genuinely curious. Sometimes I feel like he's trying to seem profound with convoluted sentences, but I'm probably not smart enough to understand. Can someone who has studied Derrida deeply share their thoughts?

Recently, I listened to an episode of The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast in which Hedda Hassel Mørch made the case for integrated information theory (also known as IIT) as a theory of consciousness that bridges the hard problem of consciousness and makes sense of causation as a phenomenon. The episode description:

> Welcome to 'Episode 47, Hedda Hassel Mørch: Consciousness and Integrated Information Theory (Part I)', where we'll be discussing Information Integration Theory and the hard problem of consciousness.

> Hedda Hassel Mørch is a philosopher and post-doc at the University of Oslo, previously at The Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. Dr Mørch’s research focuses on panpsychism, neutral monism and liberal conceptions of physicalism. More specifically, how such views can respond to problems in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, such as the hard problem of consciousness (namely, how does soggy grey matter give rise to technicolour experience), the problem of mental causation (how can the mind interact the world), and the metaphysics of causation (what does it really mean for one event to ‘cause’ another).

> In this episode, we’re going to be discussing these topics with Hedda, but focus more specifically, on her views on consciousness and Integrated Information Theory. In Hedda’s own words:

> > "The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain, we are not even sure whether we ever will."

IIT has an entry at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy which describes it thus:

> Integrated Information Theory (IIT) offers an explanation for the nature and source of consciousness. Initially proposed by Giulio Tononi in 2004, it claims that consciousness is identical to a certain kind of information, the realization of which requires physical, not merely functional, integration, and which can be measured mathematically according to the phi metric.

> The theory attempts a balance between two different sets of convictions. On the one hand, it strives to preserve the Cartesian intuitions that experience is immediate, direct, and unified. This, according to IIT’s proponents and its methodology, rules out accounts of consciousness such as functionalism that explain experience as a sy

So thanks for coming, maybe you can help me.

A few more things I (think I) remember about the band/album:

• Their name was sth. like "forename.surname & the something Somethings" -- Female japanese fore- and surname & The something Somethings' name was something with a sexual innuendo in it, I think. Not sure about that though.

• It was definitely an older album. I don't know, 60s or 70s probably. Maybe 80s, but I'd say earlier.

• If I remember correctly, I once researched the artists (when I still knew their fuckin names) and learned that the female japanese singer, before joining the group, had already made a name for herself in the erotic/porn industry or sth like that - something lewd. I'm pretty sure about this. She had some credentials that made her a good fit for the genre.

• I remember a track on the album that had this frantic, jungle-style bongo-drumming in the background, luscious sounds of flowing water and the female vocalist making increasingly orgasmic sexual noises.

• I picked up the recommendation for the band/album from whoknowswhere on the intenet (might be /mu/, might be reddit, might be elsewhere), but I remember that is was tagged with "Japanese Porn Psych" or something very similar to that. I googled the shit out of these words and tried various stuff searchwise, but this damn record lies quiet.

Please, somebody, have mercy on me and throw in some names! Anything! This feeling is giving me a seizure already.

You will never know the truth.