Intellectual Prudence

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Such gurus [Derrida, Foucault, Barthes et al.] are treasured, I suspect, less for their specific creeds than for the invigorating Nietzschean scorn they direct at intellectual prudence.*
        - Frederick C. Crews, Skeptical Engagements

What is intellectual prudence? That is, what writing and thinking deserves the respect and honor we accord to the intellectual treasure of humankind? Equally important, what does not meet intellectual standards?

In 1998 American physicist Alan Sokal and Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont published Fashionable Nonsense, an English adaptation of their French language Impostures Intellectuelles, which critiqued intellectualism gone awry. Their primary objection was to postmodern texts which incorporated examples and metaphors from contemporary science and mathematics that revealed ignorance of the material cited, rejection of scientific principles, or antirationalism and antiempiricism. “They display a profound indifference, if not a disdain, for facts and logic,” the authors wrote.

Sokal and Bricmont objected to the intellectual deficits of  “‘postmodernism’, an intellectual current characterized by … theoretical discourses disconnected to any empirical test, and by cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a ‘narration,’ a ‘myth’ or social construction among many others.” Here is a beginning selection of the flaws they found in postmodernist intellectual writing:

1. [Failure to] evaluate the validity of a proposition on the basis of the facts and reasoning supporting it, without regard to the personal qualities or social status of its advocates or detractors. p. 188
2. Radical doubts concerning the viability of logic or the possibility of knowing the world through observation and/or experiment. p. 189
3. Ambiguity as subterfuge. … [Perhaps] these ambiguities are deliberate. … The radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation. p. 189
4. “Incredulity toward metanarratives.” … Lyotard p. 191
5. [Absence of] respect for the clarity and logical coherence of theories, and for the confrontation of theories with empirical evidence. p. 193
6. Radical cognitive relativism: … the claim that assertions of fact—be they traditional myths or modern scientific theories—can be considered true or false only “relative to a particular culture.” p. 194
7. [Archaeologist] Roger Anyon … was quoted as saying that “science is just one of many ways of knowing the world. … [The Zunis’ belief that they have always lived in the Americas is] just as valid as the archaeological viewpoint [they came to the Americas from Asia ten to twenty thousand years ago] of what prehistory is about.” … The two theories in question are mutually incompatible, so they cannot both be true. p. 195

Selection (1) describes reasoning by well-known fallacy. In this case it is the argumentum ad hominem, the fallacy deployed by Adolph Hitler when he dismissed known science—special relativity—as “Jewish science.”

Selection (2) is a rejection of the epistemology of science and liberalism, which considers honoring evidence and reason as irreplaceable components of honesty. It is part of the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” one of the attitudes which gave rise to postmodernism:

“My reply to the School of Suspicion is that its Romantic, individualistic model of the search for knowledge has been erroneous from the start.”

 - Frederick C. Crews, Skeptical Engagements

The double-mindedness of selection (3) speaks for itself.

Selection (4) undermines the glory of great intellectual thinking: the ability to inspire by illuminating principles and concepts which clarify what had lain in darkness.

Selection (5): Noam Chomsky, in “Why I Am Not a Postmodernist,” cited “gibberish,” truisms better expressed elsewhere, and falsehoods. This section describes a failure to meet the most elementary intellectual standards.

Selection (6) asserts validation by culture. If this could be true, one could say that the Final Solution was validated by the culture of the German community in 1942. To see what this would destroy, recall Lincoln's assertion that the Declaration's principle of equality and liberty is “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” regardless of race, gender, class, religion or nationality.

Selection (7) documents base intellectual incompetence. Humankind cannot both have always existed in the Americas and have arrived within the last twenty thousand years.

Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller responded to the proposition, “much of the intellectual heritage does not meet the standards of the intellectual discipline” by saying, “I don't see THE intellectual discipline.”

The purpose of these posts is to further the appreciation of humankind's intellectual treasure. Immanuel Kant said that the one indispensable intellectual trait is “a good will,” because all the others can be subverted to non-intellectual ends. It helps to know that much of what is lauded as intellectual may be no such thing. One can pass over what is not worthy of critical inspection.

     .

when I was a starving writer I used to read the major writers in the

major magazines (in the library, of course) and it made me feel very bad because—being a student of the word and the way, I realized

that they were faking it: I could sense each false emotion, each utter pretense

- Charles Bukowski

 

(*) Frederick C. Crews Skeptical Engagements To “do theory” these days, as that expression is understood by department chairs who hope to load their ranks with a full panoply of “theorists,” is not to maintain a thesis against likely objections, but rather to strike attitudes that will identify one as a loyal follower of some figure—a Roland Barthes, a Jacques Derrida, a Michel Foucault, a Jacques Lacan, a Fredric Jameson—who has himself made unexamined claims about the nature of capitalism or patriarchy or Western civilization or the collective unconscious or the undecidability of knowledge. Such gurus are treasured, I suspect, less for their specific creeds than for the invigorating Nietzschean scorn they direct at intellectual prudence.