Thursday, February 12, 2015

A Documentary on Michel Foucault

For those interested, there is a video documentary on Michel Foucault below.



My assessment of Foucault’s work is the opposite of the positive one presented in this documentary. His extreme social constructivism, for example, and that of modern Postmodernism in general, is utterly refuted by modern science.

This documentary does at least have the virtue of allowing one of Foucault’s critics to speak. The one chosen is Camille Paglia, who has had some harsh things to say about Foucault’s scholarship over the years, such as his heavy borrowing from the work of Emile Durkheim without proper acknowledgement (Paglia 1991: 190).

Other criticisms are left out. For example, the fundamental ideas of Foucault’s grandiose theories are subject to withering criticism in José Guilherne Merquior’s excellent Foucault (London, 1991). The damaging historical evidence against his history of madness and asylums can be read in Roy Porter’s “Foucault’s Great Confinement” (Porter 1990).

But I will leave detailed criticisms of his theories for another time.

It is important to remember that Foucault’s intellectual life was divided into two phases: his (1) structuralist phase (including a period when he was a Marxist) and (2) his poststructuralist phase.

We can see this in his major works, which are as follows:
Structuralist Phase:
Foucault, Michel. 1954. Maladie mentale et personnalité (1st edn.). Presses universitaires de France, Paris.

Foucault, Michel. 1961. Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Plon, Paris. 673 p. (the best translation of this appears to be Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness (ed. Jean Khalfa; trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). Routledge, New York, from the 1972 Gallimard edition).

Foucault, Michel. 1962. Maladie mentale et personnalité (2nd rev. edn.). Presses universitaires de France, Paris. Presses universitaires de France, Paris = Foucault, Michel. 1976. Mental Illness and Psychology (trans. Alan Sheridan). Harper and Row, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1963. Raymond Roussel. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1986. Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (trans. Charles Ruas). Doubleday, Garden City, NY.

Foucault, Michel. 1963. Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical . Presses universitaires de France, Paris. 212 p. = Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic (trans. Allan M. Sheridan). Pantheon, New York; and Foucault, Michel. 2003. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (trans. Allan M. Sheridan). Routledge, London. 266 p.

Foucault, Michel. 1964. Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique [abridged version of Folie et déraison: histoire de la folie à l’âge classique 1961]. Union générale d’éditions, Paris. 308 p. = Foucault, Michel. 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. Richard Howard). Pantheon Books, New York. 299 p.; and Foucault, Michel. 2006. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. Richard Howard). Taylor & Francis, London and New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order of Things (trans. Alan Sheridan). Vintage, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1969. L’archéologie du savoir. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. Allan Sheridan). Harper and Row, New York.

Poststructuralist (or “Genealogical”) Phase:
Foucault, Michel. 1972. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique [2nd edn.; new preface and appendices]. Gallimard, Paris. 613 p. = Foucault, Michel. 2006. History of Madness (ed. Jean Khalfa; trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). Routledge, New York. 725 p.

Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish (trans. Alan Sheridan). Pantheon, New York.

Foucault’s History of Sexuality:
Foucault, Michel. 1976. Histoire de la sexualité. 1. La volonté de savoir. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. The Will to Knowledge. (trans. Robert Hurley). Penguin, London.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. Histoire de la sexualité. 2. L’usage des plaisirs. Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1985. The History of Sexuality. Volume 2. The Use of Pleasure (trans. Robert Hurley). Pantheon Books, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1984. Histoire de la sexualité. 3. Le souci de soi.Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 1986. The History of Sexuality. Volume 3. The Care of the Self. Pantheon Books, New York.

Foucault, Michel. 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique: cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (ed. M. Senellart). Gallimard, Paris. = Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 –1979 (ed. by Michel Senellart and trans. Graham Burchell). Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Foucault’s politics were peculiar. He was clearly influenced by Marxism, Freudianism, Nietzsche and structuralism (Sim 1996: 243), and at one point even joined the Communist party in 1950 and was a member for about a year (Mills 2003: 15; Gutting 2005: 24).

He seems to have repudiated Communism by 1962 when the second edition of his book Maladie mentale et personnalité was published and he eliminated some of the more important Marxist theory from it (Gutting 2005: 24–25). Nevertheless, his later work bares clear influences from Marxism too (Mills 2003: 15; Gutting 2005: 25), even if he maintained a vehement anti-Communism (Mills 2003: 15).

Critics of Foucault’s politics have countered that it was an infantile form of radicalism opposed to virtually everything done by those in power (Walzer 2002: 192). This led him to embarrassing positions: for example, this can be seen in Foucault’s naïve praise and support for the extreme fundamentalism that took over Iran in the revolution of 1979 (Mills 2003: 19).

Foucault was also influenced by structuralism. He was associated with the Structuralist writers who edited and published in the French journal Tel Quel (“As is”) for many years (Mills 2003: 26).

But like Derrida and Barthes Foucault broke with structuralism by the late 1960s and early 1970s. Foucault’s early works up to Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things] (1966) and L’archéologie du savoir [The Archaeology of Knowledge] (1969) are often seen to belong to his structuralist phase or quasi-structuralist phase. Some critics think L’archéologie du savoir [The Archaeology of Knowledge] marks his turn to Poststructuralism.

The works after 1969 are seen as part of Foucault’s Poststructuralist phase.

Some commentators appear to classify Foucault as a “post-Marxist” with strong left anarchist ideas (Sim 1996: 243–244), and this seems a reasonable assessment to me.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Stuart, Collinson, Diané and Robert Wilkinson. 1996. Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. Routledge, London and New York.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. 1983. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd edn.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Gutting, Gary. 2005. Foucault: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK and New York.

Merquior, José Guilherme. 1991 Foucault (2nd edn.). Fontana, London.

Mills, Sara. 2003. Michel Foucault. Routledge, London and New York.

Paglia, Camille. 1991. “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf,” Arion 1.2: 139–212.

Porter, Roy. 1990. “Foucault’s Great Confinement,” History of the Human Sciences 3: 47–54.

Sim, Stuart. 1996. “Foucault, Michel,” in Stuart Brown, Diané Collinson, and Robert Wilkinson, Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. Routledge, London and New York. 244–242.

Walzer, Michael. 2002. The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century. Basic Books, New York.

31 comments:

  1. Roy Porter was not uncritical -- this is history after all and VERY contentious -- but he was an intelligent and open-minded man. He regularly wrote that Foucault's histories were not perfect but that this is natural for someone breaking new ground. Porter wrote that when he first approached Foucault's work he found it disconcerting but it ended up having a major impact on his own work. Porter, of course, is the key author in modern history of medicine and if you read his work you can feel the influence of Foucault permeate at every level.

    Porter's view is now the mainstream in historiography. Foucault is often seen as one of the most important contributors to the field in the 20th century and his work has had an enormous impact. I am convinced that he was also the most profound political philosopher of the 20th century but this only shows through in the lectures he gave in the late-1970s. His concept of 'biopolitics' and its relationship toward old-style 'sovereignty' is the most important discovery in political philosophy in a century.

    Note that NEITHER have to do with social constructivism. I would argue that none of Foucault's work does. It is just projected into his work by people who do not understand it properly. Foucault's work is about how ideas and power interact. Especially how the discourse of Truth has been used -- for example, in psychiatry, eugenics and economics -- to further extend the reaches of Power in society. That has nothing to do with 'social constructivism'. It is far closer to ideology analysis in sociology if you needed something approximating it.

    Foucault is attacked today because certain people do not like innovation. This has always happened in the history of ideas. Uninteresting thinkers who have contributed nothing to the fields they discuss -- think Chomsky in historiography -- are dredged up usually to attack someone's character or personal politics. Conservative-minded people -- I mean intellectually conservative, not politically conservative -- do not like innovation in their fields and so they resist it at all costs. But they cannot stop the impact that is being had and will only fall way, way behind.

    The other reason that Foucault is criticised is because certain people require certain discourses of Truth to substantiate their own work and what he says makes them uncomfortable. Here I would think of people who vaguely allude to evolutionary theory to buttress their own Truth claims about, say, psychology. Anyone with any historical perspective can see that this is a rehash of nonsense discourses that proliferated in the 19th century. But certain people today want their judgement to contain Truths that they do not and cannot possess. Ironically many of these people do not even possess the technical abilities required to understand the sciences they supposedly draw upon. They merely take over the language -- usually from popular authors that are viewed with suspicion in their own fields.

    Finally a request: please quote me a clear statement from Foucault that is "refuted by modern science". That is a ridiculous assertion.

    Give me a quote from a primary source and then spell out the "scientific" refutation. I do not want your 'opinion' or 'gloss' on Foucault's work -- I can guarantee that it will be biased an incorrect -- I want a primary source quote and then a clear 'scientific' refutation that is totally uncontroversial.

    If you cannot do this consider toning down your rhetoric. It's unflattering and borderline clownish.

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    1. I am happy to write detailed responses to all of these issues.

      But first some questions:

      (1) do you think there are objective truths?

      (2) do you think Foucault thought there were objective truths?

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    2. (1) Yes but only within a system ultimately based on ultimately arbitrary rules. Example: 1+1=2 but 1+1=3 if I create my own numerical system. This is all there in late Wittgenstein and late Berkeley. You don't need post-structuralism.

      (2) He took the same position as (1) in his earlier work (The Order of Things etc.). But in his later work he just dropped this. I think he saw himself as moving beyond it as it was a redundant and constricting question. He then became interested in how Truth claims and Power relationships interacted. He was not that interested in whether the latter were 'legitimate' or not which I think he thought a secondary or perhaps tertiary issue. Foucault's later attitude toward this was that of a historian. He didn't judge, he just documented.

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    3. (1) "Yes but only within a system ultimately based on ultimately arbitrary rules. Example: 1+1=2 but 1+1=3 if I create my own numerical system."

      There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding here.

      A proposition -- what carries the property of being true or false -- is not the symbols or language used to express an idea: it is the idea expressed by the symbols or sentence.

      It does not matter what symbols are used to express the actual proposition 1 + 1 = 2, e.g., I + I = II (in Roman numerals) is the same proposition. What matters is the idea communicated. Once definitions are given and clear, then necessary truth follows in cognitively meaningful analytic propositions.

      If by 1 + 1 = 3 all you mean is that this is your eccentric private language way of writing the idea 1 + 1 = 2, then truth is still objective here, and cannot be a "system ultimately based on ultimately arbitrary rules," for "1 + 1 = 3" (your private language) and "1 + 1 = 2" (everyone else's language for the proposition) is the same proposition. This is standard logic, and it is shocking how Post-modernists can't even understand the actual definition of a proposition in basic logic.

      Any attempt to deny the truth of 1 + 1 = 2, as these terms are conventionally defined, just reduces to a fallacy of equivocation: a fallacious attempt to change the meaning of one or more of the symbols.

      Once we have the concept of 1 and 2 and the mathematical operator of addition, 1 + 1 = 2 is necessarily true.

      If by 1 + 1 = 3 you actually mean "3" by the standard definition of numeral, this is clearly wrong.

      Regarding later Wittgensetin, he was simply wrong, and fell into the same silly language games of Postmodernists. There are a few silly analytic philosophers like Rorty who also fell for this.

      Also, it simply does not address another issue: is there an objective (ontological) truth of reality beyond analytic truth: does, for example, the postulated supermind you believe in exist or not exist? It is either one or the other, if you seriously want to defend the existence of such a thing. There must be an objective truth there: either (1) it exists and your version of idealism is true or (2) it does not exist and your version of idealism is false.

      If you do not think there is any objective empirical truth, then all attempts to argue about materialism versus idealism are devoid of meaning. You cannot even defend Berkeley's position with a straight face.

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    4. It's a misunderstanding on your part.

      You believe in an "idea expressed by a symbol or sentence". I do not. Nor does Wittgenstein. Or Foucault. Or Berkeley.

      Everything is in the symbols or sentence themselves. There is no 'beyond'. It doesn't exist. It is a mystical construction; something like the Kantian 'ding an sich'. It has no content. It is an 'empty signifier' ultimately posited to buttress the speaker's own truth claims.

      You may not like this. But the fact of the matter is that this is now commonly accepted in philosophy departments across the world. It's just that the Analytic philosophers don't know what to make of it. But now the younger generations are throwing off that constrictive philosophy; just as its main progenitor (Wittgenstein) had soon after he laid the foundations.

      As to your questions regarding ontological truths, those are theological questions. Of some interest, I'll grant. But certainly outside of the realm of epistemology and worldly knowledge. Personally, not something I spend a good deal of time thinking about. Maybe when I move into old age these questions might have more allure.

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    5. Take this example:

      "It does not matter what symbols are used to express the actual proposition 1 + 1 = 2, e.g., I + I = II (in Roman numerals) is the same proposition."

      Are they the same proposition? In your mind they are, clearly. In my mind they are not. In a Roman's mind they are not either.

      The Roman numerical system is entirely different to our own. It does not, for example, contain the number 0. For this reason it cannot 'do' the same things as ours.

      I+I=II means something different to a Roman doing the sum than it means to you today. You are reading it through the 'lens' of a later system -- the decimal system.

      That you are a historian and do not understand this is rather surprising. I have actually never met a historian who did not grasp this rather quickly. It seems that your views are coloured by some outmoded Whig historiography, if I'm to be frank.

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    6. "Everything is in the symbols or sentence themselves. There is no 'beyond'. It doesn't exist."

      Yes, it does. The words "domestic cat" -- understand as a living individual of species Felis catus/Felis silvestris catus -- is a word that conveys an idea.

      It is bizarrely and patently untrue that "There is no 'beyond'.

      The words "domestic cat" refer to one specific type of thing that exists in in our sense qualia/objects of perception. The external referent is right there and can be verified by any human being who has seen a cat or even a photo of one.

      Even under your own idealist ontology, many words can and do refer to a thing beyond words: to real objects appearing in our minds.

      Not even an external material world needs to exist for this to be true: all that is needed is a mental world of sensations and sense data or what A.J. Ayer called sense qualia.

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    7. "Are they the same proposition? In your mind they are, clearly. In my mind they are not. In a Roman's mind they are not either."

      Yes, they would be: they express the same idea. You are fixating on words, without understanding their meaning.

      If what you say were true, we would not even be able to translate Roman arithmetic into our system. But we can do it easily: because ours has the same concepts as theirs, just written with different symbols.

      Incidentally, the Romans may not have had a formal numeral 0, but they certainly had and fully understood the concept: they simply used the word nullus (nothing, none). If they needed to write the concept of zero in arithmetic, they just write out nullus. And there is incidentally evidence that some people by the early Middle ages just wrote N as a shorthand and symbol for 0.

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    8. (1) No. The words do not refer to an object. The identity of the object is constituted in and through the words. This is what Foucault's early work is all about. The world is meaningless sense impressions until a language is imposed upon it to structure it. You can find early discussions of this in Berkeley and even, to some extent, Kant.

      (2) No. We can easily translate Roman numerals into our system but it is just that: a translation. And no translation immediately reflects the original. There is always some things added and subtracted in translation.

      You are what Adorno called an 'identity thinker'. You want to reduce everything to the same while trying as best you can to eliminate differences. Thinkers like Foucault move in the other direction. And they produce much more fruitful results. Their's is the philosophy of creativity and novelty; analytic/identity thinking is the philosophy of conservatism and sterility.

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    9. But imagine you are on an island that felines have never inhabited, and the people there all speak some strange language, and in this language the way you say hello just happens to be "domestic cat"?

      When one of the islanders introduces themselves by saying "domestic cat" to you, are they conveying the idea of "a living individual of the species 'felis catus'"? It would be absurd to say "yes"--how could they be communicating an idea they have no conception of? If you say "no", then you're conceding the Wittgensteinian point that the meaning of the phrase "domestic cat" is entirely dependent on the context in which it is used.

      I think that's a better way of making the point Phil seems to be talking about in saying "there is no beyond": that is, the meaning of all words are context-dependent. Thus, words do not and cannot refer to things "beyond" their immediate context. Wittgenstein makes this point much better than Foucalt, who too often got lost in pretentious obscurantism; the former viewed words as tools used in interpersonal exchange and language as a process of interpersonal exchange. This differed from prevailing views that language consisted of a series of terms that referred to a series of ideas, and so could be said to exist independently of interpersonal exchange, and thus independent of context.

      Anyway, I actually agree with you about Foucalt--he occasionally made good observations, but he took social constructivism a bit too far, cloaked his short-comings in obscurantism, and lacked historical rigor. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, was as formidable a philosopher as Bertrand Russell or Plato, and the strength and depth of his ideas are reinforced by the fact that he articulates them in concise and simple terms. He reminds me of Keynes in some ways, too, because he believed philosophy should be used for practical humanist purposes rather than remaining a purely intellectual exercise. Keynes thought the same thing about economics, I think; he saw the prevailing 'laissez faire' paradigm in econ as making the discipline of little use outside of academic debates, and thought economics was something that should and could be applied pragmatically to the real world for the good of humanity. And both thought that such a goal *necessitated* rather than *obviated* the need for analytical and historical rigor and impartiality. Interestingly enough, they were also both criticized (and/or praised) for turning their back on the privileged class into which they were born.

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    10. I suppose you're probably also unfamiliar with the actual philosophical work of Adorno. While the Marxism and the sociology and all that were primitive and awful, Adorno was an incredibly subtle philosopher who was moving in the same direction as many post-structuralists.

      http://www.iep.utm.edu/adorno/#H3

      They all recognised that knowledge is in some sense historically contingent. That is not relativism. You find the same conception as early as Vico. But it is one that the identity thinkers do not want to know anything about.

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    11. "I think that's a better way of making the point Phil seems to be talking about in saying "there is no beyond": that is, the meaning of all words are context-dependent. "

      That context is an element is the meaning of words is true, but hardly refutes anything I said.

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    12. I realize this is coming late, but I wanted to explain how it does in a sense problematize a statement like this:

      "A proposition -- what carries the property of being true or false -- is not the symbols or language used to express an idea: it is the idea expressed by the symbols or sentence."

      The Wittgensteinian would say that the idea could not exist without a language to express it. So the proposition (the idea) and its linguistic expression(s) are actually one and the same. And because there is no such a thing as a private language--a language that does not function to convey anything to anyone else--the proposition only exists as something expressed publicly to others. In this particular sense it has no 'objective' existence, and thus no objective truth, independent of language and by extension (because language is public) interpersonal communication. It is not a nihilist view of language and truth so much as it is a very non-essentialist view of them. But, again, I'm talking about Wittgenstein--and specifically the Wittgenstein of 'The Philosophical Investigations'--and not Foucalt. As I said above, the latter was a bit of a charlatan; the former was a truly formidable philosopher.

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    13. "The Wittgensteinian would say that the idea could not exist without a language to express it. So the proposition (the idea) and its linguistic expression(s) are actually one and the same."

      This is a non sequitur. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 could not exist as music without an orchestra with musical instruments playing it.

      Does it follow that Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and an orchestra with musical instruments paying it are one and the same thing? Clearly not.

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    14. The Wittgensteinian says it does follow, because Beethoven's Symphony No.5 could not and thus does not exist outside of the ability express it in language--so yes the orchestral performance (in the tonal language of musical instrumentation) and Beethoven's Symphony No.5 are the same thing. Beethoven's Symphony No.5 is also the same thing as the series of marks communicating it in the written language of musical theory. Because it is not comprehensible outside of these linguistic expressions.

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    15. "Because it is not comprehensible outside of these linguistic expressions.

      Clearly it could. If we destroyed all musical scores for Beethoven's Symphony No.5, people might still be taught to know how to play it by heart and do so. And people could recognise it without knowing anything about musical notation or scores.

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    16. I was using 'these linguistic expressions' in a more general sense, sorry for being unclear. I.e., people's comprehension of Beethoven's symphony would still depend on it being communicated to them in some kind of language--if we were to destroy *all* linguistic means of communicating it, including those in the tonal language of musical instrumentation, it would be incomprehensible.

      (BTW, since you're busy with other lines of research, feel free to depart this debate at any time and I'll let you have the last word. I just thought I'd continue a defense of Wittgenstein to add food for thought--as far as I'm concerned debunking Foucalt and pointing out the shortcomings of Marx are more important. But I would urge you to read the Philosophical Investigations and what has been written about it--it's clear, concise and very interesting philosophy worth reading even if you disagree with it.)

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  2. "If you say "no", then you're conceding the Wittgensteinian point that the meaning of the phrase "domestic cat" is entirely dependent on the context in which it is used."

    It's far beyond context. The point is that the term only has meaning in a system of other terms.

    The post-structuralists would say: "a signifier only has meaning in relation to other signifiers".

    Wittgenstein would say: "a term only has meaning in a given language game".

    Both are based on the same idea: language is constructive of reality. It delineates what we can and cannot discuss. Some might go so far as to say -- as Merleau-Ponty did in his discussions of visual art -- that it delineates what we actually SEE.

    This was all earlier pointed out by Berkeley and Hamann.

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  3. "The words do not refer to an object. The identity of the object is constituted in and through the words. This is what Foucault's early work is all about. The world is meaningless sense impressions until a language is imposed upon it to structure it. "

    Look at how incoherent this is: you say "words do not refer to an object", but then say language structures sense impressions: a sensory world of objects.

    Language names things we experience and does so by referring to sense impressions and objects of perception. This is straightforwardly true:

    "Pointing and other hand signals seem to give babies a head start in learning language skills, possibly by helping them to make connections between words and the objects in the world around them, psychologists found.
    http://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/feb/12/child-development-point-hand-signal

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    1. Sense impressions and 'objects' are well known to be different in philosophical terms. Basic stuff, LK.

      And I don't expect an empirical psychologist let alone a Guardian columnist to understand that distinction.

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    2. It does not matter whether you believe in pure idealist sense impressions or an external material reality that is the causal origin of our sense impressions: in both cases there are objects in our sensory world/sense qualia to which words refer.

      First you said:

      Everything is in the symbols or sentence themselves. There is no 'beyond'.

      There is untrue as a simple empirical fact: there exists sense data and discrete objects in our sensory world and their properties and relations.

      Words refer to and name these things.

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    3. Don't tear what I say out of context. The sense data is constructed into objects in and through language. In terms of knowledge everything is in the sentence/language as these CONSTITUTE the objects. There can be no knowledge of the sense data by definition.

      The sense data is like sand on a beach. The objects are castles we build with the sand. The castles are constructed in line with ideas which we impose on the world as a sort of 'language'.

      And just for the record this has very little to do with Foucault's work. By the 1970s he had left these (structuralist) debates way behind.

      Most of your criticisms seem to be misunderstandings of structuralism. Foucault went beyond this.

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    4. "In terms of knowledge everything is in the sentence/language as these CONSTITUTE the objects. There can be no knowledge of the sense data by definition."

      How can this be true? Children when they have no words can gain knowledge of objects by looking, feeling and touching and by experience of things. They recognise their parents from a young age and shun strangers. They recognise and know some things are food, etc., etc. Please do not say that children do not recognise or have no non-verbal knowledge of discrete objects.

      If you are only saying that knowledge in words requires words, that is trivially true, but hardly refutes the fact that words refer to objects.

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    5. Communicable knowledge or knowledge that we can reflectively grasp.

      Other forms of knowledge are also constructed. But in ways that does not immediately require language.

      This is all the structuralist debate. Very little to do with post-structuralism. If the Anglo-Saxons are having this debate they're about 80 years out of date.

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  4. LK, I'm in agreement with some of the comments on this and your other postmodern posts, I'm afraid. Over past few years I've found your site to be a fantastic resource - one which you seem to put huge effort into. I'm very grateful for that. But you're wide of the mark here.

    Nigel Dodd last year published a brilliant book on 'The Social Life of Money' which for the first time drew (in part) on many postmodern thinkers and considered explicitly how money is conceptualized in their work. Marc Shell (who I've not seen mentioned on your blog) has made some brilliant and fascinating contributions, and continues to do so. Its worth quoting the opening line of his Economy of Literature to you (it's become a something of a mantra for me)

    "Those discourses are ideological that argue or assume that matter is ontologically prior to thought"

    Put plainly, if science develops from monied relations (as, for example, suggested by Richard Seaford and Joel Kaye) then other means of conceiving of it are vital. Otherwise we are just staring at our own reflection.

    I find your lack of faith in Freud disturbing.

    PS: This might interest you. Did you know that Hayek completely misunderstood Freud? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2co-QuapTc

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    1. "Put plainly, if science develops from monied relations"

      Science develops from "monied relations"? Are you serious? Not from investigation of the world? Not from study of how things work? Not from testable and falsifiable hypotheses?

      As for Freud, his theories are pseudo-science. Take the Oedipus complex. Do you seriously believe this nonsense?

      The Oedipus complex is supposed to be the core of Freud’s program of psychoanalysis.
      Above all, it is utterly contradicted by an actual scientific theory that can be tested with empirical evidence: the Westermarck effect. Modern genetics and Darwinian evolution tell us that incestuous unions tend to produce unfit offspring, and there are very strong biological reason why members of any successful sexually reproducing species would generally tend to find it repellent, revolting and unnatural. And -- lo and behold! -- the overwhelming empirical evidence shows us that virtually everyone thinks it is repellent, revolting and unnatural.

      For debunking of Freud:

      http://skepdic.com/psychoan.html

      http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2468/was-sigmund-freud-a-quack

      http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-CrewsFreud.html

      See also these works:

      MacMillan, Malcolm. 1991. Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc. Elsevier North Holland. The Hague.

      Cioffi, Frank. 1998. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Open Court, Chicago.

      Crews, Frederick et al. 1995. The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute. New York Review, New York.

      Crews, Frederick. 1996. "The Verdict on Freud," Psychological Science 7: 63-67.

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    2. "I find your lack of faith in Freud disturbing. "

      Faith? Yes, belief in Freud mostly boils down to irrational faith.

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    3. I was being light-hearted about the lack of faith thing. Perhaps it'd have worked better if I'd said 'As for Freud, I find your lack of faith disturbing.' Did you see Star Wars? Never mind.

      You've gone on a rant against Freud and missed the point I was making. I have read a few critiques of Freud, yes most recently Albert Tauber's. Is it correct to consider his work science? No, Does his work have value? YES !

      Btw, I forgot to say you get a mention in Nigel Dodd's book. Ask me nicely and I'll find it for you.

      x

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  5. "I+I=II means something different to a Roman doing the sum than it means to you today. You are reading it through the 'lens' of a later system -- the decimal system."

    Just out of curiosity, how do YOU know what a Roman thought 2,000 years ago?

    I'm not trying to be impertinent, so bear with me.

    To be able to judge what a Roman thought, you must see things from a vantage point that allow you to "bridge the gap", so to speak. In such case, your vantage point gives YOU a truer knowledge than, say, LK's.

    Let's admit that for the sake of the argument. So, there's an ultimate truth, after all: yours.

    Ah, but you won't admit that, not even for the sake of the argument. Then, we go back to my opening question: how do you know? You have no vantage point on which base your opinion.

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    1. "I+I=II means something different to a Roman doing the sum than it means to you today."

      False. The idea conveyed is the same. Why?
      We know the Romans defined the concepts symbolised by I, II, III, IV, V as what we call 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc.

      How do we know this? They tell us so. The Latin word digitus means finger and its secondary uses mean counting with numbers on your fingers, and indeed the English word "digit" (= number), taken over from Latin, just develops right out of this sense, as it did by medieval Latin.

      For the Romans, I is measure of how many fingers you get when you hold up a finger. II is the measure of holding up another finger with the first, III adding another. V is when you hold out all the fingers on one hand, etc., etc. Therefore the concepts conveyed by I, II, III = 1, 2, 3 etc.

      In fact, even today most children will learn basic maths by finger counting -- just as probably most human children have always done.

      Frankly, people like you have no idea what you are talking about.

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    2. And I'll add: I is measure of how many fingers you get when you hold up a finger, etc. and naturally the concept of counting numbers/cardinal numbers emerges out of that or them, and they had the same concepts as we do: counting numbers.

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