/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14219514]

Does anyone else get the vibe that analytical philosophy--or maybe philosophy in general--is a bunch of gobbledygook?

Let me give you some examples. I'm going to throw a dart at some subcategory on Philpapers and paste the summary here. Then I’ll do the same for some paper and its abstract.

Summary:


Two-dimensional semantic theories postulate two "dimensions" of meaning or content, each understood in terms of possible worlds. The second dimension is typically depends on the external referents of expressions involved, while the first dimension captures the way that reference depends on the world. There are many different two-dimensional frameworks. David Kaplan develops a framework involving "character" and "content" to understand the meaning of indexicals and demonstratives. Robert Stalnaker develops a framework involving "diagonal propositions" and "propositions expressed" to understand assertion and its relation to context. David Chalmers and Frank Jackson develop frameworks involving "primary intensions" and "secondary intensions" (or "A-" and "C-intensions") to understand the relation between apriority and necessity and also to understand an internal Fregean dimension of content.

Abstract:

One well known problem regarding quantifiers, in particular the 1storder quantifiers, is connected with their syntactic categories and denotations. The unsatisfactory efforts to establish the syntactic and ontological categories of quantifiers in formalized first-order languages can be solved by means of the so called principle of categorial compatibility formulated by Roman Suszko, referring to some innovative ideas of Gottlob Frege and visible in syntactic and semantic compatibility of language expressions. In the paper the principle is introduced for categorial languages generated by the Ajdukiewicz’s classical categorial grammar. The 1st-order quantifiers are typically ambiguous. Every 1st-order quantifier of the type k > 0 is treated as a two-argument functorfunction defined on the variable standing at this quantifier and its scope (the sentential function with exactly k free variables, including the variable bound by this quantifier); a binary function defined on denotations of its two arguments is its denotation. Denotations of sentential functions, and hence also quantifiers, are defined separately in Fregean and in situational semantics. They belong to the ontological categories that correspond to the syntactic categories of these sentential functions and the considered quantifiers. The main result of the paper is a solution of the problem of categories of the 1st-order quantifiers based on the principle of categorial compatibility.


Can you believe this shit? It’s literal nonsense. Do I have permission to abandon philosophy and go back to reading Shelley in a tree? My brain hurts.

[Anonymous No.14219543]

And no, I’m not an outsider giving up on something just because it’s dense. I love poetry, it sustains me, but some of it is impossibly dense. I still love it, and I love chiseling away at it until that granite hunk gives me something beautiful. I read philosophy, probably compulsively, and there are very arcane ideas presented in impossible vocabulary that I somehow had the patience to come to thoroughly understand. But even then I kept asking myself: is any of this shit real? Even when I understand something backwards and forwards, the arguments and replies and replies to the replies sound like made up arguments over made up rules to a made up game. Poetry makes so much more sense to me. What the fuck have I been reading?

[Anonymous No.14219559]

And, look: When I say “compulsion”, I mean it. Nothing feels more urgent to me than figuring out philosophical problems, which are eternal, omnipresent, unavoidable, inevitable, etc etc etc. I really really really don’t want to give up asking these questions or searching for their answers, but dude, almost everything I read is fucking impenetrable. At the very least, philosophers should take up Louis Zukofsky’s dictum to “make it as simple as possible but not simpler”. No fucking way this shit is as simple as it could be.

[Anonymous No.14219578]

And I know when a new concept is assimilated into an understanding. I know what that feels like. It happens in everything I read, whether it be literary criticism, poetry, fiction, or history. Suddenly, or slowly, an incomprehensible idea becomes either obvious or obviously wrong. You can hold it in your mind and look at all of it at once. But with the vast majority of philosophy, when a concept passes through that membrane, it feels just as imaginary as it did when it was gibberish. It feels made up. Even when you get the internal coherence of it, maybe even its eloquence, the logic just feels like a kind of grammar instead of this *thing* that’s embedded in the laws of reason itself. This shit feels faaaake.

[Anonymous No.14219580]

It's not gobbledygook in the sense of internal inconsistency, it's gobbledygook in the sense that it tries to build up schemes of "pure" logic that are really dependent on tacitly held, underlying ontologies.

It gets even worse when these ontologies become nested within one another, spanning generations, so that you have whole schools and sub-schools of analytics studiously refuting one another over whether their interpretation of some key aspect of a major thinker's major writing is correct, when the whole interpretive framework they're working within in the first place is actually trivially wrong and stupid (and, often, easily superseded by a bit of intellectual history legwork), and on top of that, the original figure who is being interpreted to begin with (like a Frege) is fucking irreducibly vague about his ontological commitments in doing pure logic.

That's the problem with analytics. They get so deep into their matryoshka dolls of rebuking an interpreter of an interpreter of an interpreter of a certain theory about the applications of modal logic that they forget that the whole discourse they're participating in is historically pendant on some fucking moron from the '60s who only popularized his ideas because he lucked out and became an institution. Analytics are extremely bad at archaeologically investigating their own discourses. They are infamous for being blind to historical analysis. Instead they specialize in reading texts in a vacuum, by "applying frameworks," which are also considered and adopted in a vacuum, so that when they inevitably argue about a framework's details or its validity, they argue IN A VACUUM about it, only generating more sub-frameworks and sub-sub-frameworks, with the ultimate result that a hundred years goes by and they're saying "Well, if we accept Steve Stevenson's X-theory about Y's, we know that Y's can only B or C in a D-space of O-thingies, but I propose that Steve was actually wrong in interpreting this as the essence of Bob Johnson's landmark study of Frege's, and that D-spaces can actually be considered as ...... [etc.]," and at no point during this fucking process do they ever think to get some perspective on the assumptions underlying all these turning points.

That's why it's bewildering to talk to them. They think they are hyper-incisive, willing to slice through any philosophical utterance or text or set of ideas with the help of their perfectly sharp slicing-tool, Logic, but then they inevitably can't fucking prove anything without slicing into Logic itself, but they have to invoke Logic to do it, and somehow, I literally don't know how but somehow, they never think "uh oh, that's a real problem, isn't it?"

[Anonymous No.14219593]

All philosophy since it diverged from math is garbage. Just learn pure math

[Anonymous No.14219608]

>>14219580
Fucking thank you. OP here (also the poster of the first three posts in this thread). My obsession has been in philosophy of action--Donald Davidson, a little Wittenstein (his shadow really is enormous), and more recent people like Helen Steward and Jennifer Hornsby. I’m truly fucking confounded with this area of philosophy because, unlike the topic I clicked on at random to demonstrate my point, philosophy of action is based on *us*--our minds and our bodies. But even then, almost all of what I’ve been reading sounds so cut off from reality. I makes me wonder if a rational model of the mind, or action, or reasons-explanation, or anything under the sun is doomed to fail. Is that blasphemy? I’ve just read so much philosophy over the course of my life, so many arguments and replies to arguments and so on and so forth, that this one Saul Kripke quote feels profoundly true to me now: ““It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong. You may suspect me of proposing another theory in its place; but I hope not, because I'm sure it's wrong too if it is a theory.”

[a_poor_sinner !!eiHxl4pZe1i No.14219629]

>>14219593
based Euclid

>>14219580
>It's not gobbledygook in the sense of internal inconsistency, it's gobbledygook in the sense that it tries to build up schemes of "pure" logic that are really dependent on tacitly held, underlying ontologies.
Well put. But those ontologies are nevertheless the foundations for our natural language, which has gotten us pretty far in philosophy even if it is imperfect. Syllogism comes to mind, analogy is a heck of a tool but there's no arguing that it can easily lead to bad conclusions even when it works well. It's useful only insofar as we use it in the territory it belongs to: describing human experience using human language.

>>14219514
>Can you believe this shit? It’s literal nonsense.
I'm inclined to agree but I don't have the vocabulary for it. "It's Greek to me." It would make sense I'm sure if I studied it but then I'd be operating in Esperanto, a specialized language that very few people use and this limits its utility as a weapon in the arsenal of philosophy as we have understood it so far. Which truth is this formal language trying to get at?

I'm piqued. Where do I start with Witty?

[Anonymous No.14219638]

>>14219629

OP again. I almost want to find a philosopher that grants intuition ontological superiority over reason. I sense that in the Existentialists, definitely in the Romantics, but no way am I going to find that in some analytical philosopher, living or dead. If I could ditch arguments that are 50% math and Latin for, like, meditation or exegesis or even faith, I would, gladly and eagerly. I know it would be painful at first, because it’s also an indestructible intuition that reason and logic and evidence is *the* way to discover the truths of the mind, action, perception, etc etc etc, but it all feels so fucking doomed. I understand why Wittenstein abandoned philosophy later in his career, in spirit if not in practice. Why don’t more philosophers turn cloak? Is it because they have a tuition they don’t want to go to waste?


Like James Joyce, it's best to read ol Vitkenshtein chronologically.

[a_poor_sinner !!eiHxl4pZe1i No.14219660]

>>14219638
>I almost want to find a philosopher that grants intuition ontological superiority over reason.
Sounds like he'd be some kind of biologist, some DNA guy looking for the origins of the milk of human kindness literally in our bone marrow. Maybe a naturalist or sociologist who studies apes and languages as well, looking for those intuitions that proved the fittest: charity and mercy and compassion and the rest.

>but it all feels so fucking doomed
I'm guessing because those questions don't answer the why which regardless of what we tell ourselves professionally still matters to us in the long run. I'm astounded at how irrelevant the idea of a subconscious has become. We don't understand how the mind works exactly, or memory, but I can't help feeling like it's a second mind that's constantly running. An entire part of us that we usually forget except as the source of dreams, when it is reacting to our waking experience in the language of fear and memory. Instinct stuff is working in us right now and most everyone ignores it for what it is.

>Why don’t more philosophers turn cloak?
You're right I think, they just get into a comfy job and a life and can't leave. What's an old phil prof to do? Switch careers? Young kids are too busy shaking up the world by the time they're feeling old enough to retire. There's really nothing out there for them.

[Anonymous No.14220032]

Academic vs. Practical Philosophy
“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers."

I bet when you think of a philosopher you imagine a very smart person who is a professor that teaches and write papers on esoteric topics that only another philosopher could understand or even care about. You, along with Thoreau, are right. Nowadays, even philosophers believe that to be a “real” philosopher is to have an academic job at a good university, go to conferences that only philosophers attend, and write papers for top tier journals that only philosophers read.

Unfortunately, by neglecting the practical side of philosophy, academic philosophers have made themselves irrelevant when it comes to the practical concerns of society in general and people in particular.
https://www.philosophicalliving.com/academic-vs-practical-philosophy/

[Anonymous No.14221164]

Logicians are analytic philosophers and the set theory fields medalist commented on how in his first introductions to logic, he was appalled by the amount of philosophy. But later on he was even more surprised the analytic philosophy was actually producing tangible mathematical theorems

[Anonymous No.14221171]

This language can appear to be nonsense only if you don't know anything about logic and formal systems. That's it.

[Anonymous No.14221198]

All philosophy post Nietzsche is literal nonsense. Most philosophy pre Nietzsche straddles the line.

[Anonymous No.14221221]

>>14219514
Yes, philosophy is just mental masturbation.
>what works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood
Truth is in simplicity.

[Anonymous No.14221225]

>>14219514
but look how serious his face is and he was at Big University so I believe him, nothing you say can change my mind

[Anonymous No.14221228]

>>14219514
>Can you believe this shit? It’s literal nonsense.
not far from the truth
they are just narrating a melange of emotion and logic and presenting it as pure logic, bluffing by using an array of idiosyncratic descriptors
see what i did there?

[Anonymous No.14221240]

>>14219580
>in the sense of internal inconsistency
it isn't though, they are crammed so far up their own assholes they aren't really evaluating what they're saying, and neither is anyone else because they're hiding in a jungle of jargon - if you latch on to one point they'll point at the floor and and exclaim "JAPANPHORE! JAPANPHORE!" and disappear into an elevator

[Anonymous No.14221247]

>>14219638
there's no such thing as pure reason, you can never negate your biases (your brain is made of nothing BUT bias) and if you do you are dead anyway, or at least a great deal of your brain is turned off, narrowing your scope of reason to a useless amount anyway

that's why jews are so retarded and crazy, like witty

[Anonymous No.14221403]

>>14221240
topkek

[Anonymous No.14221694]

>>14221171
This
Analytic philosophy requires education in logic and theoretical computer science which analytic philosophers made possible

[Anonymous No.14222125]

>>14219638
>I almost want to find a philosopher that grants intuition ontological superiority over reason
You'll find plenty in the continental tradition. Nietzsche's precedence of art over truth is the starting point for an intuition-based philosophy that runs through philosophers like Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze. Bergson above all is the advocate of intuition by taking it as the way to view absolutely the thing in itself.