[steveklabnik]

One of my favorite takes on this debate, from a software developer: http://byfat.xxx/chomsky

(SFW even though it's on an .xxx domain)

(It is "this debate" in a broader sense, not this specific debate, which I also happen to love. I both agree with you that it is amazing how everyone sees what they want to see in that debate, and also am in the "lol Chomsky got owned so hard he didn't even know what was going on" camp.)

[svat]

The position taken in that post is an even more severe indictment of "postmodernism" than anything Chomsky (or even anyone in this thread) wrote: it is saying, basically, that postmodernists intentionally adopt a dialect and "styles of discourse" to turn off people like Chomsky and drive them away from its circles.

If true, this is even worse than simply being obscure, wrong, muddle-headed, nonsensical, or whatever. By default my assumption when encountering stuff I don't understand is that there's something meaningful and useful being attempted to be communicated, and if I just work harder I may be able to get something of value out of it. But if the claim here is true (would most postmodernists agree, BTW? have they said something to that effect?)—namely that, let alone failing to be clear, they're not even trying (worse, actively trying not to be clear to everyone)—then I can just ignore them completely, as they're not even operating in good faith. Being wrong is just an intellectual failure that can happen to all of us; being intentionally unclear is almost a moral failure. (Or at least, it's diametrically opposed to my values, and while I can recognize the possibility of other systems of values, I have no wish to engage with a community rejecting this value.)

(BTW, the link in that 2012 post to Chomsky's post is broken, but it's saved here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120711000559/http://cscs.umich... — it's not quite that, as the post claims, Chomsky threw out everything "on the basis of dialect alone", but what he asks in that post is for examples of all that "theory" throwing up some practical conclusion that wasn't already well-known. He also points out that in say, physics or mathematics, where too he may not understand everything, "I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty" — but this is not true of (what is/was called) "[critical] theory".)

[fenderbluesjr]

The link provided was just an elaborate way of saying 'postmodernism is good, Chomsky doesn't get it'. It doesn't tell you what the novel 'ways of thinking' are, just asserts that they are there and require 'investing serious time' to grasp. There's no defense here and I don't see how you can appreciate this take unless you are already firmly decided beforehand and just like seeing people you disagree with pilloried

[steveklabnik]

Not every piece of writing is trying to convince, it's true.

FWIW, I don't see the piece as saying "postmodernism is good." And I think the final two paragraphs are good bits of advice, regardless of the topic at hand.

[ostrophene]

very good take here, and it gets to the heart of the issue: Chomsky comes out of the analytic tradition where the goal is to rigorously explain and define everything that can't quite be pinned down by mathematical symbolization. French intellectual traditions owe way more to existentialism and phenomenology, where the goal is rather to understand experiences in new, historically appropriate ways. the latter partakes, even where Foucault, for instance, is apparently undertaking a historical analysis, far more of poetic language, because the thinking is "we here in history are disclosing the historically unthought that everyone before us couldn't see"