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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".) |