From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 23:03:07 MST
I think Hilary Putnam put it best: Arguing with a deconstructionist is
like having a fistfight with fog.
Derrida is open to deconstruction, but if the deconstruction is at all
faithful to the process of deconstruction, it won't shift the paradigm in
any significant way. The classic retort of the relativist to the
objection that relativism implies its own falsehood is: "So what?" The
deconstructionist has a similar and equally effective move available. If
contradiction bothered you, you wouldn't be a deconstructionist in the
first place.
There ARE deconstructionists who aren't relativists; Derrida himself was
probably one. He supposedly claimed in conversation that "truth is an
incoherent idea, but we simply can't get on without it!"
Frankly, I think people in the "third culture" tend to lean too far
towards logical positivism and sociobiological ethics. These people are,
to be blunt, shallow thinkers. Logical positivism ("if it's not
analytically derivable or empirically verifiable then it's meaningless!")
is wrong even by its own lights ("so logical positivism, being underivable
and unverifiable, is ALSO meaningless?"), and sociobiological ethics can't
justify itself any better than competing theories; sociobiological ethics'
only leg up on the competition lies in its ambitions to make ethics
scientific, appealing to that little logical positivist in us all.
(Note: some sociobiologists now call themselves evolutionary
psychologists. This is fine, but these people shouldn't be trying to do
our ethics for us.)
The more sober of the "third culture" bunch have more or less converged
with the continential philosophers on the PCR/CCR/"evolutionary"
epistemology. (Check out Rorty, of whom I am a recent fan, if you want to
see that transition played out. Hint: Hegel was probably one of the
first pancritical rationalists. But have you SEEN his logic?)
The main difference at work, in my opinion, b/w the third culture and the
continentals, is their differing attitudes towards logic. The
continentals fight a hard upward battle to show that logic has no special
access to truth. Evolutionary epistemologists with their heads on should
retort that while logic has no *special* access, it's the best we've got,
*by our own lights*. Couple that with a dash of universalism in your
ethics and you've got something like objectivism and a healthy
cosmopolitianism. (Dewey would have called it "democratic," if only
because he, along with many other modern Americans, can't imagine a system
where everybody participates that isn't Democracy. He should have read
Adam Smith or Hayek more closely.)
Anyway, I've blathered on enough for now.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:27:06 MST