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It is remarkable and unfortunate that belief in the superiority of science is so often thought to excuse a total lack of intellectual rigour or effort in discussing anything else.
If you insist that only science produces “knowledge” then you are perilously close to admitting you simply don’t know anything else.
If you then make it your business to render judgments on other fields, you are bound to convince only those as ignorant as you are.
And at that point, whatever your professional ties to “science” or your convictions about knowledge, you have made profiting from ignorance your trade.
“I read X at nineteen and it made no sense to me” is neither here nor there as a statement about X. Relatively few works of either theory or empirical scholarship are aimed principally at nineteen-year-olds.
It is also neither here nor there as a statement about the nineteen-year-old reader. Some challenges are worth it for some readers. Some aren’t. It’s not a big deal either way.
But it begins to say something about your intellectual honesty, not so say humility, if, decades later, you make claims about the nature and value of X based solely on your failure to grasp it at nineteen.
It suggests an arrogance and a lack of curiosity that are, to say the least, at odds with the frequently stated ideals of empirical science.
By the same token it inevitably raises questions about the nature of your “scientific” commitments. If you are willing to pronounce boldly on one subject from a position of (acknowledged) ignorance, why should your bold pronouncements in other areas be taken any more seriously?
It is not a postmodern eccentricity to point out that producing knowledge involves trust. The point goes back to the seventeenth century. Leaping from slender acquaintance with scant particulars to broad claims about whole fields is the sort of thing that makes one untrustworthy.
If course, backtracking from “I know Foucault’s major works and can judge them” to “I read them at nineteen I think” to “OK maybe I read a short introduction, I’m sure it was a good one” does the same thing. It just also makes you look like a total clown.
