Thread by @MatthewGreenf11

diablog.net/2020/10/shacke… "Shackel’s goal in the paper is to expose the fallacies on which the arguments for postmodernist positions rely. In the process, he gives name to a number of different fallacious rhetorical strategies"

"Humpty Dumptying is when someone redefines a word that is in common usage to mean somthing new. It gets its name from the following passage from Alice Through the Looking Glass: .."When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”"

"A Troll’s Truism is a claim that uses a Humpty Dumptied term, and which is a truism if we are bearing in mind the new definition of the term in question. But it is an absurdity if the term is taken with its traditional meaning...

... suppose someone wants to arbitrarily redefine the term ‘knowlede’ to mean ‘power.’..one could then go on to assert claims like “Knowledge is structured by social relations of dominance” or, simply, “Knowledge is power.” These are Troll’s Truisms..can be used to mislead."

"the infamous Motte and Bailey doctrine. String together enough of these Troll’s Truisms, and you’ll have what looks like a critique of objective epistemology. That’s the Bailey: the radical conclusion that a postmodernist might want his audience to arrive at...

...But, if challenged, the speaker can claim that all of his statements are mere truisms about ‘knowledge,’ i.e. power. Surely you don’t dispute these trivialities? That’s the Motte."

"Humpty Dumptying is a stark example of what Shackel calls an Equivocating Fulcrum. Equivocating fulcra are systematic patterns of equivocation on a particular word or phrase...

...use a word that already has multiple recognized meanings without specifying which of the two meanings that we intend, and allow our talk to shift back and forth between one definition and another depending on our rhetorical needs."

"Given the amount of mischief that’s advanced in popular discourse that relies on the use and abuse of language, the concepts of Humpty Dumptying, Troll’s Truisms,Equivocating Fulcra, and the Motte and Bailey Doctrine are ones that every philosopher should have in their toolkit..

... We should be teaching them in undergraduate critical thinking classes. And we should be alert to these tricks when we see them used in contemporary philosophical discourse."

The above thread is the words of Obtuse Angle.
diablog.net/author/obtuse-…

And the paper itself. philpapers.org/archive/shatvo…

"postmodernism is more a matter of taste than anything else, a matter of the rejection of the rude, the unsophisticated, in short, a rejection of the peasant...

...I do not mind being condescended to in these terms by those postmodernists who have so bravely sought to enlighten me from my dull rationalism –although I will endeavour in future to be more cleverly sophistical, or perhaps just being ruder will do." 🤣

"Having it both ways is essential to the appeal of postmodernism, for it is precisely by apparently speaking simultaneously of two different concepts with the same word that the appearance of giving a profound but subtle analysis of a taken for granted concept is created."

"The Postmodernist Fox-trot goes like this: Firstly the meta-philosophical claim is made that philosophy cannot properly be done except negatively: that to occupy a position is already to be mistaken. I am going to refer to this position as the No-Position Position...

...Secondly, alogosia is asserted: true normative theories of objective rationality are not available; whatever we take to be the canons of rationality are constructed, so could have been constructed differently...

...and that although there may be some ways in which they could not be constructed, among those ways in which they can be constructed there are no better or worse ways of constructing them...

...The upshot of this pair, the foxy bit, is that the postmodernist can use normative notions of rationality whilst evading accountability to rational standards. By the substitution of vague terminology in place of standard rational terminology...

...for example, the use of“valid” instead of “true”, by the widespread use of scare quotes whenever rational terminology is used, he exploits a contradiction which the official position, the No-Position Position, allows him to keep hidden."

"where the No-Position Position stops is just where philosophy starts. If all the postmodernist has to say is that he starts from different premisses, but he doesn’t want to talk about it, he hasn’t begun to engage in a philosophical project."

"Once one has a battery of such equivocal concepts, a school of fox-trotting writers making use of them, and an audience flattered to think that in accepting them it has a grasp on the profundities, a field of enquiry has degenerated to..a rankly relativising field...

....Participants are relentlessly sucked in by use of the rhetorical effects of first one and then another equivocal concept, and resistance is quelled by the insinuation of the Non-Position Position and alogosia...

...The rankly relativising field of postmodernism has scooped up the lost souls of the social sciences and literary arts and sucked them into absolute irrationalism. Absolute irrationalism is that every assertion is as good as any other."

"The overt incoherence of absolute irrationalism is the reason for the textualism of postmodernism..Yet no more can one escape absolute irrationalism by resorting to textualism than can one escape a black hole having reached its event horizon...

...Postmodernists cannot stop at this point without conceding objective rational standards of reference to text..They are committed to there being no such thing as reference relations, and so texts cannot even contain truths about texts."

"Falling into a black hole, when you reach the event horizon, to observers you appear to stop and instead your image slowly fades, whilst in fact you carry on going, getting more and more compressed by gravity. Such is the fate of postmodernists...

...Their rankly relativising field collapses into the black hole of absolute irrationalism. We see their wraiths..at the horizon, forever in our view, yet growing forever dimmer, and think they may yet return to us. But they have long ago passed beyond, getting denser as they go"

The second half of the above thread (its 2 for the price of 1 today!) is the words of Nicholas Shackel from his paper 'The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology'. Which can be read in full here;
philpapers.org/archive/shatvo…