Thread by @deontologistics

To synthesis some of what I've been saying about critique with @Aelkus's comments about expertise, and some of my earlier griping about Anglophone Continental philosophy, the problem is that 'critique' can be a way of perpetually suspending a debate one doesn't want to have.

This is an important point for the epistemology of ignorance, wherein we recognise that ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but a positive inability/unwillingness to learn things one does not wish to learn, sustained by unconscious biases and conscious techniques alike.

Far too much 'critique' consists in using techniques that generate discursive equipollence (an equity between P and not P) for the purpose of forwarding the argument by other means, with no intention of forwarding anything. Equipollence is no longer a means, but an end in itself.

The argument is quite literally 'left hanging'. This is quite similar to what @lastpositivist calls 'informal omega inconsistency', in which the inconsistency between one's stated intentions and one's pattern of behaviour is only realised *in the limit*.

I've encountered many academics who are consummate masters of indefinite suspension, leaving every issue balanced on a skeptical knife edge, but those avenues of attack related to their particular interests. All expertise is dissolved but their own, however meagre it is.

This is to say that the relevant discursive techniques are no longer tools to pursue and procure uncertain insights, but to bend uncertainty into a defensive structure, and sometimes even build it into an epistemic fortress, repelling every stubborn and inconvenient fact.

It will surprise no one when I say that this is the habitual stance taken by Anglophone Continental philosophy towards empirical science of all kinds, especially in those areas most invested in post-Heideggerian phenomenology.

The fact that a piece of scientific research *could* be challenged is enough to treat it as if it *has* been challenged, and these are far from the same thing, given that it is not merely assertions, but also challenges that must be assessed on their merits.

That is, until there's a fact that's convenient and which one's peers are happy to permit, no matter how poorly understood or badly articulate. Cf. almost every appeal to quantum physics for theoretical support (e.g., Zizek's dialectical materialism or Laruelle's non-philosophy).

I'm really not trying to pull a Sokal here, BTW. There's plenty of good philosophy that draws on empirical science and other fields for support, and which does so competently or at least interestingly even when it is ultimately wrong. I love Deleuze, but not always Deleuzians.

This also isn't limited to Continental philosophy or even to philosophy as such. It's a pattern of bad behaviour that turns up everywhere, because it's always tempting to quickly cut off a possible line of refutation for one's beliefs than 'staying with the trouble' as it were.

We can't all work on everything, become experts in everything, or even just retain a working overview of what's going on in other facets of the ongoing quest for knowledge. We all make choices as how best to use our time and resources. But there are better ways of making them.

It is better to say 'I do not have time to read the book you think is crucial to my concerns', than 'that book exemplifies a degenerate tendency identified by <convenient narrative> and could never usefully speak to my concerns'. Unfortunately, the latter is often more fun.

Having previously framed this in terms of epistemic humility, the former is a humility one takes upon oneself, the latter is a way of justifying the demand that others be humble with no expectation of mutual reciprocity.

I've had cause to mention negative theology several times recently, and this lets me frame my problem with it in general terms. It is in some sense an epistemology of ignorance, but it is the worst such epistemology. The most disarmingly permissive and yet cloyingly selfish.

In turning knowing what one does not know (knowing-nothing in the Socratic sense) into knowing-nothing(ness), it disarticulates those structured connections through which we learn that we are wrong. Structured ignorance precedes learning, but apophasis begets nothing new.

Anyway, off to cook!