academic commentary

Thomas Bitterman · 02 Dec 2010, 01:06 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: tom at bitterman.net (Thomas Bitterman)
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 20:06:50 -0500
Subject: (urth) academic commentary
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On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Thomas Bitterman <tom at bitterman.net> wrote:
> > The statement "Wright's methodology
> > does not permit a reading in which spiritual beings actually exist" is very
> > different from the statement "Wright adopted a methodology which prohibits a
> > reading in which spiritual beings exist because he is an atheist and that
> > sort of reading makes him uncomfortable".? The first is very informative and
> > leads to interesting questions such as "What other methodologies could be
> > brought to bear, and what can they reveal that Wright's did not?"? The
> > second simply speculates on the author's motives, which is out of place in a
> > discussion of non-fiction.
>
> I'm sorry, but this is nonsense.

At least if we cannot decide on where meaning lies, we can discern
where it doesn't.

> Is it out of place to discuss why Sarah Palin has written her book
> "America by Heart," or why Al Franken wrote "Lies and the Lying Liars
> Who Tell Them?"

To the extent that those books advance claims about reality the
motivations of the authors are irrelevant.  I don't make the rules
about logical fallacies.

One might consider anything Palin says to be fiction, however.

> I say no. There are entire motivated schools of criticism, as Marxist,
> Christian, deconstructionist, etc., and motivation is _clearly_ of
> import in reading those critics. (If deconstruction has accomplished
> anything at all, it is to demonstrate that all texts, not just those
> called fiction, have ideological and metaphysical underpinnings -- "we
> are always already within the circle of metaphysics.")

That way lies the madness of rejecting Einsteinian relativity because
it is "Jewish science", and Darwinian evolution because it is
"bourgeois".

Deconstruction has demonstrated that deconstructionists can say they
can find ideological and metaphysical underpinnings to all texts.

> Thus, while your first statement is necessary it is not sufficient: it
> is legitimate, and perhaps even necessary, to ask why <critic> chooses
> the methodology s/he does and not some other methodology. The answer
> to that question is going to be rooted in <critic>'s ideology and
> metaphysics.

It is not legitimate.  It is a logical fallacy to judge the validity
of an argument by referring to the motivations of the person who makes
the argument.

> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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