The Greatest Intellectual Scam of All-Time: French Postmodernism

by cofty 99 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  cofty

  How can you be sure the worm's view is ignorant and ours is faithful to reality? - SBF

  Utterly fatuous.
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  Ruby456

  cofty I get the impression that you are a structuralist at heart - by 'evolution is a fact' you seem to mean it is a closed system. please tell me I am wrong - how could I be when you argue against other evolutionists
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  slimboyfat

  The question is only fatuous if you take the assumption that human reason is the ultimate measure of truth to be inviolable and unquestionable.

  Society in general once held similar views in relation to God as the arbiter of truth, during which period questioning God as the source of ultimate truth was similarly "utterly fatuous".
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  cofty

  cofty I get the impression that you are a structuralist at heart - by 'evolution is a fact' you seem to mean it is a closed system. please tell me I am wrong - how could I be when you argue against other evolutionists - Ruby

  I don't understand any of that. Do you want to try again and this time try to be a bit less pomo?

  The question is only fatuous if you take the assumption that human reason is the ultimate measure of truth to be inviolable and unquestionable. - SBF

  All we have to assume is that we know enough to be sure about the shape of the earth. We do.

  
  SBF - I suspect you are not even sure that the Watchtower are wrong in any meaningful sense. You simply find their narrative to be less useful to you than you once did. Is this a fair characterisation?
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  slimboyfat

  "Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."

  I love this passage from Foucault. Beautiful and hardly obscurantist.

  One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area – European culture since the sixteenth century – one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. It is not around him and his secrets that knowledge prowled for so long in the darkness. In fact, among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order, the knowledge of identities, differences, characters, equivalences, words – in short, in the midst of all the episodes of that profound history of the Same – only one, that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close, has made it possible for the figure of man to appear. And that appearance was not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs and philosophies: it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

  If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”
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  slimboyfat

  SBF - I suspect you are not even sure that the Watchtower are wrong in any meaningful sense. You simply find their narrative to be less useful to you than you once did. Is this a fair characterisation?

  Actually I would argue that I believe JWs are wrong in a more profound way than simply being factually wrong. It's your approach that leaves people theoretically vulnerable to return. The logic of your approach is that if evidence emerges that JW doctrines were in fact "true" then we should all go back and take part again. That's why I think ethical and aesthetic grounds for rejecting JW beliefs are often more compelling and satisfying than merely disagreements over scientific facts.

  Since my rejection of JW ideology does not at its heart rely upon a refutation of its truth value, I am not vulnerable to counter-evidence as you are.

  There was an excellent thread on the forum many years ago with a subject along the lines: "who else left JWs while still believing it was true?" Many people on the thread described the amazing process of rejecting the prospect of future paradise on earth, while believing it in full to be true, because they found life as a JW unbareable in the here and now.
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  Mickey mouse

  My view is the "scientific method" had become a bit of a gold standard which some people want to apply to everything; from this perspective there are universal facts "out there" to be discovered. However your methods shape the knowledge you produce. Empirical, experimental methods work well for the natural sciences they leave room for huge oversights and unacknowledged assumptions when it comes to areas like psychology and philosophy.

  Edited to add: I believe I am sufficiently qualified to venture an informed opinion on this topic.
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  cofty

  Empirical, experimental methods work well for the natural sciences they leave room for huge oversights and unacknowledged assumptions when it comes to areas like psychology and philosophy. - MM

  No argument from anybody on that.

  My objection is when postmodern philosophers pretend they have something interesting to say about the physical sciences (or about anything really). They really don't.
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  cofty

  ethical and aesthetic grounds for rejecting JW beliefs are often more compelling and satisfying than merely disagreements over scientific facts. - SBF

  False dichotomy. It's not either/or.

  I reject the WT for factual and ethical reasons. You assert there is no such thing as facts. And apparently that is a fact!
  
  
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  Pistoff

  This seems to be the collision of scientific research based disciplines,vs literary theory.

  There is no precise, scientific analysis of or in literary theory; it is a vast pool of ideas, nothing more.

  I am not saying they are bad ideas, but that is all they are: structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, post modernism, deconstructionism.

  All ideas that try to organize and explain the unexplainable.

  To my way of thinking, they all have at least some merit, and some nonsense.
  

  It is not like physical science, where things are measured, and experiments are done.

  As soon as you start talking about literary theory (this discussion, deconstruction via Derrida) you step into a spongy mass where nothing is actually real.