Lord Neuberger has just published his report on privacy law and injunctions. The Lord Chief Justice, Igor Judge, has complained that the Internet is out of control. Allegations can appear there regardless of British court orders. Something needs to be done about this.
No it doesn't, and no it shouldn't. The courts have got used to having their authority respected, so one can understand their fury when technology means that people can take action that flouts court orders within the jurisdiction, while at the same time saying "Stuff you, I am outside the jurisdiction". My view that the law not only has lost, but should lose, is based on the following considerations.
1. The state has never had any business controlling what we say, or what we read, or offering help to others who would like to control what we say or read. Artificial technology is at last coming to the rescue of natural justice.
2. The harm that is done to reputations is the mere disclosure of truth. No-one has any right to keep the truth hidden. If you did not want it made public, you should not have done it. The law of privacy, in the form of an enforceable right against non-public bodies, is an invention for which there is no justification.
3. Since the harm done is mere embarrassment, there is no justification for effectively extending the writ of courts of one country to other countries through international agreements.
4. Lies are also put up on the Internet, but if there is to be a remedy there, it lies in the law of defamation, not in injunctions. And if there were no injunctions, it is much more likely that the truth would appear in the mainstream media, undermining lies on the Internet.
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Monday, 9 May 2011
Impact and the funding of research
Like many others, I have watched in dismay, and have signed every petition I can find, as some of those who hold the purse-strings in humanities research have accepted that politically trendy mantras have a role in the allocation of funds. The Arts and Humanities Research Council has adopted "the Big Society", a silly slogan if ever there was one. And the management of the British Academy have negotiated a settlement on the importance of the impact of research, rather than telling politicians and civil servants that they will have nothing to do with the concept. The latest, and excellent, petition on the AHRC is here, and I encourage everyone to sign it:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bigsociety/
Today, I came across one of the best, and scariest, comments on impact, in a letter in the 28 April edition of the London Review of Books. It is by Richard Bowring, Professor of Japanese and Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, the college where I had the privilege of studying in the 1970s. It is available here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/letters
He points out that while everyone knows that the concern with impact is nonsense, people will care about their institutions enough to go along with it, and will put something down on the forms in order to secure some funds. The ultimate beneficiaries will be institutions in Europe and in North America, which will welcome the really talented people from our universities with open arms. To put one of Richard Bowring's points in game-theoretic terms, our universities are in a multi-player version of the prisoner's dilemma (except that communication between players is possible). All would be better off if all resisted, but the cost of resisting when others do not is so high that all will capitulate.
And yet, some sort of control is needed. We cannot just hand over taxpayers' money, without some check that it is not being wasted. Fatuous research does get conducted, and the taxpayer should fund as little of it as feasible. It is a matter of finding the right control.
The perfect control from the point of view of saving money might appear to be one that imposed external monitoring on every research proposal. Indeed, one reason to be concerned about impact is that it would encourage precisely that approach. It is not the only supposed measurable that could do so, nor would it have to be used in that fashion. But impact has the special characteristic that it is not a quality that is naturally defined within the context of an academic discipline, unlike, for example, profundity or being wide-ranging. So the external authorities who have imposed the criterion are the natural people to say what it means, and to decide which pieces of research are likely to have it.
In fact, external monitoring of every research proposal would be a bad idea, even if the external authority was often within the institution, as when a general board monitors the proposals that a faculty board approves. Universal surveillance cramps creativity and twists research proposals. But if we are not to have universal surveillance, we must accept that some fatuous research will get funded. That is undesirable in itself, but it is a reasonable price to pay. A certain amount of money may need to be wasted, as a side-effect of properly funding worthwhile research. But we want to make sure that not much is wasted. What sort of control might do? Here are two suggestions.
The first suggestion is to monitor the achievements of our universities against those in other countries. (One reason to make comparisons with foreign universities, rather than with other domestic universities, is that it takes away a sense of competing with others for the same pot of funds, a sense that can all too easily lead to game-playing, and that can also encourage enthusiastic politicians and bureaucrats to devise games, the playing of which will increase their influence over what universities do. The assessment of impact is a game like that, whether or not that was the intention.) There is something wrong if a university does not attract a reasonable amount of private funding, or does not attract people to its conferences in the way that others do, or does not find that its professors are occasionally lured away to prestigious institutions elsewhere, or does not produce enough widely-cited publications. (It would not matter that work can take years to get recognized and widely cited, because in any one year, publications from earlier years should come to maturity and start to get cited.) These measures are chosen at random, but the principle is not. Universities that did badly in international comparisons would lose research money, while those that did well would gain it. Each university would then use its money to fund the research that it chose. It would be helpful to apply the test to each university as a whole. Then each university could develop the departments that it saw as most worth developing. The same scheme could however be applied to faculties separately.
The second suggestion is to put the decision in the hands of the faculties in each discipline. Make a central decision on how much is to be spent on philosophy, how much on history, and so on, across the country. Then ask each faculty member in each university to divide the pot among all university departments in his or her own discipline, excluding his or her own university, first supplying each person with information on the sizes of the departments. Then average the results for each discipline, possibly adjusting in some pre-defined way for the effects of more votes coming from some universities than from others, and leave each faculty to decide what research to fund with the money that it has been allocated. The point is that there should be enough collective wisdom across the country to ensure that departments that did good work, and that picked worthwhile projects to fund, would be favoured. A certain amount of discussion between people before voting would lead to some lack of independence of decision-making, so we would not get the full advantage of the wisdom of crowds. And the process would be at least slightly corrupted by mutual back-scratching. But it should not be too bad.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bigsociety/
Today, I came across one of the best, and scariest, comments on impact, in a letter in the 28 April edition of the London Review of Books. It is by Richard Bowring, Professor of Japanese and Master of Selwyn College, Cambridge, the college where I had the privilege of studying in the 1970s. It is available here:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/letters
He points out that while everyone knows that the concern with impact is nonsense, people will care about their institutions enough to go along with it, and will put something down on the forms in order to secure some funds. The ultimate beneficiaries will be institutions in Europe and in North America, which will welcome the really talented people from our universities with open arms. To put one of Richard Bowring's points in game-theoretic terms, our universities are in a multi-player version of the prisoner's dilemma (except that communication between players is possible). All would be better off if all resisted, but the cost of resisting when others do not is so high that all will capitulate.
And yet, some sort of control is needed. We cannot just hand over taxpayers' money, without some check that it is not being wasted. Fatuous research does get conducted, and the taxpayer should fund as little of it as feasible. It is a matter of finding the right control.
The perfect control from the point of view of saving money might appear to be one that imposed external monitoring on every research proposal. Indeed, one reason to be concerned about impact is that it would encourage precisely that approach. It is not the only supposed measurable that could do so, nor would it have to be used in that fashion. But impact has the special characteristic that it is not a quality that is naturally defined within the context of an academic discipline, unlike, for example, profundity or being wide-ranging. So the external authorities who have imposed the criterion are the natural people to say what it means, and to decide which pieces of research are likely to have it.
In fact, external monitoring of every research proposal would be a bad idea, even if the external authority was often within the institution, as when a general board monitors the proposals that a faculty board approves. Universal surveillance cramps creativity and twists research proposals. But if we are not to have universal surveillance, we must accept that some fatuous research will get funded. That is undesirable in itself, but it is a reasonable price to pay. A certain amount of money may need to be wasted, as a side-effect of properly funding worthwhile research. But we want to make sure that not much is wasted. What sort of control might do? Here are two suggestions.
The first suggestion is to monitor the achievements of our universities against those in other countries. (One reason to make comparisons with foreign universities, rather than with other domestic universities, is that it takes away a sense of competing with others for the same pot of funds, a sense that can all too easily lead to game-playing, and that can also encourage enthusiastic politicians and bureaucrats to devise games, the playing of which will increase their influence over what universities do. The assessment of impact is a game like that, whether or not that was the intention.) There is something wrong if a university does not attract a reasonable amount of private funding, or does not attract people to its conferences in the way that others do, or does not find that its professors are occasionally lured away to prestigious institutions elsewhere, or does not produce enough widely-cited publications. (It would not matter that work can take years to get recognized and widely cited, because in any one year, publications from earlier years should come to maturity and start to get cited.) These measures are chosen at random, but the principle is not. Universities that did badly in international comparisons would lose research money, while those that did well would gain it. Each university would then use its money to fund the research that it chose. It would be helpful to apply the test to each university as a whole. Then each university could develop the departments that it saw as most worth developing. The same scheme could however be applied to faculties separately.
The second suggestion is to put the decision in the hands of the faculties in each discipline. Make a central decision on how much is to be spent on philosophy, how much on history, and so on, across the country. Then ask each faculty member in each university to divide the pot among all university departments in his or her own discipline, excluding his or her own university, first supplying each person with information on the sizes of the departments. Then average the results for each discipline, possibly adjusting in some pre-defined way for the effects of more votes coming from some universities than from others, and leave each faculty to decide what research to fund with the money that it has been allocated. The point is that there should be enough collective wisdom across the country to ensure that departments that did good work, and that picked worthwhile projects to fund, would be favoured. A certain amount of discussion between people before voting would lead to some lack of independence of decision-making, so we would not get the full advantage of the wisdom of crowds. And the process would be at least slightly corrupted by mutual back-scratching. But it should not be too bad.
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Mobility and opportunity
The Cabinet Office has just published Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers: A Strategy for Social Mobility. It is available here:
http://download.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/social-mobility/opening-doors-breaking-barriers.pdf
There are a lot of good practical ideas in this document. But what is the aim, and what are the implications of having that aim?
One possible aim would be to create a meritocracy, albeit in economic life in general, and not as the political system that the suffix -cracy would suggest. But the document suggests that it is not the outcome, but the fairness of the game, that matters to the Government. That is, the aim seems to be equality of opportunity. In that case, the inequalities that are inequalities of natural endowment, rather than of opportunity, and that should influence the outcome even in a fair game, need to be identified. Genetically determined intelligence? Genetically determined physical abilities or robustness of general health? The opportunities for political incorrectness are legion.
I do not think that the term "social mobility" should have been used. We must remind ourselves of the difference between two things. One is everybody's circumstances improving, which is perfectly possible. The other is everybody moving up in society relative to others. Unfortunately, the term "social mobility" suggests the latter. It sounds great, but elementary mathematics shows that it is impossible. If "social mobility" is to be a sensible objective, it cannot mean getting people to move up the order, because the steps up by some and the steps down by others will, in aggregate (sum of (people x size of move) ), cancel each other out.
It must therefore mean ensuring that movement up and down is not impeded by factors that should not impede it. But if that is what is meant, the term "equality of opportunity" should have been used. The use of that term would have several advantages. It would accommodate both the possibility of everybody's improving their circumstances at the same time, and the possibility of individuals moving up on merit. It would avoid suggesting that we must in fact have more movement up and down the order (more movement might or might not be the result of introducing equality of opportunity). It would encourage us to draw on the very considerable philosophical literature on equality of opportunity. And it would not tempt us to hope for the mathematically impossible.
http://download.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/social-mobility/opening-doors-breaking-barriers.pdf
There are a lot of good practical ideas in this document. But what is the aim, and what are the implications of having that aim?
One possible aim would be to create a meritocracy, albeit in economic life in general, and not as the political system that the suffix -cracy would suggest. But the document suggests that it is not the outcome, but the fairness of the game, that matters to the Government. That is, the aim seems to be equality of opportunity. In that case, the inequalities that are inequalities of natural endowment, rather than of opportunity, and that should influence the outcome even in a fair game, need to be identified. Genetically determined intelligence? Genetically determined physical abilities or robustness of general health? The opportunities for political incorrectness are legion.
I do not think that the term "social mobility" should have been used. We must remind ourselves of the difference between two things. One is everybody's circumstances improving, which is perfectly possible. The other is everybody moving up in society relative to others. Unfortunately, the term "social mobility" suggests the latter. It sounds great, but elementary mathematics shows that it is impossible. If "social mobility" is to be a sensible objective, it cannot mean getting people to move up the order, because the steps up by some and the steps down by others will, in aggregate (sum of (people x size of move) ), cancel each other out.
It must therefore mean ensuring that movement up and down is not impeded by factors that should not impede it. But if that is what is meant, the term "equality of opportunity" should have been used. The use of that term would have several advantages. It would accommodate both the possibility of everybody's improving their circumstances at the same time, and the possibility of individuals moving up on merit. It would avoid suggesting that we must in fact have more movement up and down the order (more movement might or might not be the result of introducing equality of opportunity). It would encourage us to draw on the very considerable philosophical literature on equality of opportunity. And it would not tempt us to hope for the mathematically impossible.
Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar
I have just tried to go to www.davidoff.com, not to buy cigars (I do not smoke), but because I came across the brand in another context and was idly curious.
I was redirected to http://www.davidoff.com/davidoff/countryfilter.cfm, and was shown the message:
"We are sorry due to national legal restrictions we can not grant you access to our Website www.davidoff.com. Thank you for your understanding."
This appears to reflect the prohibition on tobacco advertising in the UK. Not only are we not allowed to see adverts, across which we might stumble by accident. We are not allowed to go in search of information on a product that we already know is made of tobacco.
I had feared that in due course, the great firewall of the UK would be built to keep out messages that were politically subversive, or pornography at which uptight politicians took offence. But no, the first target is innocent information on a perfectly legal product. (It is not quite a firewall. The page appears to be one of Davidoff's own, and is presumably displayed if one has a UK IP address. But the effect is the same.)
Davidoff did not think of this themselves. They, or tobacco companies in general, must have been asked to do it, by the UK government. Some politicians, presumably in the last government, or some senior civil servants, had such a casual disregard for freedom of information that they thought it worth interfering with that freedom for a plainly inadequate reason.
We should be worried at the existence of such an attitude, anywhere in government. We should also be told the names of the guilty politicians or civil servants. Meanwhile, I used a proxy server to get to the forbidden, and not in the least bit dangerous, site.
I was redirected to http://www.davidoff.com/davidoff/countryfilter.cfm, and was shown the message:
"We are sorry due to national legal restrictions we can not grant you access to our Website www.davidoff.com. Thank you for your understanding."
This appears to reflect the prohibition on tobacco advertising in the UK. Not only are we not allowed to see adverts, across which we might stumble by accident. We are not allowed to go in search of information on a product that we already know is made of tobacco.
I had feared that in due course, the great firewall of the UK would be built to keep out messages that were politically subversive, or pornography at which uptight politicians took offence. But no, the first target is innocent information on a perfectly legal product. (It is not quite a firewall. The page appears to be one of Davidoff's own, and is presumably displayed if one has a UK IP address. But the effect is the same.)
Davidoff did not think of this themselves. They, or tobacco companies in general, must have been asked to do it, by the UK government. Some politicians, presumably in the last government, or some senior civil servants, had such a casual disregard for freedom of information that they thought it worth interfering with that freedom for a plainly inadequate reason.
We should be worried at the existence of such an attitude, anywhere in government. We should also be told the names of the guilty politicians or civil servants. Meanwhile, I used a proxy server to get to the forbidden, and not in the least bit dangerous, site.
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
The ONS and subjective well-being
The Office of National Statistics is taking an interest in subjective measures of well-being. A new paper has just appeared, "Spotlight on: Subjective well-being", edited by Stephen Hicks. There is a link to it at the top of this page.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/article.asp?ID=2646
My immediate reactions to this ONS exercise include the following.
1. We need to sort out whether we mean happiness as flourishing or happiness as an internal sense that may be joy, contentment or something else in that general area. If the surveyors ask people about their levels of happiness, I expect that most people will take an internal sense to be meant. But if public policy is to be steered by the results of this kind of work, should we mean flourishing? And if we should, is that something subjective, to be measured by asking people about their own lives, or something to be measured by other means? Eudaimonia is discussed on page 13 (the fifteenth page of the pdf) and on page 16, and it is treated as something to be measured subjectively.
2. If we do mean flourishing, it would be interesting to see whether we could define it in more elevated terms than the meeting of needs one finds in the bottom three or four layers of Maslow's hierarchy, while still having a robust definition, and whether we could do so in a way that would overcome the paternalism objection in the report (top of page 3). The question (the fourth question at the top of page 15) avoids paternalism by asking for an opinion about the value of whatever content the subject's life happens to have. Alternative questions about a sense of autonomy avoid paternalism by asking about the actual form of a life (not one's evaluation of it), rather than considering the life's content. These are different approaches, and we should think hard about which would be the better approach.
3. Should this sort of thing steer public policy, either by leading the state to choose measures that have the main goal of increasing well-being, or by using the results of work in this area as one factor to consider when choosing between policies? My own inclination is to allow the latter but not the former. The former would only encourage an already hyper-active state, and would also be beyond what I regard as the legitimate competence of government. There was a Cabinet Office paper in 2002, "Life satisfaction: the state of knowledge and implications for government" by Nick Donovan, David Halpern and Richard Sargeant. Official nervousness about government involvement in this field was revealed by the fact that every page bore the warning "This is not a statement of government policy". (The paper is now available here.)
4. We must both be sensitive to cultural differences when comparing answers to questions about happiness from different countries, and not get excited about small differences, such as those between Britain, Australia and Sweden (top of the page numbered 7). Such differences in sample results may signify nothing of any importance, and certainly do not signify anything that is large enough for governments to even think about action on the strength of the differences. The levers of government policy are too crude to make small adjustments without having large side-effects.
5. It is disappointing that philosophers do not feature much in the bibliography to the ONS report. This sort of work is interesting, but if the ONS could get thinkers from a range of disciplines (philosophy, anthropology, psychology, etc) actively involved, on the inside and not just as external commentators, the result could be much richer.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/article.asp?ID=2646
My immediate reactions to this ONS exercise include the following.
1. We need to sort out whether we mean happiness as flourishing or happiness as an internal sense that may be joy, contentment or something else in that general area. If the surveyors ask people about their levels of happiness, I expect that most people will take an internal sense to be meant. But if public policy is to be steered by the results of this kind of work, should we mean flourishing? And if we should, is that something subjective, to be measured by asking people about their own lives, or something to be measured by other means? Eudaimonia is discussed on page 13 (the fifteenth page of the pdf) and on page 16, and it is treated as something to be measured subjectively.
2. If we do mean flourishing, it would be interesting to see whether we could define it in more elevated terms than the meeting of needs one finds in the bottom three or four layers of Maslow's hierarchy, while still having a robust definition, and whether we could do so in a way that would overcome the paternalism objection in the report (top of page 3). The question (the fourth question at the top of page 15) avoids paternalism by asking for an opinion about the value of whatever content the subject's life happens to have. Alternative questions about a sense of autonomy avoid paternalism by asking about the actual form of a life (not one's evaluation of it), rather than considering the life's content. These are different approaches, and we should think hard about which would be the better approach.
3. Should this sort of thing steer public policy, either by leading the state to choose measures that have the main goal of increasing well-being, or by using the results of work in this area as one factor to consider when choosing between policies? My own inclination is to allow the latter but not the former. The former would only encourage an already hyper-active state, and would also be beyond what I regard as the legitimate competence of government. There was a Cabinet Office paper in 2002, "Life satisfaction: the state of knowledge and implications for government" by Nick Donovan, David Halpern and Richard Sargeant. Official nervousness about government involvement in this field was revealed by the fact that every page bore the warning "This is not a statement of government policy". (The paper is now available here.)
4. We must both be sensitive to cultural differences when comparing answers to questions about happiness from different countries, and not get excited about small differences, such as those between Britain, Australia and Sweden (top of the page numbered 7). Such differences in sample results may signify nothing of any importance, and certainly do not signify anything that is large enough for governments to even think about action on the strength of the differences. The levers of government policy are too crude to make small adjustments without having large side-effects.
5. It is disappointing that philosophers do not feature much in the bibliography to the ONS report. This sort of work is interesting, but if the ONS could get thinkers from a range of disciplines (philosophy, anthropology, psychology, etc) actively involved, on the inside and not just as external commentators, the result could be much richer.
Friday, 25 February 2011
Philosophy, money and incommensurability
I have just been to an excellent talk by Angie Hobbs (University of Warwick) on the ethics of money. The talk made an eloquent case for the involvement of all kinds of thinkers, including philosophers, historians, psychologists and anthropologists, in debates on the financial system. I think that is right. Moreover, the hard-pressed philosophy lecturers who need to build up their CVs with technical papers should not be seduced into thinking that this would be second-rate philosophy, because not sufficiently technical. It is what Plato and Aristotle did, and it needs re-doing in modern circumstances. Correspondingly, it needs to be given sufficient credit by those who appraise university departments and hand out the money.
One of Angie's central points was that if we are going to get money, banking and the like right, we have to be clear about what we want on a broader scale: what kind of life, what kind of society, and so on. In particular, we can miss a lot if we think that everything is even potentially reducible to monetary terms. On the other hand, there is a strong temptation to try to reduce everything to a common scale of value, because it makes decision-making easier.
She suggested that some important things were not quantifiable. I am not sure that we need to go that far, in order to accommodate the evident phenomenon that some decisions as to what to do are not mechanically computable. It could be that there are quantitative scales, or at worst orderings, for many goods, including cultural goods such as beauty and mental challenge. For example, if there is any sense to the notion of one kind of music being objectively better than another, then Mozart is better than the Beatles, even if one happens to prefer the Beatles. But the problem is that there are many scales, orthogonal to one another or otherwise incommensurable. So we can rate options along single scales. We can perhaps place options on indifference hyper-surfaces that cover a limited selection of scales, then use a production possibility hyper-plane to find a local optimum for the limited selection of scales. But we might still lack the means to find global optima, or even local optima across reasonably wide localities (a locality being defined as a set of scales).
This thought does not of course exclude the possibility that some goods are indeed absolutely non-quantifiable. There can be grounds for thinking that, apart from the fact that some decisions are not mechanically computable. But the optimist in me does not want to rule out quantification, or at worst ordering, in advance.
One thing of which I am convinced is that if something can be measured on a single scale, it cannot be the good for humanity. The utilitarianism of the modern proponents of the science of happiness is refuted as soon as they claim that human happiness is measurable on a one-dimensional scale. It is not just that we happen to be too complicated for one dimension. One-dimensional value would be unworthy of us. We need the space for irresoluble conflict, in order to be human.
One of Angie's central points was that if we are going to get money, banking and the like right, we have to be clear about what we want on a broader scale: what kind of life, what kind of society, and so on. In particular, we can miss a lot if we think that everything is even potentially reducible to monetary terms. On the other hand, there is a strong temptation to try to reduce everything to a common scale of value, because it makes decision-making easier.
She suggested that some important things were not quantifiable. I am not sure that we need to go that far, in order to accommodate the evident phenomenon that some decisions as to what to do are not mechanically computable. It could be that there are quantitative scales, or at worst orderings, for many goods, including cultural goods such as beauty and mental challenge. For example, if there is any sense to the notion of one kind of music being objectively better than another, then Mozart is better than the Beatles, even if one happens to prefer the Beatles. But the problem is that there are many scales, orthogonal to one another or otherwise incommensurable. So we can rate options along single scales. We can perhaps place options on indifference hyper-surfaces that cover a limited selection of scales, then use a production possibility hyper-plane to find a local optimum for the limited selection of scales. But we might still lack the means to find global optima, or even local optima across reasonably wide localities (a locality being defined as a set of scales).
This thought does not of course exclude the possibility that some goods are indeed absolutely non-quantifiable. There can be grounds for thinking that, apart from the fact that some decisions are not mechanically computable. But the optimist in me does not want to rule out quantification, or at worst ordering, in advance.
One thing of which I am convinced is that if something can be measured on a single scale, it cannot be the good for humanity. The utilitarianism of the modern proponents of the science of happiness is refuted as soon as they claim that human happiness is measurable on a one-dimensional scale. It is not just that we happen to be too complicated for one dimension. One-dimensional value would be unworthy of us. We need the space for irresoluble conflict, in order to be human.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Deleuze and clarity
I have just had an interesting discussion with people who work on, or in the tradition of, Deleuze. I maintained that Deleuze, and others of that ilk, were wilfully obscure, making it impossible to tell whether there was anything of worth in their works. I also maintained that Sokal and Bricmont did the intellectual community a very great service by writing Intellectual Impostures (American title, Fashionable Nonsense). They exposed the large amount of nonsense, and the gross abuse of science, that are to be found in the work of their targets. Others in the discussion naturally disagreed with me, both on Deleuze and on Sokal and Bricmont.
Even if I am right, that would not exclude the possibility of worthwhile work in response to Deleuze and his ilk. Those who engage with Deleuze may well have worthwhile thoughts of their own, which can then be published and which may deepen our understanding in a variety of fields. Interaction with others often has that effect. Work on Deleuze and his ilk may also contribute to our understanding of intellectual history.
The discussion raised the question of standards of clarity and obscurity. I maintain that some works, such as those of Kant, those of McDowell, and texts in physics, are legitimately challenging by virtue of their subject matter. But others are obscure without good cause. Works by Hegel, Deleuze, Lacan and Derrida are like that.
Such judgements should, however, be supported by some robust and generally acceptable criteria of clarity - although it would be too much to expect that even those who agreed on the criteria, would reach the same conclusion on every difficult book that they considered. I propose two criteria. First, does each sentence make sense? (We cannot expect to get the full sense, or even the correct sense, of a sentence without paying attention to its context; but each sentence should still mean something in isolation.) Second, can I state in my own words what the author has said, listing some specific and worthwhile propositions, and be confident that I have not just invented something that I think he should have said?
The second criterion suggests something that Deleuze scholars might like to do. If they conclude that Deleuze himself said certain things and that those things were worthwhile, they should reflect on whether they have really found those things clearly in the text, or whether they have had to read their own thoughts into the text in order to extract some definite meaning. In particular, could they just have easily have extracted some other, contradictory, meaning? And could they tell when two pieces of writing in the Deleuzian style did contradict each other?
Even if I am right, that would not exclude the possibility of worthwhile work in response to Deleuze and his ilk. Those who engage with Deleuze may well have worthwhile thoughts of their own, which can then be published and which may deepen our understanding in a variety of fields. Interaction with others often has that effect. Work on Deleuze and his ilk may also contribute to our understanding of intellectual history.
The discussion raised the question of standards of clarity and obscurity. I maintain that some works, such as those of Kant, those of McDowell, and texts in physics, are legitimately challenging by virtue of their subject matter. But others are obscure without good cause. Works by Hegel, Deleuze, Lacan and Derrida are like that.
Such judgements should, however, be supported by some robust and generally acceptable criteria of clarity - although it would be too much to expect that even those who agreed on the criteria, would reach the same conclusion on every difficult book that they considered. I propose two criteria. First, does each sentence make sense? (We cannot expect to get the full sense, or even the correct sense, of a sentence without paying attention to its context; but each sentence should still mean something in isolation.) Second, can I state in my own words what the author has said, listing some specific and worthwhile propositions, and be confident that I have not just invented something that I think he should have said?
The second criterion suggests something that Deleuze scholars might like to do. If they conclude that Deleuze himself said certain things and that those things were worthwhile, they should reflect on whether they have really found those things clearly in the text, or whether they have had to read their own thoughts into the text in order to extract some definite meaning. In particular, could they just have easily have extracted some other, contradictory, meaning? And could they tell when two pieces of writing in the Deleuzian style did contradict each other?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)