…and equally unintelligibly (so much so that it's a bit amusing). Translations welcome! (Earlier coverage.)
And the second paragraph?
27 responses to “Author of controversial Synthese papers responds at length…”
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Frankly, and irrespective of the original controversy, I'm glad that academia still has some room for an oddball like professor Beziau (emphasis on 'still' and 'some'). In an unholy alliance with administrators and HR bureaucrats, the PC censors are deforming minorities' radical claims for recognition to fit the mould of a form of identity politics that's utterly unthreatening to the ruling class, and even reinforces their position by allowing them to don the mantle of social justice without sacrificing their interests. If they get their way academia will become yet another corporate workplace where there's lots of superficial 'diversity' but everyone is an obedient drone–sorry, 'professional'–with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. That world is not conducive to intellectual innovation. And I find it aesthetically horrid. I exaggerate, but someone will get the gist.
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It's perfectly impenetrable to me, but the Genesis and Jah Wobble tracks are nice touches, despite the fact that the imagery accompanying the former is from periods of the band's productions much later than the early recording.
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If the whole thing isn't a put-on, it might as well be. It is a de facto put-on.
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I wholly agree with Enzo Rossi.
Philosophy's really getting to the stage where it's little fun anymore. Think back to the zany figures we used to encounter on a regular basis. They were such a big attraction to the discipline. And people were just having so much more fun before all this professionalization seeped into it.
Whatever increases the professionalization of philosophy is a pro tanto evil. Sure, let's look at ways to make philosophy inviting to anyone *who actually might enjoy doing actual philosophy*, including the oddballs who make it what it is and always has been. But let's not forget that there has to be a point to all this. The PC police seem to forget that and to think of identity politics and superficial diversity as ends in themselves.
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It's discouraging to see publishing academics have little freakouts like this. It's all so weird and out of proportion. He describes edits to his Wikipedia page as 'crucifixion' and says, sounding eerily like McGinn, that "Sexy is sexist, in a syntactic way, as a grammatical tautology, and also semantically, in the newtork of meanings." Reading this makes me want to go for a walk.
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This has to be a put on. I mean, seriously, "to reply to criticisms I will go from the general to the particular following the winning strategy of my uncle, the glorious General Bourbaki"? That's just Borat.
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….despite the fact that the imagery accompanying the former is from periods of the band's productions much later than the early recording.
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I think this is exactly right. I actually find all the handwringing over this odball's stray locutions in Synthese to be pretty hyped up. It's almost like there's a brigade of people out there, scouring every bit of information, just waiting on the next syllable they can jump on.
One wonders when we will tire of this sort of constant posturing and signalling. I wish I could say "soon," but it doesn't seem so.
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Translating this stuff is actually quite fun. Here's a stab at "right hand column" (the left has me beaten, I'll be honest).
"Oh you fools. You have accused me of sexism for my use of the sexy-lady-gets-old-and-fades idea. But the whole point is that I was criticizing other people's use of sexy as a term of philosophical value. Because sexy only values women in a certain, fade-able kind of way, and thus applying it to a program in philosophy counts as an implicit acknowledgment that that program lacks thoroughgoing universal value. My whole point was that to value a woman only in sexy-terms neglects the fact that she might have other more robust and permanent value, and that this is a particular tragedy when women themselves internalize it. It's the same for philosophy: the moment a program starts valuing itself as sexy, it's an implicit acknowledgment that it lacks other permanent merits. So in fact I, JYB!, am not only the best philosopher, but also the true feminist."
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I find it astonishing that so many people seem to think the boogeyman of "the PC police" is a bigger threat to making room for oddballs in philosophy than the intense pressure to publish early and often, or the insane competitiveness for jobs that drives that and other forms of accelerated professionalization.
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Hi, Derek Bowman. I agree with you that the insane competitiveness for jobs is the main engine driving professionalism. The PC police are just playing a sort of auxiliary role. The horrible job market provides us with an environment just perfect for bashing each other over the head and trying to knock each other out of the competition, have undesirables chucked out of their jobs or dispelled from grad programs, etc. What we need is a model for the violent elimination battle. Elitism by pedigree can only take us so far, since it violates our generally leftist principles and also since the PhD/job ratio is now so high that many of the pedigreed now are losing their battles. Political Correctness policing suggests itself as a perfect alternative. As in pretty well every other 'Be Nice and stop bullying!' movement, PC policing just offers us another way to bully people under cover of opposing bullying. It's just that we have a different group of people to be mean to now, and for a slightly different surface reason.
But your claim that the PC police is just a bogeyman threat against oddballs in the profession is pretty crazy. Consider this choice specimen from European Professor (Daily Nous):
"…but the oddballs are all white men. If you’re a woman you’d be very careful of how you dress, what you publish, and even your tone of voice – in your absence, people will speculate, for instance, about women who wear pant suits that they must be lesbians or about women who dress with short skirts that they must have gotten their professor position by going to bed with men in positions of power. But as a white man, it’s OK to be non-conventional, e.g., making jokes about one’s sexual exploits in front of students."
There you have it Derek: a good example of a PC policer trying to make it hard for people to defend oddballs by (implausibly) associating being an oddball with being a powerful white male.
And the whole thing is really such bullshit. What sample exactly, do people like European Professor have to go by? You hear this thing all the time. It goes as follows. A bunch of women and men who are constantly trying to establish and reestablish their feminist credentials are discussing something interesting or fun still left in the profession, and everyone's pretty happy, and then someone makes the insightful and unsubstantiated comment, "Yes, well that's all very easy for men, but if a woman were to try that, her career would be over." And nobody dares to question it. Certainly, we think, the speaker knows far more than the rest of us do about what women can and cannot do in the profession. Nobody even considers that there's no causal correlation here, no evidence, no attempt even to find out what was going on in the single case under discussion. Was the woman really talked about behind her back? If she was, how can anyone be confident that it's because she wasn't an oddball? Has someone done a study comparing the rates of social criticism of female oddball professors and female non-oddball professors? Where? How was it done?
And then the women who hear these things become tense and terrified from it. On the one hand, they feel that they had better pay attention to this advice if they want to survive. Never mind obvious counterexamples (Elizabeth Anscombe? Christine Korsgaard? Ruth Barcan Marcus?): they just latch on to the idea that somehow, men can go around saying and doing whatever they want to, but women have to dress this way and be entirely conventional in order to have a chance. It's complete bullshit, as far as I can see. If anything, men are the ones who tell me they have to walk on eggshells not to be cast out in the current environment, while women seem to feel a great deal more latitude in the views they can express. But the jealous illusion that their male counterparts are somehow entirely at east while women can't afford it, though supported by no plausible evidence, gets its purchase in many people's minds just be dint of being repeated unchallenged, and the myth causes just as much harm as the reality would have.
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I entirely agree with anon grad student's general feeling and would add that I feel the same about thread's like this, which is why I can barely be bothered to write this comment, maybe I even know I shouldn't, but, to nitpick: he doesn't describe his treatment on wiki as crucifixion, a word misleadingly put in inverted commas; he says he is being crucified on wiki. I take the latter to be a fairly run of the mill phrase, without the same messiah complex connotations, or even any out of proportion connotations at all, really, given how run of the mill the phrase is. Almost as much as episodes like the one at hand, and just as much as threads like this where people show incredible blindness and focus on the wrong issues entirely, it's all the tiny and probably entirely unintentional little misrepresentations like this, which conglomerate into the exponential spreading of misinformation, in 'discussuoons' like this, that make me want to go for walks.
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Carol Hay stated in a NYT piece, "Girlfriend, Mother, Professor?", a week or so ago (25 Jan, 2016), that younger women are regarded as sexy and an older woman as not so sexy. We can compare Hay's claim with Beziau's:
Hay: "We move with depressing predictability from the role of girlfriend to the role of mother".
Beziau: "… like a sexy young woman that 1 day will be a not so attractive old lady".
For the second, Beziau was accused of a "sexist rant". Why aren't Hay's claims called a "sexist rant"? Isn't Beziau's sin the same as Hay's sin? Why is Hay promoted, and Beziau vilified?
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Someone disagreeing with you on the internet does not constitute a police force. Noticing that race and gender affect who can get away with being an "oddball" does not constitute political correctness.
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Derek Bowman: Who said anything about what's a bigger threat than what? I certainly didn't. I simply find it hilarious — and pitiful — how worked up a bunch of grown up professionals get over the fact that the weird rantings of some oddball slipped through Synthese's editorial net.
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I am with you 100%. Take a look at comments on YouTube posts of entire albums from the Gabriel period. (I know. I need to get a life.) Among them you'll find fans who have just discovered the early iterations of the band, usually to their amazement. OTOH, Peter Gabriel is kicking off a tour…with Sting. Selling England, and selling out, by the pound.
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"And the whole thing is really such bullshit. What sample exactly, do people like [myself] have to go by? You hear this thing all the time. It goes as follows … Has someone done a study …of [what I rant about]? … Where? How was it done?"
Indeed, what rigorous, peer reviewed articles are your many and varied claims based on in that post, Scott? (Objections to peer review related to the Synthese piece, notwithstanding.)
I never cease to be amazed and amused by how often I see* people in philosophy (which Scott may or may not be), when they argue in earnest outside of journals and seminars, for things where the stakes are high, i.e. irritate/affect them personally, turn into obtuse statisticians. Refusing to believe anything without necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts essential to the position of someone you disagree with is so 20th century. Better to refuse to believe anything without systematic reviews and meta analyses of the problem under discussion, if you think your opponent can't provide them.
Of course, if we refuse to consider a potential problem in the absence of lots of good statistical evidence, then there'll never be any good statistical evidence.
What was it Aristotle said about the mark of a trained mind?
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Added to post 16:
*Sample: what I have seen. Need not be representative so, naturally, it's false.
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Derek Bowman, you're attacking a straw man. Nobody said that someone disagreeing with you on the internet constitutes a police force. What we're concerned about is professors and grad students who are on or have influence upon search committees inserting these PC conversations into the discussion so that highly qualified candidates who would otherwise likely have been hired suddenly don't because they at some point made a comment that a member of the right group found offensive for reasons that aren't to be examined, and then everyone who realizes that this is happening goes into constant self-censorship mode so as not to get drummed out of the profession. We're concerned about people like European Professor putting spurious associations in people's minds like oddball professor = privileged white male who takes his own privilege for granted = bad person. We're also very concerned about the fact that PCers who begin by disagreeing with people on the internet and move on toward possibly successful attempts to expel them from their PhD programs, or toward attempting to destroy their professional reputations and remove them from their own projects (as was famously attempted with Brian Leiter), get away with these anti-intellectual antics with enhanced rather than diminished social esteem in the profession. That sort of thing puts everyone whose opinions might in some way run afoul of the PCers into stealth mode. And that's not even to mention the attempts, sometimes successful, to terminate the careers members of the profession who testify on the wrong side of an accusation of sexual harassment against a graduate student.
If you sincerely think all those things are reducible to "someone disagreeing with you on the internet", you seem not to be very up to date with what's been going on these past few years. Or if you realize that those things have happened but don't think it would have a chilling effect on legitimate conversation and fun, I'd like to know why you think they'd have no effect.
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As much as I'd love to take a detour and pursue the old-versus-new Genesis thread, I'll instead respond to a couple comments here about Beziau, his article, and his weird reply. Daniel A. Kaufman @15's amusement at the Synthese controversy reminds me of the Sokal hoax, which I suspect everybody here recalls. In that case a bunch of grown up professionals got worked up over the fact that weird, oddball rantings slipped through a journal's editorial net, but rather than level a charge exclusively against the journal, Social Text, many Sokal advocates took the success of the hoax as a condemnation of an entire sub-industry of "postmodern" academics. That was hilarious and pitiful, not because it was mistaken–the hoax might or might not have exposed the vacuity within a genre of post-Derridean "human sciences"–but because it provoked mudslinging and lazy recourse to guilt by association, not least from Sokal himself, a real scientist. Here, at least the journal is more or less the precise target.
Maybe the rhetorical questions of Onionymous @13 don't merit a response, but I'll bite. Without reading the Hay piece in full, I nevertheless don't see how one can ignore the cavernous distance between the two quotes. Hay describes an evolution in women's roles and relationships. Beziau uses trite observations (presumably, but not necessarily, by men) of the sexual attractiveness of women as a figure for the ephemeral and superficial characteristics of fashion. The latter is a mundane instance of rude sexism. He could have used any number of similes unrelated to gender to make his point. The quote from Hay is potentially verifiable, as it relates to how (some) women's lives unfold, for better or worse. Obviously, Hay believes it is for the worse, predictable and depressing. I suspect she laments this circumstance largely because it is due to the sexist expectations of people like Beziau. But again, I haven't read the article.
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Michael B., I'm not demanding peer reviewed articles supporting the contention. But people like European Professor speak as though it were just a well-known fact that (in this case) women cannot afford to be oddballs without courting career disaster, while men can be oddballs as much as they like. I'm not saying this is definitely false, but merely that none of us have any evidence of it. The one story that's told in the passage I quoted doesn't even do much work as a single anecdote. We're told a subjective story about a woman who was, in the speaker's mind, a bit of an oddball, and who was talked about badly behind her back. Would she have been talked about in this way had she chosen not to be an oddball? I see no basis from European Philosopher's story, or anywhere else, for thinking this. If your response to my criticism is to say that I equally can't prove that that wasn't what happened to this unknown female professor, then I'm glad to concede that point. Then we're left with no evidence either way. I'm happy with that, and I think that if female professors knew this, they would be far more empowered to be themselves without worrying about unsubstantiated risks they're being told they face for being oddballs. And that would be a good thing.
But as I say, I'm not even saying that only peer reviewed articles are adequate. I'm fully prepared to consider the strength of the very best evidence for the trend that you can muster. If it rises even to the level of moral certainty, I agree that it's worth discussing it further. If it doesn't, then I maintain my call of bullshit.
So please, do your best, Michael B. Present the best line of evidence there is for the assertion that female oddball professors are much less likely to succeed in the profession than female non-oddball professors. I'm very interested to see what you've got. My guess is nothing at all. I hope you surprise me, just for the sake of an interesting conversation.
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I'm surprised that people don't seem to view this affair in light of the analytic/continental divide. JYB reacts a bit like Derrida did when attacked by Searle. Analytic philosopher's expect a scientifically responsible debate. The Continentals don't separate arguments from aesthetics and jokes, associate wildly and at all times try to transcend given rules for rational debate. While mostly I find this quite tiresome, it should be admitted that the world would be poorer without them. After all, we are grateful for the contributions of Deleuze, Derrida and Laruelle, even if they don't fit our sanitized sane intellectual norms. JYB is probably less brilliant than these figures, but he acts in a similar spirit. What may complicate things is that his area of interest is logic, which traditionally has belonged to the Analytic tradition.
On a different note, a quick glance at conferences organized by JYB shows a very much more diverse picture than what meets the eye in the Anglo-American philosophical landscape. Conferences in Lebanon, Turkey, Brazil, with participants from lots of places like India, Arab countries, South America, Iran. Plenty of women. But not that many Americans. It seems so much more vibrant than your standard conference. So maybe he has some not so progressive views on gender roles (or then again maybe he hasn't); his actions nonetheless seem rather more progressive than the average analytic philospher's.BL COMMENT: JYB is a logician, not a postmodernist!
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If you are a legitimate competent philosopher who doesn't have a position, and some oddball does occupy a position, uses it to produce incoherent garbage that takes up valuable space in a prestigious journal that could have been used for real philosophy papers, and in the process casts doubts on the quality of the journal you have worked hard to publish your papers in, you may have a different appreciation of the situation.
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Boaz Miller wrote:
If you are a legitimate competent philosopher who doesn't have a position, and some oddball does occupy a position, uses it to produce incoherent garbage that takes up valuable space in a prestigious journal that could have been used for real philosophy papers, and in the process casts doubts on the quality of the journal you have worked hard to publish your papers in, you may have a different appreciation of the situation.
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Although I doubt you mean your question seriously, here is a short and plain answer:
If people who are subjected to some negative views or practises X (insert: sexism, racism, etc.) describe the views or practices in order to complain about them, it does not make them practitioners.
If someone endorses the practise, it makes him a practioner.
The latter is bad — the former not.
Final point: one and the same string of words can be used, depending on the context of utterance, to perform actions of very different types — ranging, e.g., from endorsement to complaint.
But somehow I guess you knew all that …
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FWIW, I'm pretty sure both you and Enzo also have positions. I suppose reading comprehension a first world problem too.
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Just to be clear, Boaz Miller: when I was talking about the 'oddballs' I think we should keep making room for in the profession, I didn't mean bad philosophers who routinely publish drivel. I just meant unconventional people who aren't trying desperately to fit in and be 'professional'.
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