Why are philosophers and sociologists prone to such bullsh*t writing?

The BBQ Pit
1

If Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking can give clear, layman-friendly interpretations of string theory, quantum mechanics and the most profound theories of cosmology, why haven’t philosophers and sociologists of past and present done similarly? When I read Hobbes, Hume, Spinoza, Kant–and especially the contemporary theorists–I can’t help but think they deliberately obfuscated when simpler prose would have been more powerful.

I understand these great minds were/are attempting to explain highly complex phenomena. And, yes, discursive, rambling, parenthetically circuitous writing was par for course way back when. But while many of these writings are clearly brilliant, I’ve got to believe this complex expression is unnecessary and that the field is ripe for a Sagan-like popularizer who can cut through the BS and provide clear, compelling explanations. (Don’t get me started on the musings emanating from academia today.)

I’ve stolen the following passage (Spinoza) from another thread. Check it out:

“That is, in the natural world (god’s body), the attribute of extension, modified by varying degrees of motion and rest, produces the face of the universe, which includes all of the particular physical events which are the modes of extension. (This is almost exactly like Descartes’s account of the material world.) Similarly, in the mental realm (god’s idea), the attribute of thought—modified by infinite intellect—produces the truth, which includes all of the particular mental events which are the modes of thought. Since they arise from distinct attributes, each of these realms is causally independent of the other and wholly self-contained: the natural world and the mental realm are separate closed systems.”

What the hell are “modes of extension”? What is meant by “particular mental events which are the modes of thought”?

Tying together two parenthetical expressions, we get the following from Spinoza: “…the attribute of extension … produces the face of the universe, which includes all of the particular physical events which are the modes of extension.”

WTF? The emperor has no clothes.

2

From THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY:

PHILOSOPHY, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

3

Well, Hobbes, Hume, Spinoza, and Kant weren’t writing for a general audience the way Carl Sagan was. They were mostly writing for other philosophers. If their target audience understood what they were getting at, it didn’t matter if it was incomprehensible to the average Joe. And plenty of advanced philosophical writing is bound to be confusing to non-philosophers just because they have little background in the field. I wouldn’t criticize brain surgeons for writing journal articles that I, as someone with no medical training, found difficult to follow.

Unfortunately for even those people who do have a background in philosophy, plenty of great thinkers were not really great writers. Descartes is good, and Nietzsche is generally easy to read even when his point isn’t so clear, but a lot of the other big names take some work to get through. In a plan that I think backfired rather badly, Spinoza attempted to make his ideas about the existence/nature of god easier to understand by presenting them in the style of a geometric proof. Still, he did try.

4

First of all when reading works in translation, complicated vocabulary and phrasings can be as much the fault of the translator as the original writer. Second, for philosophers from centuries back were not writing for the general public. After all, the general public couldn’t even read back then. Since they hoped to have an influence over a small body of very important (and highly educated) people, they focused on being precise rather than readable.

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On the other hand, some of the older philosopher’s work has been made more accessable by modernized translation. I remember one of my philosophy professors saying that we were all unfortunate to be native English speakers, because we’d have to read Locke’s original work. If we’d been French or German we could have read a nice translation instead!

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It’s useful, perhaps, to reiterate the point that Sagan and such aren’t writing for their peers - their peers wouldn’t find it useful at all to read popular works (although they may do so for personal reasons, or teaching purposes, or whatever.) Actual physicists and astronomers and such need to read and write papers that you and I don’t understand in the slightest. Perhaps one could say the same about philosophers, but we don’t, because we often see philosophy as such a “soft discipline” that it dosen’t need a “peer literature”?

7

This occasionally is the case. A professor in my tech writing program came from a more traditional English academic background (that’s area of study, not nationality), and she remarked that one more than one occasion she’d been criticized for writing professional papers that were too easy to understand. She was also baffled about how presenters at conferences would get up to the podium during their speaking sessions and just directly read their paper from the conference proceedings. (As opposed to, say, doing a more sensible presentation with overheads and whatnot.)

Having read my share of papers from people with English academic backgrounds, I too am pretty confident in saying that there’s a fair amount of bullshit artistry going on, with people trying to obfucate silly ideas with impressive-sounding prose.

8

Hobbes? Hobbes may be dull but I don’t see how he’s obscure. Remember he was writing hundereds of years ago, and people talked and wrote differently then.

Kant, on the other hand often was obscure. His early writings are quite readable, but the German University system forced obscurity upon him.

For a readable intro to modern (Descartes and later) philosophers I recommend
this book by Roger Scruton

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There does seem a problem that popular writing philosophers are rairly good philosophers, whilst good philosophers rairly write popular works. So we have readable trash like “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus” or “Dienetics” whilst rarely is the work of a really good philosopher available in a readily consumed package.
I don’t know if it is a problem with philosophers themselves, or that philosophy doesn’t lend itself well to simplification without becoming obvious and dull and losing the very subtleties that make it worth studying.

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In some cases, they may spend twelve chapters explaining their terminology, and the the thirteenth give their theory. So simply quoting from Chapter 13 will produce an incomprehensible chunk of text, as in the OP. (Adorno was brilliant at making himself unquotable - it’s impossible to take any excerpt of his text without it becoming nonsense. His implication? That you should read the whole thing.)

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Hegel’s "Phenomenology of Mind"or Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. They are the best cure for insomnia ever written. I agree: Philosophy is the art of saying as little as possible, using as many words as possible. Ever wonder why philosophy ranks as one of the most unpopular majors? TRy it and see why!
Most of philosophical writing could be improved with some heavy editing…and 90% of the volume would go poof!

12

Dude. Do you have much background studying Spinoza? It’s built in the form of geometric proof, and the terms you confused about have been defined earlier. That’s not to say that their definitions are perfectly clear, but you can’t just pick up the Ethics in the middle and expect to have any idea what he’s talking about. Same’s with any academic, professional work.

Unless you’re a physicist, I doubt you could pick up a contemporary journal in physics and comprehend what you’re reading. What - philosophy is supposed to be different just because it’s a soft discipline?

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I’m disappointed in your answer. I expected a thrashing from you in particular, GorillaMan :wink:

Okay, folks, read my opening post. Admittedly, part mild rant, but also well-considered argument. Let’s discuss.

I duly noted/implied that the philosophers of yore weren’t writing for the common man–and in fact, probably held the common man in high contempt. But I also believe the arcane, prolix, tortured writing style we perceive today certainly didn’t reflect the rhetorical discourse of their day. I am arguing that these “giants” were part of an elite club whose charter forbade writing in a way that was accessible to the masses. We see this in academia today, provoking the Mondalesque quip: Where’s the beef? AnswerL there is damn little.

Did someone above actually say Hobbes was/is clear? Are we talking Hobbes of Leviathan fame? Hobbes who couldn’t engineer a thought without using 500-word sentences chopped into 100 parenthetical phrases? Hobbes who framed his arguments in imprecise constructs, made wild leaps of logic, hopped from point A to G to C and then to T–all while expecting the breathless reader to hang onto his every syllable? (I think that’s 100 words right there :wink: )

Note that I pointed to contemporary writers. Ever read a dissertation from a PhD candidate in sociology, philosophy, political theory or, god forbid, education? Whereas this intellectual posturing might have been excusable three centuries ago, today it’s blue smoke and mirrors. Give me a 300-page dissertation and I say a good editor could distill it into a tight 15-page read–a read of pure drivel, of course.

Again, I return to Spinoza, poor translation or no:

What the hell are “modes of extension”? What is meant by “particular mental events which are the modes of thought”?

Tying together two parenthetical expressions, we get the following from Spinoza: “…the attribute of extension … produces the face of the universe, which includes all of the particular physical events which are the modes of extension.”

Can anyone explain what this means?

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Moving this philosophical rant from IMHO to The BBQ Pit.

15

Dude, are you arguing that humanity and humanity’s constructs can be understood as geometic proofs? As a trignometric functions? As derivatives or tensors?

Czarcasm: why not GD?

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Probably because there’s no debate here, just ignorant ranting.

17

Knorf hits it right on the knose.

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As someone whose read a number of books/articles in both physics, philosophy, and psychology trust me when I say you can find complex passages in all fields. At the more technical levels the complexity is reduced in terms of individual passages but the density of notation and obscure terms more than makes up for this in bewildering the uninitiated.

What is interesting, and briefly mentioned in your OP and not really touched on later, is that primarily the “hard” disciplines receive popular accounts. Allegories and qualitative descriptions of quantum mechanics abound. Yet it seems that philosophy has no similar popularized form. There are collected simplifications, mainly in the “For Dummies” mold, but few philosophers present their field the way that Hawkins or Greene do for theirs. Why? I don’t believe that it has anything to do with the nature of the fields; it is popular demand. There simply isn’t the demand for philosophical works, current or historic, to be put into a popular perspective. Science, physics and astronomy especially, have managed to attain sufficient popularity to support pop-science books.

I do believe, however, that the popularity is derived from objective facts about the field. Physics now describes the world as a bizarre place that does defies common sense at the fundamental levels of reality, and the examples of the odd predictions are attention grabbing. What’s more there are experimental demonstrations of some of these odd things. Philosophy does not offer experimental evidence for theories and this hurts the potential field of pop-philosophy books derived from established works because there is no thing in reality to point to and go “See, this is why it matters! This is where the strangeness of the theory is shown to hold up in the real world.”

Added support for this theory comes from the fact that books of pop-psychology that follow the mold of summarize work in the field sell better when they derive from experimental psychology. I suspect that this trend is due to the fact that people who buy pop-science books don’t want unsupported theories, they want actual science in a form they can understand. Those who don’t mind unsupported theories and wild speculation buy self-help and metaphysics books.

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Gah, preview not post, preview not post.

Anyway I wanted to add a bit more and to fix my sentence collision errors. I’m not trying to insult philosophy when I discuss why it is less popular. Just because philosophers don’t run experiments in the way that those in other disciplines do does not make their work less worthy. Philosophers have put forth a number of brilliant and inspiring arguments on a wide variety of topics, many of which defy an experimental approach.

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Modes of extension = Actions, events.

Particular mental events which are the modes of thought = Ideas, things that move thought forward.

At least I think that’s what he means.