Ah well, brilliant, well reasoned, and eloquent response there.
Remember the bot created paper which just used a bunch of philosophy jargon randomly hooked together that got published? Meh, I say the writing is covering up having nothing to say.
A random paragraph from the middle of a paper I read last year in the general field of computing (specifically AI):
What the OP is doing seems to me to be equivalent to demanding “What’s K_i? Eh? That doesn’t make sense! Computer scientists talk a lot of rubbish!”
Lots of them do, of course, but this one wasn’t. If you don’t even try and understand something, how can you tell if it’s crap?
If you believe the IBM speech recognition motto and mindset it is just that language is that simple to replicate. Besides has anyone tried something similar in other academic fields?
You wanna read sociological theory that was written by real people (not academics) and for real people (not journals)?
Robin Morgan. Elizabeth Fisher. Marilyn French. Elizabeth Janeway. Betty Friedan. Sonia Johnson. Naomi Wolf. Anne Koedt. Carol Hanisch.
The hotpoint of feminist theory was probaby within your own lifetime (so the social situation they were speaking to won’t be alien) and they wrote quite accessibly and from their own experience. You don’t have to agree with them but if you haven’t read them you’ve missed out.
Oh, and if you want very accessibly written, formidablly provocative philosophy, pick up Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, probably the best-written epistemology and metaphysics I’ve ever read; and Alan Watts, The Book is worth a read as well.
Dissenting voice here. I read academic articles. In several different disciplines, and often. And anything verging on the philosophic or sociological is so much more prone to, well, bullshit writing, as the OP put it.
Maybe it’s because I care less about Foucault and Butler than the rest of the stuff I read, but my lord, would it kill them to write a straight sentence? I hate that postmodern shit.
Sory Laur, while I agree that some is like that, not all is. I took Sociology in university and when you start getting into research methodolgy and whatnot, the text is signifigantly different.
Also, while when reading about theory such as Feminist vs Marxist theory, while perhaps overly verbose, the audience that the material was indended for is not yourr typical Grade 8 level that newpapers write for. So yes, sometimes big words are used, but if you are taking a 3rd or 4th year university course, I would sure hope that you got there by being able to digest and interpret writings written for people beyond a high school level of education.
So maybe their visions are “grandiose” rather than “sorta big”, but if you are taking the course, I would think you would intuit their meaning.
Of course all being said, my real problem is with the legal profession where the clients are usually the intended audience and as such should be “dumbed down” to those not fluent in legal-ese. In the back room with the judges? Fine. Speaking to me about a legal issue, shove the habeus corpus up your ass and tell me what you mean in plain English. I took Sociology, my head is all full up of big words. I have no room to learn your law talky ones, nor the desire.
How many of Sagan’s or Hawking’s peer-reviewed works have you read, rather than their works directed to a popular audience? Do you find them just as clear?
Now, I agree that there seems to be an environment in professional publications that promotes excess verbiage and circuitous (not to say running-around-in-circles) language. However, a separate aspect is the use of jargon which, because it has already been through multiple iterations of debate, actually makes the works more direct among the speakers of jargon.
Read the various debates on Law that are carried out between the SDMB lawyer posters and those who have no legal training. Look at how many posts are spent defining and clarifying the words that were used in one post and taken to have a different meaning (or multiple different meanings) when read and responded to in later posts. (“Evidence” any one?) Once the terms have taken on very specific meanings, (because the choices for new concepts are pretty much limited to wresting a particular meaning out of an existing word or to coining a neologism to express the idea), they may appear as gibberish to those who have not already taken the time to learn the meanngs of the words when they are encountered in extracted form.
CuriousCanuck, you know as well as I do that I don’t have problems with big words. And frankly, you’ll find just as much of that in History. What I have problems with is vague theories being worded, again, vaguely.
I am a grad student in physics, and read a lot of journal articles in theoretical physics. They are hard to understand, but the hard part for me is the concepts–I’ve never gotten the impression that the wording was deliberately made complex. I don’t think physicists have anything to gain by making their writing difficult to understand–they’re hard enough to understand as it is, and they don’t need to use big words to sound intelligent because intelligence in physics, in my experience, is judged by the success of one’s ideas. So as far as I can tell, there is no incentive to use bullshit writing.
Just a random abstract pulled from NASA ADS:
Sagan, Carl (1977) “Reducing greenhouses and the temperature history of earth and Mars,” Nature, 269 224-226.
Where is the Philosopher’s Dictionary? That is, where is the book that actually defines the accepted meanings of the words and phrases used in modern philosophical discourse at the academic level? Computer science, law, medicine, all branches of physics, indeed any and all of the `hard’ sciences have a list of words and phrases that are too specialist to appear in the OED, for example, but do have concrete denotational meanings laid out in published works.
As a trivial example of what I mean, I’ll refer you all to FOLDOC, the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing. It’s a very good first stop when you want to look up a term or a phrase used by computer science people and computer experts of all kinds.
The Sagan quote was a lot clearer, frankly. And yes, in sciences like physics, ultimately somebody will be able to perform an experiment that confirms or works against your ideas, so clarity is a virtue. A lot of this postmodern philosophy stuff is frankly bullshit. Yes, ut may be hard to explain the complete idea, but somebody should be able to come along and provide a run-down of the idea in “real English.” Where can’t you do that in some real science?
Quantum mechanics. A real description of what is going on in real English doesn’t exist. You only get allegories and empty theories unless you appeal to the math. The wave function doesn’t mean something in the way that things like Newtonian gravity meant something or the way that the Lorenz transformation means something. At least not that we yet know (and I consider it quite possible that I’m just behind).
Given this I think it is possible to translate a huge swath of the qualitative disciplines. Again it seems to me a matter of lack of market for such translations.
I thought the Sagan quote was pretty clear as well. I mean, while there are concepts that you would have to be at least somewhat scientifically literate to understand without resorting to a dictionary (reducing gases, albedo, clement, etc.) and techniques I’ve never heard of, five minutes with a dictionary or Google would tell you what everything in that paragraph is.
It should be pointed out that it’s not entirely a fair comparison; the quote I gave is the abstract of the paper, which is supposed to offer a coherent summary. A passage pulled at random from the middle of the paper would probably be much more mystifiying.
One of the things that makes philosophy so frustrating is that they have this habit of using common words in specialized ways. Sagan’s abstract contains terms like “isotopic archeothermometry” and “bolometric albedos” that make you think, Oh, crap, I’ve never heard those words before! Guess I’d better learn what they mean. Whereas in philosphy you get stuff like “attribute of extension,” which makes you think, Hey, I know what “attribute” and “of” and “extension” mean, but the way he’s putting them together doesn’t make any sense at all. This is bullshit!
Not that I’m defending philosophers, or anything. How come they don’t make up their own words instead of redefining plain English words and giving everybody a headache?
I agree with your point, in essence, but I think we should be distinguishing between deliberate obfuscation and jargon. Just because the author isn’t being intentionally obscure doesn’t mean his/r point can be understand in “real English.”
Consider this, from the physics paper that just happened to be lying on my desk at the moment:
“In order to preserve coupling unification, it is probably best to assign the standard model quantum numbers of complete SU(5) multiplets to chiral supermultiplets transforming under G.” -T. Banks
(“G” is defined earlier in the paper)
I suppose one can translate this into “real English,” but unless someone is much more talented in this type of thing than I am, it seems like the result will be ambigous and less informative than the original. For example, I could translate this as, “If we want to make sure that the couplings still reach the same value at a high energy scale, then we should probably assign…”
OK, never mind, I was wrong–I can’t translate it into real English. It’s too specific .
Maybe someone else can do better.
The Tim–
I’m not sure I agree with you about wave functions–to me they seem like one of the easiest things in QM to relate to something understandable. The way I’ve explained it to my students is that it relates to the probability of measuring some property of a particle (for example, where the particle is). If the wavefunction is big at a certain location, it means that there is a high probability of finding the particle in that location.
Field theory, on the other hand, is harder to explain non-mathematically…
To generalize about the whole of philosophical writings is a little ridiculous. Yes, some philosophers write in a circuitous and complex way, but others write as clearly, if not more so, than any other academics (See GE Moore, Carnap, Putnam). If we must generalize at all, surely we have to take contemporary examples. MOST academic writing pre-1900’s was written in a style ensure the social status of academics. If we compare contemporary examples of native english speakers, I think philosophy holds it own with any other field. The terms might be complicated, but the style and organization are very clear. Indeed, philosophy is more self-concious about this than any other field. Contemporary philosophers are very careful to write in such a way that there is little room for ambiguity or misinterpretation. While it is true that some philosophers still prefer to write in a sort of “post-modern” style, most do not, and even among those who do there are still examples of very good, very clear writing (See in the first few chapters of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, for example.)
In response to the above post (on preview): Philosophers make up new words to avoid the connotations that existing words hold in the mind of the reader. It may seem to reduce clarity, but it is actually for the purpose of clarity (and I think we can agree having to learn a new word is better for clarity than using an old word that has many different connotations, only one of which is intended).
Oops.
Disregard the last part of my post. So much for preview. :smack: