@socialjusticemunchkin, did you coin the phrase “dogma of mandatory comprehensibility” for your NAB review, or does it have some earlier provenance, in your writing or somewhere else? It’s a phrase that captures something that has frustrated me about deconstructionist (and similar) criticism in the past, and it’d be nice to be able to use it without referring people back to this particular kerfuffle.
Specifically, the frustration I have is that in order to identify “holes” in a text, places where a text “undermines itself,” or the like, it seems to me like you first need to ask the usual questions like “does this make more sense in historical context?” or “does it work to read this as meant ironically?” I.e. the kinds of questions you usually find non-deconstructionist critics asking when confronted with aspects of a text that confuse them.
And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go. (I wonder if Foucault ever got on the deconstructionists’ case about this?)
(Note: I have a rule of not talking about NAB, but this post doesn’t count as talking about NAB by my standards)
As far as I know it’s my OC, and fresh to this particular incident.
The basic idea has been bugging me longer though, tying to the more general pattern I’ve observed of people yelling about things because they don’t realize they don’t speak the same language and thus assume that an expression in rationalist!english means what the same words mean in liberalartist!english, give a reasonable response to their misconception in liberalartist!english and speakers of rationalist!english are like “lol wtf are these guys talking about”, and in the end both sides hate each other for the horrible sin of speaking the Wrong Dialect.
(And the general pattern kind of applies in a lot of uncharitable readings; most snarky nitpicking would lose its effect if one were to read things in the writer’s dialect instead of one’s own; and no matter how much fun said snarky nitpicking is, it’s not at all fair. (Yes, I sometimes do it myself too, feel free to yell at me if you catch me doing it unless I’m clearly aiming for a non-serious&honest approach.))
Thanks for the fast response.
IMO, “liberal arts” is not a very useful term here. In modern usage it tends to refer to types of education which in some way hark back to the old quadrivium/trivium and the notion of a “broad education” they represented. The quadrivium/trivium had no “humanities as opposed to STEM” focus – you can sort of break it down (imprecisely and misleadingly) as “trivium is (premodern) humanities, quadrivium is (premodern) STEM,” but logic is one-third of the trivium, so if you count that as “premodern STEM” you’ve got 5 of 7 “premodern STEM” subjects.
(The quadrivium included music, because this was thought of as the study of “number in time,” to go along with arithmetic (number), geometry (number in space), and astronomy (number in space and time, i.e. something like physics).)
Hardly anyone actually uses the original trivium/quadrivium anymore, but modern “liberal arts education” tends to aim for the same breadth. For instance, at the “liberal arts college” I attended (where I got a physics degree), all students were required to take at least two classes in each of four “groups,” one of which was natural science (and there was nothing like “physics for poets” – everyone had to take the same intro science classes that the science majors were taking, which were taught with appropriate rigor), and one of which was something like “syntactic systems” (it included math, symbolic logic, foreign language courses excluding those classed as “literature courses,” and linguistics).
(Also, the “liberal arts college” as a a subtype of American colleges has a bunch of other characteristics, like being expensive, having small class sizes, and holding many classics as Socratic-ish discussions rather than lectures. None of these have much to do with the distinction I think you’re drawing.)
“Humanities” I think is a term that works strictly better than “liberal arts” here, because in the modern university it tends to mean stuff that isn’t “natural science” or “social science,” e.g. literature and history. Still, even this is way too broad, since the “dialect” of a history department, say, will be different from that of a literature department, and even literature departments with different focuses will have different “dialects.” (There’s been a fair amount of friction involved in the attempt to bring things like deconstruction into the discipline of classics, which tends to be old-school about most things, including literary analysis.)
What I think you’re pinpointing is something like “the most commonly used intellectual dialect in modern university literature departments, excluding classics.” Although that isn’t a very snappy phrase. “Talking like an English major,” although crude-sounding, is actually pretty close, but is likely to make you sound like don’t know whereof you speak (cf. the reaction to @theungrumpablegrinch‘s review of NAB). I’d love to find a phrase here that is readily and mutually intelligible.
Okay, the concept I’ve been trying to translate has been, in my brain, defined by a Finnish word which basically means “not STEM” and I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the word ‘humanities’. That specific dialect is a subtype of it, but there seems to be a general pattern of “humanist” vs. “mechanist” language and thinking which this dialect, the postmodernist “reality don’t real” meme, the “scientists are soulless, understanding destroys wonder” meme, the idea that science has difficulties modeling fluid dynamics because our systems of knowledge are founded on patriarchal rigidity [sic], etc. are extreme edge cases of.
The thing isn’t limited to English as eg. gender studies tends to feature the same thing to some degree as well; whatever the fuck CrimethInc. is its “Eight Reasons Why Capitalists Want to Sell You Deodorant” is exactly that thing (“Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.”); the analytic/continental divide in philosophy is also partially about that thing; I’ve seen many humanities people comment on issues of science with an embarrassing unawareness of the actual mechanisms of how things operate (because the broader version of the dogma of mandatory comprehensibility lets them believe things are way simpler than they actually are (and it obviously operates in reverse too with naive STEM people on humanities questions causing enough facepalms to extract all the world’s cooking oil needs from)); the people who stop treating others as humans if they say the word “rational” are that thing; etc.
(And similarly the “mechanist” edge case would be the stereotypical weakman “soulless” engineer who thinks emotions don’t matter and Spock is something to emulate instead of an embarrassing failure of a humanist attempt to cargo-cult rationality, identifies as Objective Rational Thinker™, uses models derived from physics to explain all human behavior and forgets that they are crude simplifications at best, etc…)
Hello Rationalist Tumblr™, I’m here via @aprilwitching, and I just wanted to jump in with a little linguistics. I believe the “dialects” you’re describing would be considered “registers” in linguistic jargon. Jargon is also a very useful word for this type of discussion. I think basically what happens in the types of conflicts you’re describing here is that both parties coming from different academic backgrounds believe they are speaking in “academic register” but in fact there is no one unified academic register, there are many registers specific to the academic background in question, and therefore both parties believe they’re speaking the same register and don’t question the applicability of their jargon. You can see some evidence for this when those same people speak to a non-academic person about the same subjects in a non-academic, casual register; they’re far more likely to either avoid jargon, or clearly define their jargon, because they know the other party doesn’t speak Academic Register. If they only applied the same idea to discussions across academic backgrounds, they’d be set!
And also, this conflict definitely happens within STEM to a massive degree, as there is a ton of jargon in, say, biochemistry that a physics person isn’t likely to know. Or in Ornithology that an Ichthyologist won’t know. And I constantly find myself trying to explain taxonomic and evolutionary jargon to computer programmers (without much luck).
I don’t have as much experience with cross-humanities register conflicts, but I’m aware that they happen, especially between specific fields that examine the same phenomena from radically different angles. The intersections of Linguistics with Anthropology and Psychology, Cultural vs. Evolutionary Anthropology, and Sociology with Psychology appear to be particularly rich examples. There are an increasing number of weird Frankenstein Specialties emerging as a direct result of frustration at the lack of effective cross-specialty communication, too, like Neuroanthropology.
Okay, this register thing is definitely a part of it, but I think another part is about the Rules of the Game.
Specifically, whether one manipulates the symbols people use to refer to underlying phenomena, or focuses on the phenomena themselves.
Both ‘bad postmodernists’ and 'straw rationalists’ use the rules of symbols as The Rules, thus the kind of “I found a contradiction in this philosophy according to English grammar, therefore it’s pwned” and “your emotions are illogical because I can’t construct a consistent boolean table of them” [uncharitable description omitted], while the steel versions don’t do embarrassing things like claim “there can’t be infinite growth on a finite planet” as if it were an actual argument (it’s rhetoric, and its value as rhetoric can be debated, but the argument operates on the superficial symbol-level contradiction of 'finite’ and 'infinite’ which the actual underlying phenomena don’t map perfectly to, thus rendering the symbol-level relatively irrelevant (symbol-level contradictions may point to something that might need investigating, but it’s perfectly fair to conclude that the only problem is in the symbols themselves)).
So from this perspective the Mandatory Comprehensibility boils down to “I expect this to follow the rules of the symbols I’m used to”. At least it matches very well with this:
And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t. The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.” When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go.
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