Kieth DeRose Plunges Into the Fogbank of Postmodernism

I'm in the middle of a huge stack of dossiers, so I haven't even finished reading this yet, but still thought some of ya'll might like to know about it. Seems like it's worth a peek. Er, it being Kieth DeRose's "Characterizing a Fogbank: What is Postmodernism and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of It?"

Analytic philosophers are raised to loathe Continental philosophy and postmodernism, and most of them have more loathing for it than actual knowledge of it, so I usually try to tune out their screeds about it, but this seems like it might at least be worth reading.

Oh, and let me say that I'm one of those guys, too. I was encouraged to deride the Continentals and PoMos before I really knew anything about them. And I still don't know much about them, so I've tried several times to reign in my judgments. How can one occupy such a position (I loathe it, but I don't understand it)? Holding such apparently incompatible positions should worry anyone.

Well, the short story goes like this:

1. I've developed a reasonably acute bullshit detector, and the needle hits '11' whenever most of these guys start talking.

2. When I have taken the time to delve into a few of the works of well-known PoMo heroes--e.g. Lyotard--with care, they've turned out to be jaw-droppingly full of shit. So, if I find them to be cracked when I do take the time to understand them carefully, I have at least some grounds for making judgments about their work overall.

3. I know a good bit about the general positions that are in favor among those folks--e.g. cultural relativism and "social constructionism"--and can say with some authority that those views are intellectual dead ends. So, if they're wrong about the issues I do know about, I'm not inclined to trust them re: the issues I'm less clear on.

4. I'm with DeRose when he notes in this context that life is short. There are more books to read than I have time to read them, and too many written by authors I'm sure are non-charlatans. I'm not going to take a risk wasting my time with authors of dubious sincerity. Speaking of which:

5. I'm sympathetic with Emerson when he writes that "Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only be overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment." When I read those guys, I get an overwhelming sense that the authors are possessed of bad intellectual characters. They're bullshitters in Frankfurt's sense: they don't care whether what they're saying is true or false.

6. I once asked the best, most well-read and most intellectually honest philosopher I know--someone who has not only read but taught the recent Continentals from time to time--what he thought about those guys. After a long pause he said "I don't see how anyone who admires Peirce could admire them."

Oh, there's more but I'm tired of this, and who cares? These are just reasons why I have made a semi-snap judgment about the PoMos and don't feel too guilty about it. Roughly, in terms of their intellectual and philosophical characterisics, I've found them to be similar to creationists, new agers, and scientologists. And a relatively small sample of such wares tells you everything you need to know about them. (And, incidentally, I say this as someone who's put in untold hours on the creationist literature.)