Julian Baggini (Philosopher & Journalist) on the Anti-Derrida “Cambridge Affair” of 1992

In 2020, Julian Baggini wrote a piece on Jacques Derrida for the magazine Prospect. It’s called ‘Think Jacques Derrida was a charlatan? Look again’. He starts off with a retrospective account of what came to be called “the Cambridge Affair”. In Baggini’s own words: “In May 1992, academics at the University of Cambridge reacted with outrage to a proposed honorary degree from their venerable institution to Jacques Derrida.” Baggini then spends some time on that affair, and has strong words to say against members of what he calls “the Anglo-Saxon academy”. This is my own response to Baggini’s words.

Julian Baggini and Jacques Derrida.

“A certain sort of analytic philosopher who dismisses as meaningless what does not instantly make sense to his shallow pate. [] I coined a name for people like him: ‘philosophistine.’ A philistine out of his depth among real philosophers.”

— Bill Vallicella [See source of quote here.]

Julian Baggini is a British philosopher, writer and journalist. His Prospect article on Jacques Derrida (‘Think Jacques Derrida was a charlatan? Look again’) is relentlessly positive — even deferential. Indeed, even when various criticisms of Derrida are broached, they’re summarily dismissed.

Baggini offers his readers two (if implicit) alternatives:

(1) If readers have made “a serious attempt to read” Derrida, then they’ll realise that he was a (to use Baggini's words) "true philosopher". 
(2) If readers believe that Derrida wasn’t a true philosopher (or, worse, if they believe that he was a “charlatan”), then they simply can’t have made a serious attempt to read him.

So, in the light of Baggini’s unceasing positivity toward Derrida, this essay is critical of both Derrida and Baggini himself.

Yet had Baggini expressed at least some qualms about Derrida and his work (he does tackle other people’s qualms), then my own essay will have included at least some positive remarks about the dead French philosopher.

An Event at Cambridge University in 1992

It can be supposed that Julian Baggini simply couldn’t resist mentioning an infamous event which occurred in 1992. He wrote:

“In May 1992, academics at the University of Cambridge reacted with outrage to a proposed honorary degree from their venerable institution to Jacques Derrida. A letter to the Times from 14 international philosophers followed, protesting that ‘M Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour’.”

Here’s another account (as found in the journal Sophia) from Jeffrey Sims at the University of Toronto:

“Conscientious objection from Professor Barry Smith and 18 others ensured a period of debate in the English press pertaining to issues of academic freedom, and academic responsibility. [] Smith’s letter to The Times is congruent with the efforts of four senior dons who announced a ‘non placet’ vote when the proposed degree was originally announced in March, 1992. The declarations came from David Hugh Mellor [who’ll be discussed later], Ian Jack, Raymond Ian Page, and Henry H. Erskine-Hill.”

Baggini himself continues by telling us that

“[t]o them Derrida was a peddler of ‘tricks and gimmicks,’ a cheap entertainer whose stock in trade was ‘elaborate jokes and puns.’”

Baggini doesn’t seem to have much time for analytic philosophers or what he calls “the Anglo-Saxon academy”. (As opposed to Derrida’s Latin Academy? Or, say, the Teutonic Academy of Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man?) Alternatively and less strongly, is it that Baggini simply doesn’t have much time for those who’re critical of Derrida?

The letter to The Times.

Despite the innuendos, the letter to The Times certainly wasn’t signed by some kind of cabal of snobby and elitist English (or perhaps British) philosophers. (Derrida himself has attracted many elitist and privileged academics.) So Baggini also needs to bear in mind the signatories of the letter against Derrida included Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Austrians, Poles, Dutch, Swiss, etc…

Sure, perhaps they were all “analytic philosophers”, regardless of their nationalities. (I don’t know.)

In any case, that list included the following names:

Hans Albert (University of Mannheim)
Richard Glauser (Neuchâtel)
Rudolf Haller (Graz)
Massimo Mugnai (Florence)
Lorenzo Peña (Madrid)
Wolfgang Röd (Innsbruck)
Karl Schuhmann (Utrecht)
Daniel Schulthess (Neuchâtel)
René Thom (Burs-sur-Yvette)
Jan Wolenski (Cracow)

Added to international nature of these signatories (admittedly, Baggini does use the words “international philosophers” himself) are these words from the letter to The Times:

“Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.”

Indeed, even a fan of Derrida (a Professor E.S. Schliesser) had the following to say about the signatories:

“They are an eclectic mix of anglo-phone analytical philosophers, anglo-phone ‘analytical’ historians of 19th and 20th century philosophy, European and anglophone Husserlians, European ‘Austrian’ philosophers, European analytical philosophers, and a few whom I wouldn’t know how to characterize.”

Have Derrida’s Critics Read Derrida?

More relevantly, Baggini informs us that

“Salmon concludes that ‘none of them had taken the time to read any of Derrida’s work’”.

Baggini himself claims that

“[i]t would have been understandable if some had tried but quickly given up”.

Indeed, almost all the defenders of Derrida have simply assumed that none of the signatories had read Derrida.

For example, there’s a podcast called ‘Judging Philosophers You Haven’t Read’ on the “Cambridge Affair”. Then there’s Terry Eagleton’s article for the Guardian newspaper (called ‘Don’t deride Derrida’), in which he wrote the following:

“English philistinism continues to flourish [] Either they hadn’t read him, or they believed his work was to do with words not meaning what you think they do [].”

[See note.]

The American philosopher John D. Caputo didn’t claim that the signatories hadn’t read Derrida at all. Instead, according to Jeffrey Sims, he was

“ready to celebrate the idea that many of those found on Smith’s list of signatories may not have even read Derrida adequately”.

“Adequately”? What does that mean?

Should they have read Derrida to such an extent that they became positive about the French philosopher?

So how long does that take?

Now take these words from the podcast ‘Judging Philosophers You Haven’t Read’ mentioned earlier:

“How many of his books had they read? [] I’ve read about a dozen of them [] I seriously doubt that most of the signatories to the letter had read more than a smattering of Derrida’s work. Most of them would have likely read one or two of his books (more likely skimmed it), failed to understand what they were reading [] lost patience and probably their temper, and quickly stopped reading.”

In any case, Sims says that it “might be [] reasonable” to ask such questions about the signatories. However,

“it may be difficult for Caputo to know just how much of Derrida these philosophers have actually read”.

Yet the claim that the signatories of the letter (perhaps all of Derrida’s critics) haven’t read Derrida is simply false…

That’s right — false!

Sims continued:

“Clearly, as Barry Smith points out, some have read more of Derrida (J. Claude Evans, John Searle, and Kevin Mulligan) while others admit to having read less.”

Again, how much time should these philosophers have spent on Derrida?

As much time as Julian Baggini?

As much time as a biographer of Derrida, such as Peter Salmon himself?

As for the main signatory of the letter, Professor Barry Smith, he said:

“Certainly some of the many criticisms of Derrida’s work are not based on a scholarly understanding of the relevant literature to which Derrida is reacting. But I have endeavoured to be a serious critic of Derrida. I have taken the trouble to read his work [].”

And, in response to the question “What exactly were you reading [when Smith was in his 20s and 30s] in terms of French thought?”, Barry Smith replied:

“Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Camus []. But I rapidly became more and more interested in Central and Eastern European philosophy, and more specifically in Austrian philosophy. Over the years I became friendly with quite a number of philosophers in Eastern Europe. I collaborated with a number of people in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic (as it is now called), and I travelled a lot there, as well as in Austria and Germany.”

Now take Eric Schliesser’s words again:

“It is sometimes noted that it is extremely unlikely that most of the signers had read much more of Derrida than I had by the time I left graduate school. What is not noted is that it is extremely unlikely that these signers had read much of each other.”

As for the other critics of Derrida who signed the letter to The Times: had they read Derrida?

Isn’t it obviously the case that those philosophers who’ve sniffed what they believe to be a lot of (to use Hugh Mellor’s word) “bullshit” in Derrida’s work, won’t have wanted to spend too much time on him?

So how much time did Derrida spend on, say, the Anglo-Saxon W.V.O. Quine?

And how much time has Peter Salmon spent on, say, Bas van Fraassen, Jaakko Hintikka, or Hugh Mellor?

I suppose the argument here would be that Derrida didn’t write a letter to The Times stating his (negative) views about another philosopher.

And neither has Peter Salmon.

That’s true… Well, Derrida and Salmon didn’t do so to The Times anyway.

However, I’ve come across a hell of a lot of poststructuralists, postmodern philosophers, “theorists”, etc. who’re fiercely critical of analytic philosophy, yet who’ve hardly read a word of it.

So it works both ways.

Baggini himself provides no evidence that the signatories hadn’t read Derrida. Indeed, all this (as least as far as Baggini’s article is concerned) seems to be a conclusion based on a reference to the term “logical phallusies”, which these supposedly ignorant analytic philosophers claimed Derrida used in a letter.

In the book which Baggini was reviewing in his Prospect article (An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida), Peter Salmon says that Derrida never used such a term.

So what about the actual use of that term “logical phallusies” itself?

This is the passage from the original letter to The Times:

“Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (‘logical phallusies’ and the like) [].”

Is this all that Salmon (as well as Baggini) have to go on?

This reference to “logical phallusies” was hardly the sole basis of the philosophers’ case against Derrida. It was something said in passing — and in parenthesis! — in a single letter. However, because Peter Salmon is a biographer of Derrida and a loyal fan, he picked up on this.

Baggini himself also says that

“[t]he irony is that the protests showed a shocking lack of rigour themselves”.

Sure, perhaps a lack of research when it came to a single term.

However, is this single misattribution really that relevant in this overall debate about Derrida?

Perhaps all Peter Salmon is showing us is that he’s a scholar of Derrida, whereas most of Derrida’s critics… aren’t scholars of Derrida. Thus, like all experts, Salmon probably found it very easy to spot mistakes (or a single mistake in a single letter) when it came to the minutiae of Derrida’s biographical detail.

Hugh Mellor on Jacques Derrida

Hugh Mellor (D.H. Mellor)

Now take the case of one philosopher associated with this (as it were) campaign against Derrida — Hugh Mellor (D.H. Mellor).

As already quoted, Mellor was one of the

“four senior dons who announced a ‘non placet’ vote when the proposed degree was originally announced in March, 1992”.

Mellor stated that Derrida

“is a mediocre, unoriginal philosopher — he is not even interestingly bad”.

What’s more, Mellor added that it had been “a bad year for bullshit in Cambridge”.

More relevantly, Mellor had read Derrida!

Take the following words from Mellor:

“Some of Derrida’s early work was interesting and serious. But this isn’t the work he has become famous for, and which led to him being put forward for an honorary degree. That is much later work which seems to me wilfully obscure.”

Of course, Mellor might have got Derrida wrong or simply been uncharitable.

Alternatively, he might simply not have been able to understand him correctly. (Perhaps he should have got Derrida via people like Julian Baggini or Peter Salmon.)

Mellor then gave his reasons for his “‘non placet’ vote”:

“If you spell out these later doctrines plainly, it becomes clear that most of them, if not false, are just trivial.”

Indeed, that sentiment can be found in the original letter (not written by Hugh Mellor) to The Times:

“When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.”

Mellor himself then cited an example:

“Take the fact that the writing down of a signature must have been present at whatever time in the past it was done. Now you can make this truism sound mysterious, as Derrida does. But there’s nothing mysterious about it: it’s just trivially true that if an action leaves a trace, then the trace will always be of something in the past that was once present.”

Now readers can be very sure that Peter Salmon will fault all this. However, it at least shows that Mellor had (tried to?) read Derrida.

In any case, Mellor concluded in the following way:

“So one objection is that Derrida goes in for mystery-mongering about trivial truisms. But he also mixes these truisms up with silly falsehoods, which, if believed and acted on, would cripple intellectual activities of all kinds.”

All the above may well be wrong. (Derrida’s ideas will be discussed in the next essay.)

It may be naïve.

It may itself be (to use Mellor’s own word again) “bullshit”.

What’s more, some of the things Mellor says on this subject I disagree with.

However, Mellor had read Derrida.

Conclusion

Quote from Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy.

On a personal note, I’ve been attempting to understand Derrida since the late 1990s. So perhaps that partially explains one major problem here.

Oddly enough, Julian Baggini acknowledges this when he admits that Derrida was a (well) show-off. Or, at the very least, Baggini quotes Derrida saying (of himself) that he was an “an incorrigible hyperbolite,” and that he would “always exaggerate”. Yet, of course, Baggini immediately (as it were) takes that back when he says that “[y]ou can see why Derrida’s writing could never have been clear and plain”. What’s more:

“Hence Derrida’s difficult style, far from being an affectation, is an inevitable requirement of his philosophy.”

All that said, my own lack of understanding can be explained in three — and probably more - ways:

(1) I’m (philosophically) dumb, I have a “shallow pate”, and/or I’m one of Terry Eagleton's “philistines”. 
(2) I’m biased and prejudiced against Derrida. 
(3) Derrida designed his prose (or his actual philosophy) to be only partially understand. What’s more, there isn’t that much to understand anyway, and what can be understood is often (to use Hugh Mellor’s word again) “trivial”.

As for the philosophers who signed the letter to The Times.

Perhaps some (even all) of them were merely being tribal in their criticisms of Derrida.

However, they don’t seem to have been nearly so tribal as Julian Baggini, Peter Salmon, Terry Eagleton, etc. have been in their responses to the now infamous “Cambridge Affair”. After all, words such as “English philistinism continues to flourish”, “Anglo-Saxon academy”, “it would have been understandable if some had tried [to read Derrida]”, “a shocking lack of rigour”, “none of them had taken the time to read any of Derrida’s work”, “remarkably sloppy”, “[John Searle] was snide and condescending”, etc. are hardly conducive to fostering dialogue and debate.

As stated earlier, it works both ways.

---

Note

(1) Terry Eagleton’s words about Derrida’s critics believing that “his work was to do with words not meaning what you think they do” are truly a (to use his own term about Derrida’s critics) “bone-headed” response to the philosophers who signed the letter to The Times. I doubt that a single philosopher has come even close to holding that position on Derrida’s work.

(*) See my ‘Philosopher Julian Baggini on Derrida and the Anglo-Saxon Academy’.

My flickr account and Twitter account.

‘A new study says [x]’: A Vacuous and Overused Headline?

The headline ‘A new study says [x]’ can often be found in newspapers and the media generally. Why do journalists use it? And what is the general status of such studies? These questions relate to our attitudes to science itself, as well as to our attitudes to particular studies, published at particular times on particular subjects. One study has shown that the “academic system incentivises journals and researchers to publish exciting findings”. An important consequence of this is that many studies end up being just plain “wrong”.

(i) Introduction

(ii) A New Study Says [x]

(iii) A Scientific Study About Scientific Studies

(iv) Professor Brian Nosek on Scientific Studies

(v) Other Media Clichés About Scientific Studies

(vi) Conclusion

Scientists and academics are human beings.

Scientists and academics have strongly-held values and strongly-held political beliefs.

Scientists and academics have strong emotions and feelings.

Scientists and academics have good careers and are usually tenured.

Scientists and academics need to pay their mortgages, bills, the school fees of their children, go on holidays, buy new homes, cars, computers, clothes, etc.

Most scientists and academics are funded by various and many bodies and institutions. They also work for — or actually within — governments, political parties, university departments (some with strong political and/or scientific biases), corporations, global institutions (such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), thinks tanks (or policy institutes) and activist/pressure groups (such as The Heartland Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists), the European Union, pharmaceutical/oil/etc. companies…

So it’s worth bearing all that in mind in the context of the following little story.

At the end of July I was reading a copy of the free newspaper Metro. In it, there were three short news items side by side. Two included the headline ‘A new study says [x]’, and the other one used the words “research shows” in the subtext.

These phrases are used all the time in national newspapers, on websites, and on social media. In fact, when it comes to national newspapers, it can safely be assumed that each publication will include at least one item every day which has the headline ‘A new study says [x]’.

There are also some odd examples of news items which have the headline ‘A new study says [x]’. Take these examples (which were easy to find):

‘Groundbreaking new study says time spent playing video games can be good for your well being’, ‘ChatGPT’s Performance Is Slipping, New Study Says’, ‘Some Extra Heft May Be Helpful, New Study Says’, ‘Climate change is leading to more home runs, says new study’, ‘People aged under 40 should not drink alcohol and consumption guidelines should be changed, study says’, ‘Bradford beats London for business startups, says new study’, ‘A new study says only working out on the weekend is just fine (and here’s how to do it)’, ‘Tip or no tip? Over 65% of U.S. have negative view on tipping, new study’, ‘Can You Be Overweight & Healthy? A New Study Says It’s Possible’, ‘A new study says it’s okay to eat red meat. An immediate uproar follows’, ‘New Jersey is one of the best places to live and work in the US, new study says’, ‘Turn off that camera during virtual meetings, environmental study says’, ‘Is Coffee Good For You? A New Study Says It Is’, ‘Children Who Are Exposed to Awe-Inspiring Art Are More Likely to Become Generous, Empathic Adults, a New Study Says’, ‘Is sitting always bad for older adults? A new study says maybe not’…

Ironically enough, we also have the following titles:

‘Most scientific papers are probably wrong’, ‘Study: half of the studies you read about in the news are wrong’, ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, ‘This is why you shouldn’t believe that exciting new medical study’, ‘New Study Says There Are Too Many New Studies, New Study Finds’, ‘Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test’, ‘Research findings that are probably wrong cited far more than robust ones, study finds’, ‘Is Most Published Research Really False?’…

‘A new study of a new study which says that most new studies are wrong is wrong’…

That last one is a joke!

Yet we do have this study: ‘Ioannidis (2005) was wrong: Most published research findings are not false’.

So now readers can wait for a study called, ‘The study which claimed that ‘Ioannidis was wrong to claim that most studies are wrong’ was itself wrong’. (Incidentally, Professor John Ioannidis’s research findings will be discussed later.)

In any case, every day there will be dozens — perhaps hundreds — of studies published. There’s also vast amounts of research being carried out all the time by numerous scientists, academics and graduates. Hundreds of studies and papers are published every month…

And all that largely explains why newspaper editors and journalists find it so easy to write news items with the headline ‘A new study says [x]’.

So I suggest that readers put the words ‘A new study says…’ into the Google search engine. (One set of results can be seen here.)

I personally found 50 ‘A new study says [x]’ headlines, and then I gave up counting. There are 20 Google pages of links with the headline ‘A new study says [x]’. And then, for some reason, the Google search just comes to an end. (Readers can presume that it could have gone on for a lot longer.)

So what are we meant to make of the news headline ‘A new study says [x]’?

A New Study Says [x]

This essay is going to stick to the words ‘A new study says [x]’, rather than going into the details of particular studies, or the details of the news items about particular studies. That said, there’ll be a small amount of commentary on the studies themselves.

That aforementioned distinction between scientific studies and new items about those studies is relevant here because journalists may simply get things wrong.

A news item on a scientific study may also be extremely biased.

What’s more, the news item (or journalist) may ignore various important parts of the study, and play up various unimportant parts.

All this is very easy to do, either wilfully or through basic ignorance.

On another theme.

What a new study says may be false.

Some parts of what a study says may be true, and other parts may be false.

What a study says may also be irrelevant, trivial, plagiaristic, biased, a waste of time, etc.

What’s more, what a new study says is often contradicted at a later point. Indeed, sometimes new studies are strongly contradicted within weeks (or less), but usually the contradictions come much later.

In addition, the headline ‘A new study says [x]’ is often meant to give legitimacy to whatever the news item is about. Basically, sometimes it’s the journalist himself who’s using the headline ‘A study says [x]’ to give credence to what he believes anyway. Editors may also publish stories about studies (or research) simply to fill space. Who knows, they may sometimes do so to enlighten their readers.

A Scientific Study About Scientific Studies

There’s a study called ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, which was written in 2005 by Professor John Ioannidis of the Stanford School of Medicine.

[When I Googled the words ‘A new study says…’, as mentioned earlier, I couldn’t find this particular new study. It was discovered via other means.]

Some readers may spot that there’s a self-referential problem here. The Guardian newspaper, for example, picks up on the self-reference when it says that this study “is itself not exempt from the need for scrutiny”.

In any case, one passage in ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’ says something which many laypersons have known for decades. Professor Ioannidis wrote:

“There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”

What’s more:

“Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment.”

All this has been especially true about dietary matters or issues relating to food and health.

There’s also “controversy” over and above what is “refuted” in these studies. As Ioannidis put it:

“Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies to the most modern molecular research.”

Is it really the case that, as Dr Marta Serra-Garci (who studies behavioural and experimental economics at the University of California) puts it, some studies “conclude that something is true or not based on one study and one replication”?

Readers may also wonder why certain (scare-quoted) “scientific” disciplines are more prone to bullshit than others.

Professor Brian Nosek on Scientific Studies

Professor Brian Nosek (at the University of Virginia) tells us that “[w]e presume that science is self-correcting”. Indeed, many scientists do say that science is self-correcting. (Perhaps Nosek meant fellow scientists — not people as a whole — by his word “we”.)

For a start, it’s not really the case that most laypersons presume that science is self-correcting. Most laypersons may well (as it were) believe in science (whatever that means). However, that probably isn’t because they also believe that science is self-correcting…

Actually, it depends.

It depends on how much a particular (to put it crudely) pro-science layperson thinks about the nature of science.

Put it this way.

Many of those people who see themselves as being pro-science think less about the actual (philosophical and otherwise) nature of science (or read less science books and papers) than many of those who’re critical of science. Anecdotally, this is something I’ve come across many times — especially in political contexts. Particularly, claiming to be “pro-science” is often simply a way of also saying that one’s political opponent is anti-science.

To get back to Professor Nosek’s words:

“[E]rrors will happen regularly, but science roots out and removes those errors in the ongoing dialogue among scientists conducting, reporting, and citing each others research.”

This is a simple point about the communal nature of (all? most? much?) science.

In basic terms.

On the large-scale and over (relatively) long periods, science often is self-correcting. However, particular scientists, particular groups of scientists, particular scientific journals, particular scientific departments, etc. are often not self-correcting. Or, at very least, they aren’t self-correcting to a satisfactory degree. (It would be hard to even imagine any scientist, scientific group or scientific institution never indulging in self-correction.)

In detail.

Even most scientists accept the problem of political and other kinds of bias in scientific work. So in this particular case, biased scientists don’t (to use Professor Nosek’s words) “root out and remove errors” when those errors work in support of their political — and otherwise — biases. Or, as it’s often been put, the errors will be retained if they work toward the conclusion (or thesis) that these scientists wanted to arrive at from the very beginning.

More relevantly, when a particular news headline tells us that ‘A new study says [x]’, then this may be a study by a group of scientists who weren’t sufficiently self-correcting. Indeed, in isolated cases, some scientists aren’t self-correctors at all.

All this ties in with Nosek’s words that

“dialogue among scientists conducting, reporting, and citing each others research”.

But what if many (even all) the other scientists engaged in a particular “dialogue” are also biased in the same way or ways?

What if they adhere to the same theories, worldviews, etc?

Thus, how will dialogue work (or help) in this case?

If anything, “citing each others research” would only compound (or solidify) the bias and/or lack of self-correction.

Professor Nosek himself admits that scientists aren’t always self-correcting. He says:

“If more replicable findings are less likely to be cited, it could suggest that science isn’t just failing to self-correct; it might be going in the wrong direction.”

Nosek also picks up on a point that undergraduate philosophy students - and almost everyone else with a logical mind — does (or should) spot. He tells us that it’s often the case that when it comes to the conclusions of particular studies, the “evidence is not sufficient to draw such a conclusion”. (Nosek believes this is true of many studies.)

The problem here, Nosek argues, is about the “social systems of science” which don’t “foster self-correction”.

Interestingly and relevantly, many scientists have been critical of what the philosophers Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend (along with many others) have said about the (to use Nosek’s words) social systems of science. However, we must add here that actual scientists have said similar things too. The thing is, many scientists will admit to various shortcomings when it comes to scientific practice, but virulently deny such things when it comes to science itself.

[To take just one example of a scientist who’s aware of scientific bias and the sociology of science, see theoretical physicist Lee Smolin’s ‘How Do You Fight Sociology?’ chapter in his book The Trouble With Physics. This specifically deals with the decades-old social systems of string theory.]

So now take this very Kuhnian passage from the aforementioned Guardian article:

“The academic system incentivises journals and researchers to publish exciting findings, and citations are taken into account for promotion and tenure. But history suggests that the more dramatic the results, the more likely they are to be wrong.”

So do we really have science on the one hand, and the social systems of science on the other hand?

Some “radical” philosophers of science (such as the ones just mentioned), as well as historians of science, have strongly questioned this bifurcation or binary opposition.

More relevantly, when we read the phrase ‘A new study says [x]’, we should be aware — at least to some degree — of the (to use Professor Nosek’s words again) social systems of science in which that study was embedded.

Other Media Clichés About Scientific Studies

The headline ‘A new study says [x]’ can even be taken to be a journalistic cliché. So now let’s looks at some other examples.

Take this headline: ‘A new study says that [x] might lead to [y]’.

A lot of other headlines (or actual studies) say that ‘[x] might be [y]’, ‘[x] could be [y]’ or ‘[x] could occur if [y]’.

The (very) important word here is might.

To be extreme for a moment. x might lead to all sorts of things. The probability of x leading to y may also be fantastically small. What’s more, the fact that it’s a fantastically small probability may not even be mentioned in the news item (or even the study) itself.

Indeed, there could be a flying teapot floating around the Sun (see ‘Russell’s teapot’). The Royal Family may be controlled by alien reptiles (see here). The world could come to an end on August the 20th, 2023. There could be philosophical zombies. Etc.

So saying that something could happen (or that something could be the case), may not be much of claim. Of course, the news item (or actual study) will still have the veneer of being important — even very important.

So all this has to be placed within the context of the infinite number of things which could be the case. What’s more, if ‘A new study says [x] is going to happen’, then another study (perhaps published the day after) may say that ‘[x] is unlikely to happen’.

In other news headlines about studies (as well as the studies themselves) we also have the common, “[x] has been associated with [y]”. Again, and at an extreme, anything can be associated with anything else. [See note.]

Yet many journalists and editors don’t care about all this.

Indeed, even if journalists don’t sympathise with the explicit or implicit politics of the study (i.e., if they don’t want to “weaponize” it), or even care about the science of the study, then they may still write a titillating and saleable news item with the headline ‘A new study says [x]’. After all, most editors love this kind of stuff.

Conclusion

It must now be said that criticising particular scientists and particular studies is sometimes — indeed often — deemed to be what’s called “anti-science”. Yet seeing all such criticisms as being anti-science is itself very… anti-science. Or, at the very least, it’s very unscientific. In other words, this conflation of science itself with particular scientists and particular studies saying particular things at particular times is very unscientific.

More relevantly, this conflation of science itself with whatever a new study says is scientifically naïve.

However, it can be acknowledged that taking such a view of science may lead some people to arbitrarily pick and choose which scientists or scientific studies to believe. Yet that’s also certainly the case with many of those people who conflate particular scientists, particular scientific institutions or particular studies with (what’s now come to be called) “the science”.

Finally, all the above isn’t to argue that all studies are false, biased or a waste of time…

However, there are many good reasons (some just discussed) to believe that many studies are.

Of course, it would need to be explained why certain studies are false, biased or a waste of time, and others aren’t. And that explanation may itself display biases or simply show personal interests or concerns. It can also be suspected that most people do deem various (even many) studies to be false, wrong, biased or simply a waste of time. Of course, these conclusions too will probably involve at least some bias or personal interest.

Yet these controversial — often fierce — debates about what studies say are a very good thing… for science.

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Note

(1) The guilt by association trick is used a hell of a lot in politics and on social media. For example, Person A is — as the phrase has it — “linked to” (nefarious) Group Y or Person Z in order to discredit that person. Yet that link may well be very weak or completely irrelevant. Still, the journalist’s (or activist’s) purpose is to plant that link into the minds of his viewers or readers.

Marxists on the Linguistic Idealism of Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

In my first essay on Catherine Belsey and linguistic idealism (‘Poststructuralism and Deconstruction as Forms of (Linguistic) Idealism’), I focused on purely philosophical matters. In the second essay (‘Linguistic Idealism as a Weapon of Poststructuralist/Postmodernist Politics’), the theme is explicit in the title itself. This final essay is similar to the second, except that it focusses on various Marxist critiques of poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy, as well on how Marxists have also tied these two isms to linguistic idealism.

In simple and perhaps crude terms, poststructuralists and postmodernists believe that politics is all about the words (or “discourses”) we use. Of course, these are simple terms that poststructuralists and postmodern philosophers themselves would never actually use.

To cut the story short. This means that poststructuralists and postmodern philosophers believe (or believed) that (radical) political change is mainly (sometimes exclusively) about changing the words we use.

Put that way, it can be strongly suspected (again) that poststructuralists and postmodern philosophers (or their defenders) would respond by saying that things ain’t that simple.

They never are.

In any case, as the literary critic, academic and poststructuralist Catherine Belsey herself put it:

“If language, in other words, transmits the knowledges [note the plural] and values that constitutes a culture, it follows that the existing meanings are not ours to command.”

So if poststructuralists (like Belsey) want to change the “knowledges and values” of our culture and society, then they must also change our “meanings” and our words. More specifically, academics need to become the new (to use a word Belsey uses elsewhere) “Master”, and then create and “command” a new lexicon. In other words, poststructuralist academics must either change the meanings of what Belsey calls “old words”, or create new words with new meanings. And, after all that, they hope that their radical semantic changes will filter down to those outside the Academy…

These radical semantic changes have filtered down.

Catherine Belsey

In Belsey’s own words:

“If meanings are not given or guaranteed, but lived all the same, it follows that they can be challenged and changed. [] If meaning is a matter of social convention, it concerns and involves all of us.”

Moreover:

“Postmodernism celebrates the capability of the signifier [basically, word or term] itself to create new forms and, indeed, new rules.”

All this should be familiar to most readers.

For the last decade or even less (especially in the last couple of years), there have been all sorts of new words to grasp (as well as old words being used in new ways) in politics and on social media. (To some degree, that has always been the case.)

So do these new (poststructuralist and postmodernist) words, or do these old words with new (poststructuralist and postmodernist) meanings, refer to things?

Belsey and other poststructuralists don’t believe that they need to.

Are they about the world?

There is no ̶w̶o̶r̶l̶d̶ outside the text.

[Jacques Derrida, who’s the main man behind Belsey’s own poststructuralism, once wrote: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” This is usually translated as the following: “There is nothing outside the text.” See note 1.]

Thus, poststructuralists and postmodernists are linguistic idealists.

More relevantly, linguistic idealism was chosen (as a philosophical position) primarily because it serves various political causes and goals.

Marxist Critiques of Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

The main theme of this essay (as with the last one) is the politics of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Indeed, it’s the politics of postmodernism and poststructuralism (or the lack thereof!) which is (or which was) very problematic to many Marxists.

To name names.

Marxist writers such a Christopher Norris, Frederic Jameson and (the Socialist Workers Party’s) Alex Callinicos have been particularly critical of postmodern philosophers.

So, firstly, take the critical theorist and Marxist Douglas Kellner, who wrote the following in his book Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond:

“I am not sure that we have now transcended and left behind modernity, class politics, labour and production, imperialism, fascism and the other phenomena described by classical and neo-Marxism.”

The Marxist and literary critic Fredric Jameson went even further when he argued that the whole of poststructuralism and postmodernism simply expressed “the logic of late capitalism”. [See note 2 on “woke capitalism”.]

More relevantly, Marxists have often argued that the political impotence of both poststructuralism and postmodernism is a direct result of their linguistic idealism. (It must be said that Marxists don’t always use the precise term “linguistic idealism” when discussing these issues.)

More broadly, many Marxists have claimed that poststructuralism isn’t political at all.

Or, at the very least, Marxists have claimed that it isn’t political in the right way.

As a writer in Revolutionary Publications has put it:

“[Linguistic] idealism in the garb of radicalism wants us to live within the prison-world of language.”

In other words, poststructuralism and postmodernism only have a glossy veneer of radicalism. Yes — the politics (or radicalism) of poststructuralism and postmodernism is merely a simulacrum.

This is something which has been stressed by many other Marxists.

Yet poststructuralism and postmodernism clearly are political.

Indeed, the embrace of linguistic idealism was an important way in which poststructuralists (like Belsey) and postmodern philosophers (like Lyotard) could advance their own political causes and goals.

Language as Substructure

So now take the following words from an article called ‘The Linguistic Idealism of Poststructuralism/Postmodernism’:

“This [kind of] idealism has turned language into an all-pervasive force both — sovereign and dominant, virtually diminishing human agency. Everything is discourse [] and discourse is everything.”

What’s more:

“[Linguistic] idealism preaches [about] our imprisonment within language.”

It can be argued that poststructuralists and postmodern philosophers have believed — and sometimes stated — that human persons are simply the passive subjects of language. What’s more (at least as Marxists have expressed things), poststructuralists and postmodernists have made language the substructure (even if not deemed to be the material substructure) of politics and society as a whole.

As the just quoted article in Revolutionary Publications puts it:

“The ‘sign’ is posed as if something material, the only reality, and thus [poststructuralists and postmodernists] can discard all notions of social reality.”

What’s more, there is even (do I need to write “even”?) a Marxist defence of objective truth in the following passage:

“With the departure of objective things [] there cannot be any fundamental role for [] truth as a correspondence between the domain of objective things and the subjective idea.”

Is that a misrepresentation of poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy?

Well, French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard — for one — once wrote that “[r]eality itself is too obvious to be true”, and that “truth does not exist”.

The English literary theorist, critic and Marxist Terry Eagleton put a similar point about postmodernism when he summed up its philosophy as the position that there

“is in truth nothing there to be reflected, no reality which is not itself already image, spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction”.

Ironically (or perhaps not), Baudrillard agreed with Eagleton’s account. At least he did so in the following passage:

“Postmodernity is [] a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”

The following point is important to Marxists — as it is to many others.

If there is “no reality”, and everything is “image, spectacle, simulacrum, gratuitous fiction”, then what grounds do poststructuralists and postmodernists have for political action? (At the very least, how would they argue their political case?)

Thus, is it simply a case of language games (or Lyotard’s phrase regimes) against language games? (Remember, “language game” is a term that Catherine Belsey herself uses — see here.)

Of course, not only Marxists have made these points against postmodern philosophy and poststructuralism.

Noam Chomsky on Postmodern Philosophy

Take this small selection of Noam Chomsky’s words on both postmodern philosophy and postmodern philosophers:

“pseudo-scientific posturing”, “cults”, “obscurantism”, “trivial”, “complicated verbiage”, “the mutual-admiration societies of intellectuals”, “crazy ideas”, “incomprehensible rhetoric”, “incoherent sentences”, “inflated rhetoric”, “self- and mutual-admiration”, “meaningless”, “irrational”…

In terms of philosophical detail, Chomsky fills in some detail here:

“One of the ways to have exciting new ideas is to tear everything to shreds, and say ‘everything was wrong’. You know, the ‘Enlightenment was wrong’. There’s ‘no foundationalism’. That’s right, there’s no foundationalism. [and] that was known in the 17th century. But they had to rediscover it, and put it in a fancy way. [] Well out of this comes this irrational tendency.”

As with the Marxists just discussed, it was the political consequences of all this “complicated verbiage”, etc. which concerned Chomsky.

He continued by saying that all this “did undermine dedicated activism”. More concretely, Chomsky recalled the time (in this YouTube video) when a student asked the following “rather plaintive question”:

“‘Bertrand Russell tells us we should look for the truth, but the philosophers tell us there is no truth. So what should we do?’”

Chomsky also said that a political theory should be — or at least it must become — “well tested and verified”. That is, a theory should

“appl[y] to the conduct of foreign affairs or the resolution of domestic or international conflict, rather than simply remain as pseudo-scientific posturing”.

What’s more, the “little” parts of postmodernism which are

“sometimes quite interesting [still] lack [ ] consequences for the real world problems that occupy my time and energies”.

Chomsky’s criticisms almost perfectly harmonise with some Marxist critiques of postmodern philosophy (this isn’t to say that Chomsky is a Marxist himself), such as those found in Terry Eagleton’s book The Illusions of Postmodernism, Alex Callinicos’s book Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, and Fredric Jameson’s book Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

Now take the analytic philosopher Ian Hacking and the very title of his book, The Social Construction of What?

… Sure, Hacking uses the words “social construction”, not linguistic construction. However, we can just as easily ask the following questions:

Language games about what?

Words and terms about what?

“Discourse” about what?

… But hang on a minute!

Catherine Belsey has already told us (as stated in the first essay) that words are about words. This also means that discourse is about discourse.

More broadly, whatever is said or written in a language game will be about other things which are written and said within that language game.

Thus, in poststructuralism and postmodernism, the world and reference are erased.

This effectively means that we now have linguistic idealism as a weapon to advance various political causes and goals.

In response, Marxists say either that poststructuralism and postmodern philosophy aren’t political at all, or that the adoption of linguistic idealism doesn’t (or can’t) work to bring about (real) radical political change.

Readers can decide if Marxists are right about this.

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Notes

(1) See ‘Deconstructing Systems — There is Nothing Outside the Text’, in which the writer says that this phrase isn’t idealist. He then (if implicitly!) says that it is. Harish tells us that “you can no longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language”. That was after quoting Alex Callinicos (mentioned in the essay above) saying that “Derrida wasn’t, like some ultra-idealist, reducing everything to language”.

Of course, any mention (or “appeal to”) “reality” will include “language”. Does that mean that reality isn’t “independent of language”? What we say about reality can’t be independent of language — by definition! But surely that wasn’t Derrida’s point because it’s a statement of the obvious.

Few contemporary realists have argued that we (well) intuit reality without the need for language. At the same time, Derrida surely couldn’t have believed that the world and things are literally made up of words or language.

Perhaps one alternative reading is that Derrida’s position is, in actual fact, commonplace. It’s a (to use Hugh Mellor’s words) “trivial truism” dressed up in arcane prose.

What’s more, almost every other explanation (or interpretation) I’ve read of Derrida’s words “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” is different — sometimes radically different. So no wonder many people have taken the translation (or the original French) literally. (Not everyone wants to “play with the sign”.)

To be honest, I don’t really understand much in Harish’s essay either. It doesn’t help that he never quotes Derrida himself. (He does quote the famous words: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”) However, he quotes other philosophers attempting to make sense of Derrida.

Thus, Harish’s essay itself must also be purely (or merely?) a reading of Derrida. After all, readings are all we have. And that’s according to these very same philosophers. Indeed, Harish himself makes that point (I think!) in his essay…

Okay. I read Derrida as being a linguistic idealist.

(2) A few Marxists and people on the Radical Left are making these points today against such a thing as “woke capitalism” However, the just-linked Wikipedia article makes it seem as if only (what it calls) “conservatives” and those on the “American right” believe that there’s such a thing as woke capitalism.

My flickr account and Twitter account.