Les Green, a teacher of the philosophy of law at some college in Oxfordshire, put a post on his philosophy blog about “bullshit” in academic paper titles. As you might imagine, bullshit provides fertile soil for such titles. As background, he presents a brief typology of bullshit, referring to great authorities in the field, like G.A. Cohen and Harry Frankfurt. As an example of Cohenistic obscurantist bullshit Green proffers the following sentence: “Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability.” It is put forward as a random piece of unmitigated bullshit cobbled together by Green himself. It is actually a direct quote from Judith Butler, who is herself paraphrasing Derrida’s critique of J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory. It is clearly a meaningful sentence that makes a genuine claim, particularly when seen in the context of Butler’s argument (or Derrida’s for that matter). Whatever one may say about the merits or otherwise of these arguments, the sentence is manifestly not the piece of obscurantist bullshit that Green claims it is.
So why did Green say it was bullshit? By way of an explanation, I suggested adding the category of meta-bullshit to his typology. I sent this comment to his blog:
What we have on our hands is a fourth kind of bullshit, a bullshit about bullshit, a meta-bullshit, one in which the accusation of obscurantism is used to obscure the accuser’s intellectual laziness, parochialism, and refusal to engage seriously with any thought that does not originate in the narrow institutional confines of anglophone analytic philosophy.
Despite the comment being pertinent and to the point Green refused to allow it to be posted. The comments he did allow are generally sycophantic. For example, the first comment on his post merely quotes some of his potty humour and adds the comment “Perfect!” to it. Green appears to want to close himself off from any kind of criticism whatsoever. Not a good quality in either a philosopher or a blogger.
Like this:
Like Loading...