Piscis ipse dixit
Stanley Fish is back.
Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions…that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.
Yes yes yes, but it doesn’t follow that any and all assumptions are reasonable and sane and that therefore any old evidence is good evidence as long as it ‘comes into view in the light of’ some assumptions.
Then there is a swerve into a new topic, the fact that some people who commented on his previous musings on God claim that religion is too optimistic. Fish knows better than that.
The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent, and the struggles of faith, the dark night of the soul, feelings of unworthiness, serial backsliding, the abyss of despair.
Really?! Nothing but doubt and dissent? So the religions he knows do not include any of the majors, which are about considerably more than doubt and dissent? If the religions he knows are about nothing but doubt and dissent, he must be acquainted exclusively with very peculiar very tiny minority religions which hardly anyone is aware of. His post on the other hand seem to be about ‘God’ which usually refers to a character with some connection with the familiar and well-known monotheisms.
Brian Leiter asks Does the NY Times Not Realize That Stanley Fish is Philosophically Incompetent? Jason Brennan has an interesting comment:
Nicholas Shackel has a fun paper in Metaphilosophy called “The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology.” Among other things, he describes the method of “Troll’s Truisms.” The idea is that postmodernists like to express radical claims about reality and rationality, but when pressed, retreat into trivial claims no one disagrees with. Shackel gives Fish as an example of someone who does this.
I actually saw Fish perform this maneuver in person. A student group had him out here (to Brown) a few years ago. He spent 20 minutes saying that there is no objective reality, etc.–all the typical twaddle and poppycock. When some student criticized postmodernism, Fish berated the student, and then said that postmodernism is nothing more than the simple claim that all our beliefs are mediated by concepts. I was stunned.
Yep. Susan Haack calls that ‘the bit where they say it and the bit where they take it back.’
Will no one rid us of this meddlesome blowhard? Honest to Christ, Ophelia, if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were aiming to kill us through high-blood-pressure-at-a-distance.
Oh, I hates me some Fish. Almost makes me want to ritually burn the copy of “Is There a Text in this Class?” that stares at me, all “j’accuse” from my bookshelf. Don’t you dare ask me how it got there.
Hey don’t blame me, blame the New York Times! And of course our piscine friend.
Once the stuff is out there, you can’t possibly expect me to ignore it. Now you know you can’t.
I can, and I shall, expect you to ignore it. Oh hell. I know you can’t ignore that any more than any of us could be expected to ignore a hang nail. It is fun to take him apart, but at what cost to our health, I demand?!
And I do blame the New York Times. I cannot figure out why they run his blather. Is it just that it generates such pushback from readers, and thus drives eyeballs to the paper/website? Or (in a more sinister vein), is the editorial board so blinkered and besotted with Prof. Fish that they actually believe he has something erudite to say?
Either way, Gray Lady, j’accuse.
First, a nitpick: It’s Piscis ipse dixit. (Or Pisces ipsi dixerunt.) “Pisces” is plural.
I started reading this latest piece by Fish in the Times and couldn’t finish it. If they’re going to print nonsense they could at least print original nonsense.
But in this case the fishy part is that the Fish is commenting on comments on a commentary of a fictional character he created called Ditchkins. At this rate the NYT won’t need journalists. All they need do is make up a story and write stories about stories about stories. So it is not only nonsense, but, as a famous utlitarian once said in another connexion, nonsense on stilts.
I guess, if you’re going to wade through a cesspool of nonsense, stilts or chest high waders are necessary. And is this, I wonder, the kind of push-back that a struggling newspaper industry needs? I just responded to an NYT survey, asking whether I would (among other things) be prepared to pay for online content. The answer would be no, if this is the kind of content on offer. Perhaps, however, this is part of the new journalism? Real journalists no longer being affordable, the NYT is reduced poisoning the water and then fishing in it.
Oops, thanks, Dennis – I did think it was singular.
Well, to be fair to the Times, this is a blog, not the paper itself, so it probably isn’t part of the new journalism. But nonetheless – they could get good bloggers, so why get Stanley Fish?
Of course, there is more than one fish in this particular sea. One other thing. Do standards not count then, since it’s a blog?
Well that’s why I said they could get good bloggers rather than S. Fish!
But I think newspapers don’t consider their bloggers to be journalists – so bad blogging doesn’t necessarily implicate journalism as such, even if the bad blogging is on a newspaper’s website.
But it does tarnish the newspaper’s reputation with people who pay attention, so it seems a stupid thing to do – for the Guardian and for the Times.
(More than one fish – yeah – but I didn’t feel like saying dixerunt. It’s ipse dixit, I wanted to keep that.)
Yes, Ophelia, I know. I was just being a smart ass! I had just read your piece in TPM on philosophical contretemps, and didn’t quite feel up to scatology!