[PEN-L:30629] Re: RE: Re: academic lingo

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

RE: [PEN-L:30625] Re: academic lingo
----- Original Message -----
From: Devine, James



I think you're right. Many times on pen-l, I've railed against the Mandarin
Mentality of academics, who use all sorts of unneeded jargon or math in
order to make their ideas seem profound (or to get tenure, or whatever).


But the idea of "a new pseudo-mathematical language that would make
meaningless debates impossible and force some form of responsible analysis"
has been used for this purpose.


==============

The guy Ravi is thinking about is Rudolf Carnap, who was a longtime friend
of Quine. His quest for a neutral language of describing physical and social
facts led to the whole verificationist theory of meaning and truth disputes
in epistemology and the philosopy of science -theory ladenness of
observation, reflexivity as undermining of the doctrine of verificationism
itself etc. If I remember right he was a fan of the Esperanto 'movement.'

The lineage of what Carnap was struggling for comes from Leibniz' dream of a
form of language and decision for resolving diplomatic disputes which were
rooted in theological disputes; the tower of Babel problem. Once you read
his Monadology as a form of 'social physics' his claim of the
pre-established harmony may be shown to be a foil for "just who gets to have
the final say" in a dispute in which the parties can't even agree as to
whether there is one true answer to some ethical, normative, injunctive
dilemma, trilemma, quadrilemma etc. Since the pre-established harmony is
something, Leibniz claimed, was something imperishable it not only served as
'first cause' it was also a telos of all the monads as well; even as Leibniz
knew that the mechanics and calculus banished teleology from physical
causality. The pre-established harmony is now the axiom of the
self-consistency of mathematical space-time. In social systems however, the
tower of Babel problem[s] is/are still with us and the alethic and dialethic
aspects of logic are undergoing a serious revival - paraconsistency,
defeasible deontic logics etc.

Back in those days it seems God/Scripture was the "final word"
[pre-established harmony] which led to the modern obsession with objectivity
and justification procedures because of the potential for interminable
interpretive regresses due to the notion that Scripture itself admitted of
an irreducible plurality of perspectives. Hence Kant's obsession with the
notion of the Transcendental, meta-perspectival marks the secularization of
the manner in which the Pietists approached the issue of the problem of
interpretive regresses. The problems are still with us of course and the
'enlargement' of our vocabularies in order to secure advantages in disputes
which may not have any one right, true answer makes for jargon as a
positional good.........

Ian