Poll: does Romney's pledge to censor porn make you want to vote for him?

[hifiguy]

81. And it's still the same incomprehensible BS it was

when Dworkin and MacKinnon started spewing it 25 years ago.

Some will say that words have no fixed meanings, and are therefore subject to infinite malleability which in a deeply epistomological sense may be true, just as quantum physicists say that, after a fashion. matter as we know it has no meaning. But a quantum physicist will not deny that the laws of Newtonian physics govern the way we see, touch, and otherwise interact with the world. In fact they will tell you the exact opposite. Newton's genius was in explaining how things we see and do every way work in terms of mathematical laws that expressed those everyday phenomena. People cannot observe quantum structures, so even if they are weirdly random, they don't affect everyday life in any detectable way. (I am not even going to try to get into string theory here. Therefore Newtonian physics still govern the way humans see the world, which any serious physicist will not only admit, but tell you.

In language a similar paradigm exists. Unless we accept a basic premise that words have a meaning which is commonly intelligible and has an agreed-upon meaning amongst speakers of the language in which they are expressed, communication is impossible. When someone repeatedly attempts to redefine the commonly understood word "dog" as representing an animal that looks like this



meaningful communcation is no longer possible within the framework of the English language. There are people who attempt to do just that very thing in many areas of thought. It is not just a foolish exercise, it is a deeply disconnected and/or STUPID exercise. Deliberately removing yourself from the overarching paradigm governing discourse in a given language results only in the speaking of gibberish. Departing that overarching paradigm can be interesting if one is a linguist or a French philosopher, and in those contexts it is a valid thought experiment, much like spinning out string theory is for theoretical physicists and cosmologists. Trying to make a logical argument in everyday discourse while doing the same thing is doomed from the start as an exercise in failure. So there is really no point in arguing with those who do.

I had to slog through MacKinnon and Dworkin in my last year of law school because my senior paper was in part a deconstruction of their "philosophy," if such nonsense deserves that label, as it applied to constitutional law. (I got an A, BTW). I had to understand this crap, to the extent that it can be understood given its often insane redefinitions of common words and utter inability to come to terms with some aspects of human nature, to be able to effectively critique it. It was horseshit then and it is horseshit now. In addition to using the English language in ways that resemble nothing so much as a funhouse mirror, their work is the worst English prose I have read this side of Ayn Rand, and is every bit as didactic, humorless and content-free.

In other words, when you throw away all the framework of the operative paradigm, you no longer have anything of value or interest to say to anyone else. And all anyone has to do to understand why is read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

ETA: To bring the argument to a terminal degree of simplicity, one need only look to the words of Thomas Paine, who famously said that "to argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."


Have a good weekend!



hfg