Plato – Sweet Talk

Featured image is a scholar with his books and globe.

Meredith L. Patterson has a wonderful post on the Platonic dialogues, and the different roles particular characters fill in them.

At a high level, there are just two roles: smart guy and dumb guy. Socrates is the only smart guy, so if you are his interlocutor, you’re the dumb guy.

But on the dumb guy side, Meredith makes a further distinction:

Broadly, they fall into two classes: hubristic dumb guys and epistemically humble dumb guys. Hubristic dumb guys think they know all the answers, and by definition don’t, because nobody does. Epistemically humble dumb guys know they don’t know most of the answers, and don’t mind, apart from the whole not-knowing part, and would like to know more.

You’d think that for your self-image it would be better to be Socrates, but I honestly kinda like being the second kind of dumb guy.

I think this is on the mark. To see why, consider two extreme interpretations of Socrates.

Continue reading “Ignorant, Humble, and Curious” →

Millais_Boyhood_of_Raleigh — The Boyhood of Raleigh by John Everett Millais

As far as I can tell, “deconstruction” is a word that simply means “academic trolling,” at least when it is performed by the man who coined it—Jacques Derrida.

This can clearly be seen in his deconstruction of speech act theorist J. L. Austin, which Jonathan Culler provides an account of in On Deconstruction.

Austin was arguing, against his predecessors, that language is not simply about making descriptive statements. He pointed out that fitting language into that straightjacket meant treating as exceptional what in fact was characteristic of huge amounts of discourse. As an alternative, he proposed the idea of language as including both constative statements, those which are true or false, and performative statements, those which have some consequence within the social reality in which they are stated. The canonical case of the latter would be the making of a promise.

Continue reading “Interrogation, Dialectic, and Storytelling” →