I was reading this piece: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/philosophy-returns-to-the-real-world/?_r=0
We start with a softball game, with Stanley Fish as umpire:
When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring at a practice once when the batter, my buddy Mike, now a distinguished professor at Yale, argued a call. Fish good-humoredly pointed out that what’s a ball and what’s a strike is not an objective, external, or natural fact, it’s an interpretive practice; and according to that practice, whatever the umpire calls is real: If he calls it a strike, it’s a strike.
What do we call this attitude everywhere else? Fascism. Or in another era, Monarchism, or at least Oligarchy. It is “might makes right”. The entirety of the Western Liberal tradition of philosophy was intended to end it. Everything our best minds did for several hundred years, which resulted in an unprecedented out-pouring of political freedom and vast material wealth, spread across all classes, was oriented precisely around avoiding assholes like this getting the upper hand.
Well, they got the upper hand.
Then we read about his interactions with Richard Rorty (PoMo, which means “intellectually impoverished Modernist”):
Rorty challenged me, over and over, to describe an undescribed object, to tell him about something outside language. He didn’t, according to himself, deny the existence of the world, he simply held that the assertion that there was stuff outside of language was itself a linguistic practice.
Jesus H. Christ. How the fuck would you describe something without using words? This is a fucking tautology. If he had asked me to describe the feeling of being kicked in the shins without using words I would have kicked him in the shins. Yes, plural. Then I would have hoped he asked me to describe the feeling of a groin kick.
Can you name me any word which has no descriptive referent? Cow? Milk? Even more complex words like “justice”, which can be defined in many ways, can still be defined. I would define it as equality before the law, regardless of social class, race, or gender; and the diligent effort to punish the guilty.
As I have said many times “that” is a fully descriptive term. Who is Bob? HIM. We do not form words and then match them with outer realities. Our entire early life is wordless. It is pure experience. And everything that matters afterwards is also wordless. Love is wordless. Joy is wordless.
This is the creed of people avoiding feelings. I would suggest that is the psychological root of the whole thing.
And I would offer an alternative definition for philosophy I put forward earlier: Philosophy is the structured intellectual process of learning to effectively get from THIS to THAT.
Finally, he feels the need to defend those who would speak of “reality”:
Some of the motivation for the realist turn has been ecological: Climate change isn’t just in our heads or in our descriptions, but a real-world situation that requires real-world physical transformations. Others have been political: defenses of the urgent truth of justice, or of the importance of material economic conditions and the treatment of physical human bodies. And I think that, as our experience becomes in many ways increasingly mediated or virtual, we simply started yearning toward the old-fashioned physical environment, which was always available and still is, and on which whatever we see on a screen depends utterly. Ideas are always an index of longings.
People like this should be fired and forced to apprentice in practical trades like plumbing and carpentry. Such idiocy would not long endure a daily engagement with real and practical problems.