New APPS

10 responses to “new philosopher’s metablog (hat-tip Spiros)”

1. 

   Paul Gowder

   May 6, 2014

   Jesus, why did you link to that horrible thread? I ended up READING some of it! And now I want to drink heavily, and it’s 8am, far too early for heavy drinking.

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2. 

   David Borman

   May 6, 2014

   This may not be what you had in mind (and not the least because it’s neither a book, nor am I desirous of claiming the mantle of a smart Habermasian). But, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure Habermas’ account is likely to be helpful in formulating positive policies (although I’m also not sure I know quite what you have in mind by that). The “ideal speech situation” is intended to model the presuppositions that anyone sincerely attempting to engage in discourse must make and must presume their interlocutors will make. This includes that all parties are actually oriented toward the truth (or rightness, in moral discourse); that all affected are able to raise challenges, that people will say only what they really believe, that they will abide by rules of consistency and avoid equivocation, and so on. But these presuppositions are always more or less counterfactual (that’s what puts the “quasi”- and “quasi-transcendental” – unlike the rules of chess, Habermas says, we can and must accept approximate satisfaction in the case of discourse since, for instance, no one’s view are perfectly consistent). Actual discourses reveal the extent to which the presuppositions are redeemed or violated; if they are sufficiently violated, discourse simply breaks down. And, of course, if one suspects in advance that these conditions for discourse won’t be met, then one can still engage in some kind of language-mediated interaction, but it won’t be discourse (perhaps what some informal logicians call “eristic interaction” – that is, belligerence and name-calling).
   Anyway, the point is that Habermas offers a vocabulary for describing how communication breaks down in online fora, as well as a set of terms for criticizing pseudo-discourse (pretty much in keeping with other pragmatic approaches to informal logic). But it’s not clear to me, at least, that anything by way of positive policy is implied by this. If internet communication raises the possibility of modifying his theory, as you mention, it’s not because the messy reality somehow contradicts the “ideal speech situation.” Habermas abandoned that description because of this empiricist misunderstanding (in either “A Reply,” or “A Reply to my Critics”, I forget which) and now sticks with talking about quasi-transcendental presuppositions which are summarized by Principle (U).
   Yet something like trolling, which represents a kind of bullshit participation – in something like Frankfurt’s sense of indifference to the validity of one’s claims – does seem to me potentially problematic for Habermas. I wrote a paper on Habermas and bullshit a few years ago, although it doesn’t deal with online communication specifically (if you’re interested: (http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8295578). The upshot of the argument is this: It’s not that Habermas lacks resources for criticizing bullshit (or, in this case, trolling), as a violation of the validity claim of sincerity and of a procedural rule of discourse, but that he believes that the attitudes toward communication that are required for participation in discourse, especially the insistence on the part of competent language users on the difference between communicative and strategic action, are the product of socialization. As a result, the sheer pervasiveness of bullshit as a strategic use of language (sometimes openly so, as Jonathan Lear complained in a review of Frankfurt’s account) threatens to shape our attitudes toward public language use in communicatively-pathological ways, undermining the empirical basis of the communicative-strategic distinction. One example of such pathology is the “backfire effect”, as documented by Nyhan and Riefler (“When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions”), Lebo and Cassino (“The Aggregated Consequences of Motivated Reasoning”), and others. There’s disagreement over how to explain the phenomenon, but part of any explanation is the way that we have come to interpret information and speech in the media in terms of pre-formulated, partisan positions (“An article presenting more evidence for global warming? That’s just more liberal media bias”, etc.). This suspends the rules of discourse (as oriented to truth) from the outset: we come to expect that public expression is always a vehicle for a partisan agenda of one kind or another, between which one must simply choose. As Horkheimer and Adorno complained, we come to hear public invocations of words like justice and right as mere slogans. Of course, trolling is not always specifically political; but it’s prevalence has the same cynicism-inducing effect on our attitudes toward the speech of others (“do they really mean that, or are they a troll? Should I engage the point as sincere, or ignore as strategic thread-jacking?”).
   The sociological and social-psychological side of Habermas’ theory is vulnerable to these sorts of changes, which threaten to transform his account of communication from a reconstruction of intuitive knowledge to a purely normative theory. There are certainly some reasons for concern, I think, when we consider how the attitudes of young people today are likely to be shaped, having grown up with internet fora as perhaps their primary model of public discourse. But to return to the main issue: what Habermas once called “the ideal speech situation” is supposed to be a reconstruction of existing intuitions, not an account of how actual interactions proceed nor a policing tool to be invoked against individuals who lack the relevant commitments or intuitions (to whom it’s invocation would probably be question-begging); if anything, it tells the non-trolls when and why to abandon the effort to convince.

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3. 

   PA

   May 6, 2014

   Actually, the “Zizek’s Jokes” threadjacking at PA was relatively atypical. In fact, sufficiently so as to prompt the backlash among the cranky jerks that habituate said blog that ultimately led to the metablog.

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4. 

   Catarina Dutilh Novaes

   May 7, 2014

   Some people have way too much free time in their hands, is all I want to say.

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5. 

   Glaucon

   May 7, 2014

   Thanks for the shout-out, Jon — and for commenting there.

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6. 

   NotIntoTheCreepiness

   May 7, 2014

   Ok, Glaucon, there’s a really creepy person over there who keeps talking about “gyrations”. Do you really have to give that sort of creepiness a platform? You’re mean. Not creepy. Think it over please.

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7. 

   Jon Cogburn

   May 7, 2014

   Thanks so much. This is incredibly rich and thought provoking.

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8. 

   Jon Cogburn

   May 7, 2014

   Yeah, it’s a strange experiment.
   It would be very nice if it ended up getting used for intelligent critiques of philosophy blogs. It might!
   This being said, as far as I can tell some percentage of it is just in the service of lancing the boil that had become the PA comment threads and some percentage of it is turning over a rock to see what’s underneath. Both are still valuable goals I think.
   We tried really hard as long as we could not to go to pre-moderation over here. But it was ultimately just impossible not to. So many anonymous people were saying things that either really were libelous or such that people would send us angry e-mails threatening us with defamation. And then you get people just derailing conversations.
   When this got really bad, we didn’t know how to deal with it and made a lot of mistakes, and finally gave up what we’d been trying to do. Some people quit (mostly because it’s too much work and they are very busy) and those of us left premoderate all of the posts now. I think around the time we switched over almost all the other non-anonymous philosophy blogs did for similar reasons.
   I miss the days when we didn’t have to do that, and hope that philosophy metablog works as a pressure valve so that the few blogs that don’t premoderate can keep going with the more free wheeling discussions.
   Sorry if I’m misinterpreting your motives. In any case, I think it’s a really cool idea.

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9. 

   Jon Cogburn

   May 7, 2014

   That’s why God invented mimosas and bloody marys. Really nice if you live within stumbling distance to a place that serves brunch.

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10. 

    Jon Cogburn

    May 8, 2014

    That’s right. But Spiros has done multiple posts now saying he might shut down the blog as a result of the threadjacking.
    People who don’t run blogs don’t understand what a drag it is to try to moderate these kinds of things. If you are not anonymous then many people assume you approve of what people are saying in your comment threads. You get e-mails from named philosophers for whom you have tremendous respect taking issue with you. You get some e-mails threatening you for defamation/libel. I don’t know how plausible that is, but going through such a lawsuit would financially ruin most of us.
    So you start to feel responsible for policing the thread. And this is not at all easy to do, especially when the threadjackers are continuously trying to get your goat and pranking you with sock puppets. Then they denounce you on other blogs.
    You can’t really win. I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had with people where I end up telling them not to assume Spiros agrees with the stuff people say in the comment sections of his blog. It’s a very simple point, but not a natural one for lots of readers. I don’t know if he’s thinking about packing it in because enough people know who he is and he’s getting too much grief or if its just too much work to deal with all of this even as someone not blogging under his own name.
    As I noted in the response to Glaucon, most blogs have dealt with this by going to pre-moderation and just not posting all of the comments. This also takes a lot of time, and a lot of people have just quit (Spiros says he’ll quit rather than do that). But the solution leaves a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth, because I think that free speech isn’t just a matter of what laws Congress does and doesn’t enact. This is part of why I’m excited about Glaucon’s blog.

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