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Book reviews for "Smith,_Barbara_Herrnstein" sorted by average review score:

Goodness & Advice (University Center for Human Values Series)
Published in Paperback by Princeton Univ Pr (2003)
Authors: Judith Jarvis Thomas, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith
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a peculiar book
There is a rather peculiar book. Thompson's main goal is to criticize consequentialism but it appears that most consequentialists don't even accept the consequentialism that is her target, namely some kind of view that says we should promote *goodness simpliciter*, NOT goodness for sentient beings, goodness for persons, other states that are intrinsically good or whatever. Thompson has an odd target and even if she refutes it, it's not clear what difference it makes to most other consequentialist theories. (Thompson's view seems like it could be classified as a consequentialism anyway).

Four people give comments on Thompson's main text but two of them are't even philosophers (I think they are from English departments!??). Nussbaum's comments interesting though.

Some of Thompson's articles on these topics are a bit better than this book. I'd recommend checking them out first.


Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy
Published in Paperback by Harvard Univ Pr (1997)
Author: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
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Unimportant by its own (postmodern) standards.
As my first and last reading in postmodernism, what immediately stood out was the turgid obscurity of the writing. Random page:

"Apel's rebuttal of Albert's anti-foundationalist argument via the charge of performative contradiction assumes that the a priori validity of logical rules must be assumed". Example would be nice, but definitions and examples are scarce and would cramp the author's style.

After a few pages, a greater realization: one can read for pages and not encounter an actual idea. Words, chosen for ambiguity, arranged on paper so as to have no meaning when considered in sequence.

The book is unimportant in two ways: it is hypocritical and has no utility. It is an abstract game in which the author depends on 3rd-order natural-language word definitions to avoid committing to anything specific. Well, almost.

ON IT'S OWN TERMS, the book is necessarily a final (meta)attempt to provide the universal mechanism to avoid "cognitive dissonance", the discomfort felt when exposed to another viewpoint. But that assumes that cognitive dissonace is something all seek to avoid. Thus, there is the rejection of absolutes, itself based on a specific assertion -- the assumed universal/absolute desire to resolve cognitive dissonance.

Given the record of intellectuals and academia in jumping on-board intellectual frauds from Marxism to Keynesian economics to Freudian psychology to Kinsey sexuality (See "Degenerate Moderns" by Jones) only to see them collapse in ruins of error after thousands of Ph.D's and careers were built around them, post-modernism can be seen as a self-defense mechanism for academia. An attempt to declare that all human reason is inadequate, there being no truth. "We could only have failed so monstrously if human reason itself is unreal".

Self-centered arrogance. Human reason is fine, albeit finite. It is demonstrably irrational assumptions of academic elites that are unreal:

1. "There are no absolutes".Comment: The statement claims absolute knowledge, thus contradicts itself. (There is the temperature absolute zero. Has much to do with entropy, thus the cause-effect direction of time, with all THOSE consequences). Question: Do you suppose there are no absolutes or there are people who PREFER there are no absolutes, so they can do what they want?

2. "Everything is relative". Comment: Contradicts itself, being another absolute assertion of truth even as it claims there are none. Meaningless.

3. "We can't know anything with certainty". Comment: Except, it seems, this one belief. Which, being an example, is thus self-refuting and meaningless. It asserts an absolute truth as it claims one is not possible.

4. "What a person believes is the result of social, psychological or chemical conditioning" Comment: Then this belief is also the result of such conditioning, invalidating its significance to an equal extent.

5. "There is no truth". Comment: If true, the statement is an example contradicting it's assertion. Another impossible statement that excludes itself.

6. "Only empirically verifiable or falsifiable statements have any meaning". Comment: This idea cannot be verified and prohibits itself from being simply assumed true. It is thus impossible.

Post-modernism was invented to protect elites from the cognitive dissonance that comes with recognizing the irrationality of the assumed "enlightened" beliefs above. (That, and to amuse the French: "Jacques, I can't believe the Americans bought into us AGAIN...finally, revenge for all those 'I Love Lucy' reruns.")

Once these beliefs are recognized and eliminated, human reason does well. The reasoning that requires the above to be self-refuting statements allows one to construct the mathematics to send a spacecraft 30 million miles to another planet and arrive within 100 meters. Human reason does well if started from a certain point.

The author, of course, doesn't deny any of this (and cannot), just constructs a preemptive defensive fog of imprecise words so as to cover all bases simultaneously. This fog is dependent on using implied but less common alternate word definitions. For example, when trying to address the charge of self-refutation, it turns out the charge must be "unloaded".

"Refutation" has too precise a meaning, thus the post-modernist has to "unload" the charge of self-refutation instead of "refuting" the charge of self-refutation. "Unload" is typically used with respect to physical labor. By switching it to refer to a logical operation, the author creates a vagueness of meaning that allows the reader to fill with imagination or assumption. Deeply dishonest, intentional miscommunication.

She writes "for the self-refutation charge to have logical force (as officially measured), the mirror-reversal it indicates must be exact". First, I wonder how, ON HER TERMS, she can know this. Second, I wonder what "mirror-reversal" logic is. Third, on her own terms, how and who "officially measures" logical force"?

There may be a suggestive parallel to post-modernism in science. Mathematical reasoning often contains infinite series summations, or sometimes, additional small terms in the expressions. For computational reasons, these expressions are often truncated to an approximation. Thus the spacecraft arrives 100 meters off target after 30 million miles. The error has little to do with the arbitrariness of human reason. 3rd order and higher terms were deliberately neglected, not worth carrying.

I think post-modernists fixate on these infinite series (without knowing about them, being verbalists), missing the bigger picture that to put a spacecraft down within 100 meters conclusively demonstrates successful reasoning of high order, including the precise boundaries of what one doesn't know. I suppose covariance mapping would be shocking revelation to a post-modernist.

While the book is UNimportant ON ITS OWN TERMS with respect to reason, it is very significant for academia. It promotes intellectual suicide of the current ruling elite that has failed so badly. Even as modern academics eat this stuff up to protect themselves from facing the awful recognition of the concretely false assumptions of humanism that frame their lives, it nullifies their intellectual existence and prepares for the collapse of degenerate institutions, making way for the new. Thus, some hope; the dead-wood is clearing itself. If it doesn't go fascist, universities might be in good shape in 20-30 years.

Careful exploration of relativism and its consequences
The previous (hostile) reviewer noted that this was his "first and last" reading in postmodernism.

It shows.

In fact, his objections to Belief and Resistance are entirely anticipated in the book itself.

In this book, Herrnstein Smith extends the arguments in her earlier _Contingencies of Value_, showing how belief patterns can be sustained and effective without reference to "objective" truth. It _does_ take a certain patience to get used to her style, which here, even more than in her earlier books, is qualified sometimes nearly to the point of disappearing. But in fact, the particular idiom she has developed is a consequence of her intellectual journey, and the book is a serious defence of a serious philosophical position.

Another potential problem is the "occasional" nature of some of the pieces. Unlike her earlier works, Belief and Resistance collects pieces originally written for various forums, and often in response to critiques of her earlier formulations. Because of this, the opening and closing chapters (especially the material on Habermas) seem not to fit fully with the central argument. But that argument, particularly in the title chapter and the chapter entitled "Doing without Meaning," is presented brilliantly and (despite the wilful misunderstanding of the earlier reviewer) clearly.


Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory
Published in Paperback by Harvard Univ Pr (1991)
Author: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
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Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory (Science and Cultural Theory)
Published in Hardcover by Duke Univ Pr (Txt) (1997)
Authors: Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky
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On the Margins of Discourse: The Relation of Literature to Language
Published in Textbook Binding by University of Chicago Press (1979)
Author: Barbara Herrnstein. Smith
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Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End
Published in Paperback by University of Chicago Press (1971)
Author: Barbara Herrnstein Smith
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The Politics of Liberal Education (Post Contemporary Interventions)
Published in Hardcover by Duke Univ Pr (Txt) (1992)
Authors: Darryl J. Gless and Smith Barbara Herrnstein
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