On Dec 18, 2008, at 9:19 AM, Carl Beckhorn wrote: > This is not a very common issue in mathematics except for certain > philosophical > aspect, and fringe/pseudoscience topics. But I think it would be > more important > in writing about Derrida.
Derrida is perhaps the most thorny example you could pick here, given that one of the biggest controversies over him is whether he engages in intentional obfuscation. That is, his critics accuse him of saying nothing sensible at all. This has obvious limitations for the purposes of summarizing Derrida. But even beyond that, one of the fiercest critics of Derrida, John Searle, runs into the major problem that he egregiously and systematically misunderstands Derrida. Derrida, in fact, has an 82 page essay taking him to task for doing that. Searle, in his major engagement with Derrida, accuses Derrida of saying things that it is transparently clear that Derrida never said, and that virtually nobody who is sympathetic to Derrida thinks he said. And, of course, the primary respondent to Searle's critiques? Derrida, who ripped them to shreds. So now we've got a double problem - Derrida mounted such an effective response to Searle that nobody has seen much value in repeating the effort. Certainly Derrida's response gets a great deal of priority, and is largely responsible for Searle's importance as a main critic of Derrida (since he is one of the critics Derrida has spent the most time engaged with). An article that heavily relies on Searle to summarize Derrida would be a disaster. And yet the best ways to counterbalance Searle involve primary sources. The correct solution is to summarize Derrida's essay, summarize Searle's response, then summarize Derrida's response to Searle. Then you have the conflict neatly described. And you work with your fellow editors to make sure that everybody agrees with the descriptions of what is claimed in each essay, and you get to a decent result. And inasmuch as the Derrida article deals with these issues, that is what happened. But that is manifestly not what NOR allows. And what NOR allows would not lead to a good Derrida article. -Phil _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
