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