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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Jiggery Pokery Trumpery

Graham Harman has found a perfect term to describe a maneuver that's only too common in our world: trumpery. I tell you that your ideas are far less sophisticated than mine by pulling out a pseudo-counter-intuitive trump card. Viz. my favorite (least favorite) one from Continental philosophy: “Of course you would be totally naive to think that there is a continuity between humans and animals. That would be mere Darwinism, a dreadfully unsophisticated mistake.” I can also think of dozens of examples from Dennett and Dawkins et al.

“Trumpery” is a great term. It has a hint of something like effrontery or mockery (because of the sound of the word), a kind of affected importance.

Harman holds trumpery responsible for some of the terrible pickles we've gotten ourselves into and I think he is definitely on to something. His example:
“Contrary to the gullible masses of readers who all think Heidegger is straightforwardly anti-technology, it’s not really that simple.” This is trumpery: a deceptive, misleading trump card based on false sophistication.
Or this from phenomenology:
Correlationism does this as its essential gesture: “The naive are trapped by the pseudo-problem of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ or ‘outer’ and ‘inner’, when in fact we are already outside ourselves in our very inwardness.”

1 comment:

  1. What about claims that something is "teleological" or "essentialist"? Are those trumpery as well? As if to say "You shouldn't listen to X because X's philosophy is teleological and/or essentialist, and mine is not."
    It frustrates me because I often can't figure out why X's philosophy is teleological or essentialist, and whoever is making the claim doesn't explain it very well.

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