I realize this is a total tangent to the point of your post, but I feel you’re giving short-shrift here to continental philosophy.
If it were only about writing style I’d say fair: continental philosophy has chosen a style of writing that resembles that used in other traditions to try to avoid over-simplifying and not compressing understanding down into just a few words that are easily misunderstood. Whereas you see unclear writing, I see a desperate attempt to say anything detailed about reality without accidentally pointing in the wrong direction.
This is not to say that there aren’t bad continental philosophers who hide behind this method to say nothing, but I think it’s unfair to complain about it just because it’s hard to understand and takes a lot of effort to suss out what is being said.
As to the central confusion you bring up, the unfortunate thing is that the worst argument in the world is technically correct, we can’t know things as they are in themselves, only as we perceive them to be, i.e. there is no view from nowhere. Where it’s wrong is thinking that just because we always know the world from some vantage point that trying to understanding anything is pointless and any belief is equally useful. It is can both be true that there is no objective way that things are and that some ways of trying to understand reality do better at helping us predict reality than others.
I think the confusion that the worst argument in the world immediately implies we can’t know anything useful comes from only seeing that the map is not itself the territory but not also seeing that the map is embedded in the territory (no Cartesian dualism).
I realize this is a total tangent to the point of your post, but I feel you’re giving short-shrift here to continental philosophy.
If it were only about writing style I’d say fair: continental philosophy has chosen a style of writing that resembles that used in other traditions to try to avoid over-simplifying and not compressing understanding down into just a few words that are easily misunderstood. Whereas you see unclear writing, I see a desperate attempt to say anything detailed about reality without accidentally pointing in the wrong direction.
This is not to say that there aren’t bad continental philosophers who hide behind this method to say nothing, but I think it’s unfair to complain about it just because it’s hard to understand and takes a lot of effort to suss out what is being said.
As to the central confusion you bring up, the unfortunate thing is that the worst argument in the world is technically correct, we can’t know things as they are in themselves, only as we perceive them to be, i.e. there is no view from nowhere. Where it’s wrong is thinking that just because we always know the world from some vantage point that trying to understanding anything is pointless and any belief is equally useful. It is can both be true that there is no objective way that things are and that some ways of trying to understand reality do better at helping us predict reality than others.
I think the confusion that the worst argument in the world immediately implies we can’t know anything useful comes from only seeing that the map is not itself the territory but not also seeing that the map is embedded in the territory (no Cartesian dualism).