Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[28]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[13]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[28]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-03-04 03:54:21.238
	1	+2017-03-04 03:54:21.0

Caselist.CitesClass[13]

Cites

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	3	+Fiction is indeterminate and propagates decadence. Ramsay 04
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	5	+Ramsay 04 John Ramsay, The Economics Division, The Business School, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, UK, “Trope Control: The Costs and Benefits of Metaphor Unreliability in the Description of Empirical Phenomena”, British Journal of Management Volume 15, Issue 2 June 2004 Pages 143–155
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	7	+Metaphors bring ambiguity, but opinions vary over the significance of the effect of this feature on our understanding and explanation. Positivists, particularly those of a Popperian bent, regard this aspect of metaphor as deeply problematic. Indeed some find the difficulties generated by metaphor insuperable and suggest that: ‘an alternative to adopting and/or over-developing metaphors is to strive to avoid using them at all in reported research and new theory…deliberate striving to avoid metaphor tends to tie accurate scientific communication to observable phenomena by way of direct reference and ostension.’ (Pinder and Bourgeois, 1982, pp. 646–647) This conclusion stems from an ontological belief in an objective reality ‘out there’ to be described and understood through the observation of events and the identification of their ‘constant conjunction’, and an epistemological view that classifies metaphors as obfuscating impurities in the language that serve only to prevent us from arriving at accurate descriptions of the regularities of the empirical world. The heart of their complaint rests on a Popperian view of explanation: ‘honest science ultimately puts itself on the line in literal enough terms to show us the conditions under which we should reject it (Popper, 1968). But a science that is laced with metaphors makes this difficult, because metaphors shape cognition as much as cognitions shape metaphors (de Man, 1978), and pursuing metaphors can be misleading and inefficient because one never can be sure whether they have caused us to ask inappropriate questions, whether we have asked appropriate questions appropriately or whether we are correctly interpreting the implications for theory of results derived from metaphor-guided theorizing. In brief we cannot be sure that unsuitable metaphors will be culled from the lexicon of the field by regular scientific means.’ (Pinder and Bourgeois, 1982, p. 644)
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	9	+The call to trust identity makes performance appear as legitimate evidence, dooming the pursuit of knowledge by propagating decadence. Gordon 06
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	11	+Lewis Gordon—professor at philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at University of Connecticut Storrs—2006 (Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times, p 28-29). NS from file
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	13	+A striking feature (among many) of the contemporary intellectual climate, as I pointed out in the introduction of this book, is the war on evidence. There are many instances of this, but perhaps most memorable are the many "charts" and so-called evidential claims made by Ronald Reagan during his presidency. The so-called evidence he advanced was rarely ever evident. We needn’t blame Reagan for this. It was happening everywhere. Think of the scores of pseudo-intellectuals who have mastered the performance of “academese” and the rhetorical advance of evidence like claims. Lying beneath all this are, of course, nihilistic forces, and lying beneath such forces are, as Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed little more than a century ago, decadent ones. Where truth has collapsed into commonness, then critical thinking isn't necessary, which makes the work of assessing evidence superfluous. The effect is the kind of nonthinking activities against which Ortega y Gasset argued. There are two extremes of this. On the one hand, there is oversimplicity that demands no reflection. On the other hand, there IS the dense, abstruse appearance of expertise that conceals an absence of thought. Both don't require thinking because their ultimate appeal is appearance. ¶ Evidence is paradoxically that which has been hidden but revealed as a conduit for the appearance of another hidden reality. In effect, then, It is an appearance that enables appearance, but it is an appearance that requires thinking in order to appear. In short, it is not an appearance that stimulates thought but a form of thought that stimulates appearance. This means that evidence is always symbolic; it always refers beyond Itself. Because whether affirmed or rejected, it always extends itself publicly for assessment, evidence is peculiarly social. And since it is social, evidence is subject to the complex exchange of intersubjective activities. Evidence must, in other words be subject to norms" and "criteria." By norms, I don't here mean normativity or social prejudices but instead an understanding of where an exceptional instance versus a typical instance of a case holds. This requires further understanding of relevance, which, too, requires the value of distinction. All this together provides a clue to the contemporary problem. When simply the performance of presenting evidence substitutes for evidence, then anything can count as evidence. We see this in scholarly texts where the authors announce the importance of looking at a subject and then later argue as though that announcement itself constituted examination. Think, as well, of some texts in literary and cultural studies with long, run-on commentary in end notes and footnotes that serve no role of substantiating the claims they supposedly demarcate. We also see it in cases where pronouncements of past failures of certain social remedies take the form of perennial truths.
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	15	+Decadence destroys the possibility of a decolonized ethics of the oppressed to overturn. Gordon 14
	16	+Lewis Gordon—professor of philosophy, African and Judiac Studies at the University of Connecticut—2014 (“Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge,” Africa Development 39.1: 81-92, 88).
	17	+The first is regarding the political significance of this critique. For politics to exist, there must be discursive opposition over relations of power. Such activity involves communicative possibilities that rely on the suspension of violent or repressive forces. In effect, that makes politics also a condition of appearance. To be political is to emerge, to appear, to exist. Colonisation involves the elimination of discursive opposition between the dominant group and the subordinated group. A consequence of this is the attempted elimination of speech (a fundamental activity of political life) with a trail of concomitant conditions of its possibility. It is not that colonised groups fail to speak. It is that their speaking lacks appearance or mediation; it is not transformed into speech. The erasure of speech calls for the elimination of such conditions of its appearance such as gestural sites and the constellation of muscles that facilitates speech – namely, the face. As faceless, problem people are derailed from the dialectics of recognition, of self and other, with the consequence of neither self nor other. Since ethical life requires others, a challenge is here raised against models of decolonial practice that centre ethics. The additional challenge, then, is to cultivate the options necessary for both political and ethical life. To present that call as an ethical one would lead to a similar problem of coloniality as did, say, the problem of method raised by Fanon. European modernity has, in other words, subverted ethics. As with the critique of epistemology as first philosophy, ethics, too, as first philosophy must be called into question. It is not that ethics must be rejected. It simply faces its teleological suspension, especially where, if maintained, it presupposes instead of challenging colonial relations. Even conceptions of the ethical that demand deference to the Other run into trouble here since some groups, such as blacks and Indians/Native Americans, are often not even the Other. This means, then, that the ethical proviso faces irrelevance without the political conditions of its possibility. This is a major challenge to liberal hegemony, which calls for ethical foundations of political life, in European modernity. It turns it upside down. But in doing so, it also means that ethics-centred approaches, even in the name of liberation, face a similar fate.

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-03-04 03:54:23.35

Judge

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	1	+XX

Opponent

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	1	+XX

ParentRound

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	1	+28

Round

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	1	+8

Team

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Morganbesser Neg

Title

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	1	+0 - Decadence

Tournament

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	1	+Berkeley