>
>Because Shakespeare seemed to believe in ghosts and witches, does that make
>him a bad poet?
Makes one take him much less seriously as a historian...
>I don't quite understand why a misunderstood concept from
>another field invalidates the whole effort. Why is a philosopher's use of a
>concept any less "real" than a mathematician's, even if they don't conform
>with each other?
If you are engaged in discourse in order to communicate ideas, then you have a much better chance of success if you use words to mean more-or-less what other people have used them to mean beforehand. When Althusser (or Freud) grabbed "overdetermined" they should have tried hard to make sure that their use of it would have the same or a similar meaning as previous uses of the word.
If you don't work hard to use established meanings for words--if you make your own meanings, either because you are too sloppy or careless to figure out what prior users meant, or because you have a different end in view than communication--your writings become hard to read.
Incompetence at the use of language borrowed from other fields does not "invalidate the whole effort", but it is a sign that you haven't worked very hard at trying to communicate--and thus a clue to readers that perhaps they might find something else more interesting and fruitful than trying to read your works.
There is a awful lot of good stuff to be read out there, written by people who have sweated blood to try to make it as easy as possible for readers to learn what they know. Why should anyone waste their time reading your works if you haven't sweated blood to make your stuff as easy as possible to read? To not make the attempt at clarity is to show disrespect to your readers.
Now maybe you want to show disrespect to your readers. Maybe you are in the business of, say, trying to raise intellectual barriers to entry so that your particular in-group can monopolize a particular set of academic positions.
But suppose that communicating your ideas isn't important enough for you to try to make your readers' task as easy as possible: suppose that you make your readers' life difficult either by using old words in new and peculiar ways, by mangling concepts imported from other disciplines that you are too sloppy to get right, or simply by using ten four-syllable words where three one-syllable words would do. Isn't that a pretty good clue to a reader that they should go do something else? For if communicating your ideas isn't that important to you, how could it possibly be important to them?
Brad DeLong
Brad DeLong