Sokal et al

[Bill Burns]

Monte Davis writes:

> Then, the Word having saved me from the Lab, I've spent my career writing 
>about science and technology. 

Whoa, another technical writer on the list? Whoohooo!

<CONTENT SNIPPED TO PASS THE SAVINGS ON TO OUR CUSTOMERS>
>
>That said (windily)... I know I've always been made uneasy by the glad
cries with 
>which some artistic and literary modernists and pomos have seized on fields
vs. 
>particles, relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc. There's a lot
of us/them 
>psychological baggage there, a subtext of "we never liked mechanics or 
>determinism much, and now look! The scientists themselves have abandoned
it! We 
>were right all along!"

I find some interesting parallels when comparing the metaphors that each
discipline 
uses to express its ideas. Sometimes, those of use with less of a background
in the hard sciences grab onto the metaphor without fully (or partially)
understanding the relationships behind the analogies.  (Hmmm. . .seems to
happen in the political spectrum, too.) If you're interested in more
discussion on this, check out the wen site for the Metapphor and Metonymy
Group at 

        http://www.psyc.nott.ac.uk/met/metaphor.html

<snip>

>I think that's the nerve that was struck in l'affaire Sokal. What the
parody article 
>asserts (as clearly as it says anything) is that neither is the case, that
there's an 
>emergent pomo science that's as supple and user-friendly as a _texte_, that
the 
>physical world is abandoning its nasty old habit of insisting that some
things are so 
>and some things aren't so.
>
>Hence the gleeful cackling when it was revealed as parody. God knows a lot of 
>really stupid and pointless stuff makes its way into science journals, but
there *is* 
>a _ne plus infra_. The acceptance of the Sokal article, and the editors'
subsequent 
>tap-dancing, hinted that such is not necessarily the case across the hall
in the 
>Department of Deconstruction.   
>  
Hey, deconstructive analysis can be loads of fun, and it can shed some light
on the tendency people have to define their experiences in totalizing
schemes. My problem with its underpinnings is with its extremely simplistic
perspective on language. But, then, it wasn't intended as much to expose the
limitations of language (of which earlier semioticians were well aware) but
to expose the limitations of *logical* analysis of it. Unfortunately, the
deconstruction camp began to believe its own gameplaying methodology.
Deconstructive criticism doesn't provide an argument as much as it provides
a metaphor for what it is trying to accomplish. When people forget the
metaphor, they lose sight of what the original purpose of the method was.
Remember Magritte? ("N'est cette pas une pipe.")

I was preparing to return to graduate school next fall, but because of
family obligations, I'm going to have to put off that goal (one that very
much mirrors Joe V's). One of the issues that concerns me is the tendency
for scholars in the humanities to forget the object of their scholarship. In
science, practitioners (ideally) learn as much if not more from their errors
as they do from their success. Why don't we have such a paradigm in the
humanities?

<BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THIS STATION AND THESE PROUD SPONSORS>
*---------------------------------------*
*Bill Burns           wdburns at micron.net*
*---------------------------------------*
* "Waaaaagggghh!"                       *
*                     --Korn, 11/27/96  *
*---------------------------------------*