Sokal et al

[VW]

Bill Burns wrote:
> 
> 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  *
> *---------------------------------------*



Exactly.