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[Roy Gordon]

Andrew Clarke Walser wrote:
> 
>         As Jean points out, jargon can give a gloss of profundity to
> utter nonsense -- among those, obviously, who do not wish to utter
> nonsense.
>         In AN ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, David Hume
> distinguishes between impressions, which come from the senses, feelings,
> and will, and ideas, which come from impressions.  Hume condemns language
> that lacks any root in the empirical -- that drifts free of impressions
> AND ideas.  His objections, intended for theology, apply equally well
> to the sort of prose Sokal mocks.
>         Nevertheless, when I hear writers characterized as unreadable, I
> cannot help but remember that snub of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by the Pulitzer
> Committee.  Do the allies of Sokal really stand up for substance, or do
> they ask that words be windows, and resent anyone who attempts to stain
> the glass?

Had they but categorized their writings as fiction...

The difference that I see is that, I believe, "Sokal and his allies" regard 
this (obscurantism, unending jargon, etc.) as a property of the disciplines 
as practiced and not that of just particular individuals within them.  
(Witness the octopus parodies that have recently appeared here.)

When I was in graduate school in analytic philosophy in the early 70s 
Wifrid Sellars, whom I doubt many on this list have heard of, was the star 
of the stars in this highly regarded department.  His writings were also 
(deservedly) criticized as being difficult and obscure, a problem that 
bothered him and that he acknowledged in one of the prefaces to his books. 
I spent considerable time with his stuff and found it very rewarding, but 
even so, there were certainly elements I didn't understand.  Despite the 
maddening complexities and slipperiness of the concepts in the field, most 
others were more successful in their attempts to write clearly, a virtue 
that was defnitely encouraged and for which people received positive 
reinforcement (based on my seven years in graduate school and three 
teaching).

					-- roy

Here's some more specifics in case anyone is interested:

One not so uncommon technique in order to gain clarity, was the attempt to 
explicitly set out the key premisses and conclusions of arguments in a very 
semiformal manner.  Often times, the process was interative, the extracted 
premisses and conclusions undergoing revisions in the aid of clarifying 
them.  This was known as "chisholming away", after Roderick Chisholm, one 
of its more frequent practitioners. Even an introductory textbook by 
Cornman and Lehrer used this technique extensively.  I don't mean to 
mislead, this was more the exception than the norm, but hardly unknown, 
and, I believe, was not unrepresentative of a common attitude towards 
explicitly attempting clarity.  (Btw, being able to extract from someone 
else's writings a set of premisses and conclusion was quite difficult (at 
least for me!) but when done well it all seemed so obvious!)

Another instance:

Three people I knew had articles accepted by Philosphical Review, one of 
the leading journals at that time.  (I have no idea what its status is 
today.)  The editors communicated with each several times, each time asking 
for clarification of confusions, apparent gaps in argumentation, and so on 
in the submitted articles.  One person commented to me that one of his 
revisions apparently satisfied the editors, but that he didn't really 
understand until months later what they had been complaining about.  His 
conclusion: "They were right."