The Sokal Text

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Roy Gordon comments:
"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.""


That points to one of the key problems, which is rhetorical, not in the sense
of mere "style," but in the original, Aristotelian sense of a relationship
between speaker and listener (conditioned by Aristotle's categories of Logos,
Pathos and Ethos).  Much of the confusion over these issues turns on the
interaction (and sometimes mutual obscurantism) of Logos and Ethos--logical
appeals are undermined or confused by the perceived character of the
speaker (whose form is discourse is itself a "key" to "character") or the
very form of the logical appeal provokes an ethical condemnation.

Particular rhetorical practices and discourses contribute to the confusion.  I 
never quite know how to read the British poststructural film critic Stephen
Heath until I heard him speak in person.  I then realized that he actually
would repeat the same sentence three times, as a kind of redundancy backup
factor, but would change the wording each time.  After that, he became
much easier to follow!

All this is a way of saying what others have pointed out, one "audience's"

"clarity" is another's "obscurantism."  I have seen forums where undergraduates
and/or members of the general public (whatever *that* is!) were puzzled and/or
outraged at the speech of academics that I found very straightforward.

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)