the real world

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

On Mon, 27 May 1996, Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt wrote:

> It's really ("really"? "'really'"!) an old old debate ("and coxcombs 
> vanquish Berkeley with a grin", etc.). Interestingly, GR and V both 
> deal with the shift from _a view of_ science as dealing with 
> certainties, to one of (statistical) probabilities (Roger Mexico, the 
> parable of the sieve, the Monte Carlo fallacy, etc etc). Ultimately, it 
> doesn't matter at all whether we are materialists or idealists or some 
> cunning variation - it's what we do _with_ science that matters, rather 
> than esoteric early modernist squabbles about some ultimate (non)reality.
> 
> hg
> hag at iafrica.com
> 
 
> 
 . . . and this is precisely why Fish corrects Sokal, as do the other 
editors at _Social Text_ (more replies can be forwarded, if you like).

Reality exists.  And it is a social construction (note the epistemology 
of both/and that operates in chaos--if only they could read my piece on . 
. . oh, forgive me).  For Sokal, this concept only goes so far as to 
suggest that the vocabularies we have developed to describe reality are 
social constructions--this, he concedes.  For him, a word-to-thing 
("real" thing) construction is as infallable as gravity.  For others, 
there is more at stake, especially given reality, itself (again, chaos 
theory might reveal alternatives to gravity even as gravity displays its 
effects--thus the hope w/in GR, in my obfuscated view).
Even this is neither here nor there.  For as Fish, and Hag (great combo, 
that) have pointed out, the debate is not over "science," but agency 
within science, scientific racism, sexism, dogmatism, emperialism, and 
much more (Pynchon shows us this much).  Sokal's own replies to Fish 
demonstrate his elitism in his reference to himself (allegedly sarcastic) 
as a "mere theoretical physicist" who has to put up with the likes of the 
drones of the academic left who are so, apparently, confused about right 
and wrong, black and white, etc.  There mere fact that Sokal felt 
compelled to write at all is an indictment of his archaic dualistic 
thinking--that which places himself, and other conservatives of science 
(and he says he's a "leftist and a feminist") in the absolute right, a 
kind of elitism that is under investigation/attack by various 
sociologists of science and social constructionists.  silly.