Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 11:17:24 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: BHA: Pomoitis
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu



               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            19-Aug-1997 11:04am EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu )
 
Subject: Pomoitis

I have not had time recently to follow closely the debates
over reductionism and related matters on this list, but 
I just wish to second Tim Dayton's point made in his 2).

Since I have over the years been reasonably close to a
number of the principals in Social Text, I have had occasion
these past 14 months or so to exchange my views on the Sokal
business with several of them.  What Tim says about the
willingness to acknowledge determination by social constructivists
when they are pressed is exactly correct:  Aronowitz, Robbins,
Ross, et al. continue to say that none of them is in truth
a relativist, that everyone in what they term "the collective"
acknowledges that the physical world exists and that it
constrains human action.  But as Tim rightly observes, when
they come to write any particular problem in the sciences,
that ontological commitment goes out the window and theories
are just the outcome of indeterminate circumstances, no theory
being in principle better than any other--and certainly not
those accepted by the majority of the community of researchers
in a given discipline.  Nor do they feel obliged to consult
with, say, physicists about the current state of physical theory,
since what the physicists say about the world is, ex hypothesis,
optional as an explanation to be preferred over others.

The truly weird aspect of all this irritating palaver, though,
is that someone like Aronowitz will hold (in his truly awful
book SCIENCE AS POWER, for example) that theories are social
determined, and then decline to give any account of how social
causation itself works, viz., he has no explanation of social
forces themselves and thus ends up in the empty (in part because
false) claim that theories about the world are entirely the
outcome of contingent social circumstances, none of which can
be accounted for in their own right.

We used to call this sort of thing "bad faith," in the days
when Sartre still mattered to the Left.  Does anyone have a
comparably piquant label for this drivel that might catch
on?

Fraternally,

Michael Sprinker


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