Date: Mon, 20 May 1996 17:52:09 -0500
Subject: Re: marxism2-digest V1 #111


>The ineffable Aronowitz, caught with his pants down, nonetheless denounced
>Sokal as "ill-read" and "half-educated." What, aside from labor history,
>does Stanley know? Why does Stanley consider an education in physics to be
>only half an education? Why is so much of the US "left" hostile to science?
>Just wondering.
>
>Doug

Stanley's article in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture clearly
shows that he thinks he understands quite a bit about physics, and also
that a little learning is a very dangerous thing. For all intents and
purposes, he understands less than a newborn babe. I've been meaning to
incorporate it into something about the whole question you addressed above
for some time now. A few howlers:

"...the concept of unified field theory, which really reduces to the notion
of scientific truth as a consensual product ..."

"Consider, from the 1930s, the dispute about wave and particle theory as
two alternative explanations for the nature of the physical world."

"Niels Bohr tried to make the incommensurable commensurable by declaring
that the conditions of scientific inquiry, the experimental mehod and the
whole theoretical apparatus of science, were inadequate to fix on a unified
field theory ..."

He also calls the "founding of molcular biology by Francis Crick and James
Watson" "...a fairly self-conscious effort to make a scientific paradigm
intrinsically instrumental to technological development and engineering,"
as if they decided what the structure of DNA was.

I suppose one should be grateful that this charlatan, unlike so many
others, has actually made some specific statements about science, so as to
show up his own combination of ignorance, stupidity, and dishonesty (I
don't know in what ratios) so effectively.

Rahul




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