Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 18:09:41 -0500
Subject: Re:  Heretic Refuses To Recant, Recently


Ralph:

>Becuase Leo has no intellectual integrity himself, he is indiffernt
>to its presence in others.  He is only an intelelctually flabby pomo
>farter.  Hence nothing to say on any topic.

I don't believe Leo has no intellectual integrity, even though he has
consistently caricatured my views on the subject under discussion here. I
think it's merely a matter of having a strong desire to find strawmen to
oppose because that tends to make a certain body of thought that he has
invested in seem to have intellectual content.

As Lisa hinted, intellectual integrity is one of the most important aspects
of this affair. The common scientific notion of ii, honored unfortunately
as often in the breach as otherwise, comprehends not only a prohibition
against saying things you know to be wrong but a bending over backwards to
take into account all the possible objections to what one says. Feynman
gives a nice brief account of the matter in a little piece called Cargo
Cult Science. Of course, with the Sokal affair, we're dealing with a whole
bunch of people who pass off nonsense as meaningful thought, of whom Sokal
is the only one who has admitted to it. The most basic, obvious point,
seemingly inaccessible to Stanley Aronowitz and Andrew Ross, is that no one
should ever, under any circumstances, write something about a
"transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity."

Leo's refusal to "genuflect before the altar of science," as if anyone has
asked him to do any such thing, would only be meaningful if he had some
idea of what he's refusing to genuflect before.

Rahul




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