File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-06-08.010, message 103


Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 08:48:40 -0500
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: SERIOUS SOKAL DISCUSSION?


At 8:55 PM 5/27/96, jajohnso-AT-interserv.com wrote:

>"Well, to start with, if they can't smell bullshit, or pass along a
>submitted paper to a physicist with an appropriately trained nose, then
>maybe it's because their noses have lost all sensitivity to the stuff,
>being so deeply immersed in it."
>
>This is exactly Keith's point.  That's a rhetorical answer, not a substantive
>one.  I myself can't agree with the post-modernists, of which I assume
>Ross and
>Aronowitz are a part.  But I myself am not particularly familiar with their
>particular views, and would like to see a bit more substantive debate of their
>positions.

Gee perhaps I can make it clearer. The editors of Social Text profess to
know something about science, or they wouldn't have had a special issue on
Science Wars, right? So they get a paper from a scientist that turns out to
be absolute nonsense, that anyone with a minimum degree of scientific
literacy could have spotted in a minute. In the course of a year of
editorial deliberations, the editors never noticed this simple fact, nor
did they think science an important enough intellectual pursuit to bother
vetting the paper with someone who actually knew the physics, rather than
just assuming a cocky pomo 'tude. This seems to me highly substantive -
conclusive proof that the editors of Social Text hadn't the slightest idea
what they or their contributors were talking about, and that when caught,
Stanley A's reaction was to call Sokal "ill-read" and "half-educated"! In
demotic English we call that bullshit.

Doug

--

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