Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 18:16:59 -0500
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: SERIOUS SOKAL DISCUSSION?


Scott:

>          For the most part, the discussion over Alan Sokal's hoax has been
>          very poor.  ...
>          The existence of  the physical
>          world is not, in  any serious way,  at issue in  this debate.  If
>          you  grasp  that,  by  all  means, give  me  the benefit of  your
>          thoughts on the real issues here.  Thanks.

Well, duh. To be more precise, nothing is at issue in any serious way in
this debate. What some people have been spending years trying to put at
issue is the worth of science, actual and potential. They have not
succeeded, nor are they likely to, in making it an intellectually serious
issue, for obvious reasons. Largely for this reason, scientists have mostly
ignored it until the severe political consequences of doing so have become
increasingly clear even to people who like to spend all their time
scratching obscure wriggles on cluttered pieces of paper, or getting high
by sniffing formaldehyde.

I'm not sure who exactly you're being snide to here, but for myself, I have
read exactly one short piece by Mr. Aronowitz, the one in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. It told me that nothing he says about science is
worth a damn, and that anybody who will recklessly make such ignorant and
foolish statements in one realm, passing them off as the clear truth, is
not likely to have much that's worth listening to about anything. I have
already posted a couple of self-evidently ignorant and absurd statements he
made there which show, among other things, his colossal arrogance in acting
like a know-it-all about a subject where he barely knows any of "it" and
doesn't understand the part he knows. I haven't read anything by Mr. Ross
-- maybe he's an apostle of self-critical rationalism, for all I know.

The only real issue here is what has academe come to, and what, if
anything, is to be done.

Rahul




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