Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 11:45:51 -0500
Subject: Re: SOKAL CONT. (APOLOGY)


At 10:44 PM 5/24/96, SCOTT R MCLEMEE wrote:

>          Secondly,   there   is   the   question   of   whether   or   not
>          interdisciplinary work should, or even can,  be subjected to  the
>          same  means  of evaluation appropriate to  more traditional work.
>          Sokal  notes  that  a  persona competent in  physics  would  have
>          laughed  at  his manuscript.  Was  SOCIAL  TEXT required to  have
>          Sokal's manuscript evaluated  by  another physicist?  Would  that
>          have made sense, given that  the whole point of "science studies"
>          (or whatever they call it) is to create a zone of inquiry outside
>          established traditions of  both sociology of  science and history
>          of science?  (By  no means do  I endorse their project; I'm  just
>          posing this hypothetically).

Back in the 1970s, Lou Reed said if you can't do jazz, and you can't do
rock, you do jazz-rock, and what you get is one big piece of shit. I'm
afraid that law applies to too much interdisciplinary work as well. So yes,
Social Text should have had a physicist read the manuscript - isn't that
what scholarly journals are supposed to do? There can only be a few of
reasons they didn't: 1) they're too lazy, 2) they're too vain to admit they
don't know something, or 3) they don't think science important enough as a
discipline in itself, reducing it instead as either a metaphor or a mode of
social domination. The point of interdisciplinary studies should not be a
zone "outside," but "between" - and an inclusive between, not some
interstitial between.

Doug

--

Doug Henwood
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