Split from Threat To PRogress.

[Spin Echo]

Whenever a scientists asks a question he/she constructs a problem. That does not mean that the problem in itself only exists within the scientist's own head, but that when he/she decides what's worth investigating and what's not that is, in fact, something he or she decides to do, out of the preference of society, the institution, or the scientists own liking. This is something that natural science has chosen to ignore to a large degree, and that is why PoMo, or at least Po Mo-inspired methods, can make a retribution to the world of positivist science aswell as the area of social science and culture studies.

I disagree. I think most scientists are quite aware of the personal and societal reasons for their research. We constantly have to defend these reasons in grant applications, in publications, for promotions, and even occasionally in social settings. We are often asked why we are doing experiment X instead of experiment Y. To say we are ignorant of the driving forces behind our own personal research is simply not true.

[Psychodelica]

Whenever a scientists asks a question he/she constructs a problem. That does not mean that the problem in itself only exists within the scientist's own head, but that when he/she decides what's worth investigating and what's not that is, in fact, something he or she decides to do, out of the preference of society, the institution, or the scientists own liking. This is something that natural science has chosen to ignore to a large degree, and that is why PoMo, or at least Po Mo-inspired methods, can make a retribution to the world of positivist science aswell as the area of social science and culture studies.

I disagree. I think most scientists are quite aware of the personal and societal reasons for their research. We constantly have to defend these reasons in grant applications, in publications, for promotions, and even occasionally in social settings. We are often asked why we are doing experiment X instead of experiment Y. To say we are ignorant of the driving forces behind our own personal research is simply not true.

Then we have very different experiences of natural science. I know a few active biochemists, and they all get extremely annoyed when I ask them WHY they use the models they're using, why they analyse their material the way they do and if they've considered their own possible biases before going into the research situation. I have not done this in a defensive or aggressive way since they are my highly respected friends, but the mere notion that THEY, as SCIENTISTS should even be able to have a bias seems to upset them.

I should add that one of these men are a professor in psychiatric medicine, and influential in his field, and that two of others are assistant professors and the last a doctorate student, so none of them are exactly outside of the world of reseach.

[Spin Echo]

Then we have very different experiences of natural science. I know a few active biochemists, and they all get extremely annoyed when I ask them WHY they use the models they're using, why they analyse their material the way they do and if they've considered their own possible biases before going into the research situation. I have not done this in a defensive or aggressive way since they are my highly respected friends, but the mere notion that THEY, as SCIENTISTS should even be able to have a bias seems to upset them.

Have you considered that they may be annoyed because giving a proper explanation as to why they choose particular models may be very difficult depending on your scientific background? For example, I do some modeling of fluid movement within a porous medium. If you ask why I model it that way, I can tell you that's how the transport equations work. If you wanted to know why the transport equations were that way, that would require breaking out the differential equations and some physics you may not understand.

Also, I find I sometimes get annoyed with questions from people outside my scientific discipline because the questions often don't make sense. It's as if I were asked "When is 7 o'clock?". Some people are better than others at getting in the mind of a layperson to understand how they are viewing things. If you can't figure out where the question is coming from, it can get frustrating.

And no one likes to admit they have personal biases in science, though I'd wager most scientists do realise they have them. It's what I call "I've got a hammer" syndrome. You have a hammer and you're really good at hammering. It's great if you come across a nail, not so great if you come across a screw. Since you're good at hammering, you'll want to try the hammer even if it's not the optimal method simply because it's what you know best.

I think you should re-examine the idea that scientists don't understand the motivation behind their work. I'd be curious to hear what the other natural scientists on the board say, but my personal experience is that you are constantly required to justify why your science is important and why it's better than than some other science going on and thus deserves funding.

[Spin Echo]

Actually, could a Mod split this tangent? I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts about scientists understanding the motivations for their research, but we're getting pretty off topic from the OP.

[Psychodelica]

Then we have very different experiences of natural science. I know a few active biochemists, and they all get extremely annoyed when I ask them WHY they use the models they're using, why they analyse their material the way they do and if they've considered their own possible biases before going into the research situation. I have not done this in a defensive or aggressive way since they are my highly respected friends, but the mere notion that THEY, as SCIENTISTS should even be able to have a bias seems to upset them.

Have you considered that they may be annoyed because giving a proper explanation as to why they choose particular models may be very difficult depending on your scientific background? For example, I do some modeling of fluid movement within a porous medium. If you ask why I model it that way, I can tell you that's how the transport equations work. If you wanted to know why the transport equations were that way, that would require breaking out the differential equations and some physics you may not understand.

Also, I find I sometimes get annoyed with questions from people outside my scientific discipline because the questions often don't make sense. It's as if I were asked "When is 7 o'clock?". Some people are better than others at getting in the mind of a layperson to understand how they are viewing things. If you can't figure out where the question is coming from, it can get frustrating.

And no one likes to admit they have personal biases in science, though I'd wager most scientists do realise they have them. It's what I call "I've got a hammer" syndrome. You have a hammer and you're really good at hammering. It's great if you come across a nail, not so great if you come across a screw. Since you're good at hammering, you'll want to try the hammer even if it's not the optimal method simply because it's what you know best.

I think you should re-examine the idea that scientists don't understand the motivation behind their work. I'd be curious to hear what the other natural scientists on the board say, but my personal experience is that you are constantly required to justify why your science is important and why it's better than than some other science going on and thus deserves funding.

The interesting thing in all this is that most natural scientists I've spoken to live in the delusion that I don't understand their science, but they understand mine perfectly, even though they've never even took a social science method class or puts Platon at the top of political theory.

I think that most natural scientists are aware of all these issues we've raised (you convinced me there), but all the same they do not wan't to talk openly about it. Like you said, no one wants to admit they're biased, even though they know that they are. Perhaps its this openess that I miss, and where I feel that the natural sciences has something to learn from other scientific fields.

And, if I ever ask you a scientific question that doesn't make sense: Explain to me! I am naive anough to believe that when an intelligent person ask another intelligent person a question, it's out of sheer curiousity, thus making a two hours explanaition something of an evening of pure fun. Perhaps I'm mental, but I seriously think there is very few things better than getting an insight into a new area of expertise.

[Psychodelica]

Hey, we got a new Thread!

[Spin Echo]

The interesting thing in all this is that most natural scientists I've spoken to live in the delusion that I don't understand their science, but they understand mine perfectly, even though they've never even took a social science method class or puts Platon at the top of political theory.

I'm starting to wonder if you may just know some arrogant scientists. Most scientists I've met are freely willing to admit their knowledge falls off greatly outside of their area of expertise. The belief that they understand social science probably stems from the fact that, for example, a physicist can talk about social and political issues with a social sciencist, but a social scientist would be harder pressed to talk shop with a physicist.

And, if I ever ask you a scientific question that doesn't make sense: Explain to me! I am naive anough to believe that when an intelligent person ask another intelligent person a question, it's out of sheer curiousity, thus making a two hours explanaition something of an evening of pure fun. Perhaps I'm mental, but I seriously think there is very few things better than getting an insight into a new area of expertise.

I'll certainly give it a try. I was mainly trying to explain why some people would get annoyed when their work is questioned.

[Psychodelica]

The interesting thing in all this is that most natural scientists I've spoken to live in the delusion that I don't understand their science, but they understand mine perfectly, even though they've never even took a social science method class or puts Platon at the top of political theory.

I'm starting to wonder if you may just know some arrogant scientists. Most scientists I've met are freely willing to admit their knowledge falls off greatly outside of their area of expertise. The belief that they understand social science probably stems from the fact that, for example, a physicist can talk about social and political issues with a social sciencist, but a social scientist would be harder pressed to talk shop with a physicist.

I don't agree with you here. I find it utterly difficult to discuss any deeper scientific (in my case political/identity politics) matters with people outside my specific area of expertise, since they don't have the tools, theories or background information that I have. Most people don't tend to see this, and act as if six years of studies in politics and social sciences is nothing but something we do to make the years go by. I think this is due to the lack of status within the humanities and social sciences when compared to the natural sciences that, at least in europe, have both a better funding and more credability in the public.

This is the same problem as when I discuss other sciences with professionals from their fields, but at least I try to be humble enough to admit that all I can do is comment on the premisses they have given me, due to lack of actual knowledge.

Then again, I see everything as politics, and even though I'm totally unqualified to discuss biology or medicine as science, I sure can discuss the political implications of said science. Everything strings together. You cannot do natural science outside of society, and you cannot (hm, SHOULD not) make policy without regard to scientific results.

I think that what's really needed is a brigde between the disciplines. Natural scientists might need a better insight in how the social sciences work and affect their premises, and we social scientists need a bigger insight in the natural sciences, and how they affect the work we do.

[Psychodelica]

Hm, and, perhaps I know arrogant scientists. Or perhaps it's the fact that I only know _male_ scientists and I'm but a wee girl that does it.

Maybe swedish scientists are more arrogant than other nationalities?

No matter where you stand on the feminist issue it often is a drawback having double X-chromosomes when in a heated discussion.

[Spin Echo]

Maybe swedish scientists are more arrogant than other nationalities?

Ja, det kunne være fordi de er svensk.

No matter where you stand on the feminist issue it often is a drawback having double X-chromosomes when in a heated discussion.

Really? Why do you say that?

[Psychodelica]

Maybe swedish scientists are more arrogant than other nationalities?

Ja, det kunne være fordi de er svensk.

No matter where you stand on the feminist issue it often is a drawback having double X-chromosomes when in a heated discussion.

Really? Why do you say that?

Hey, a norweigean!

I say that because me and my fiancee has made several experiments where we say exactly the same thing and then compare how its taken by other people. He gets more respect for his opinions (even though it's the same thing we're saying), he gets to finish his sentences and he never, ever gets called "darling" or "sweetie" or "Lilla gumman" when the opposite part runs out of arguments.

[Spin Echo]

I don't agree with you here. I find it utterly difficult to discuss any deeper scientific (in my case political/identity politics) matters with people outside my specific area of expertise, since they don't have the tools, theories or background information that I have. Most people don't tend to see this, and act as if six years of studies in politics and social sciences is nothing but something we do to make the years go by. I think this is due to the lack of status within the humanities and social sciences when compared to the natural sciences that, at least in europe, have both a better funding and more credability in the public.

It's difficult to discuss the deeper aspects of any type of work with some one outside the discipline. However, I'd say that people in general have a better basic understanding of political and social theories than basic scientific ones. I'm not sure where I'd find evidence to back that claim up.

The derisive view also could stem from the fact at many technical universities, something in the social sciences is considered a wash out course. At the university where I did my undergraduate, there was the joke that if you couldn't cut it in your desired major, you did biology. If you couldn't cut it in biology, you did course 21, which encompassed the social sciences among other things. There's less math in the social sciences, which causes people to believe, rightly or wrongly (there have been a few threads on this topic in particular), that it's a less difficult subject.

I think that what's really needed is a brigde between the disciplines. Natural scientists might need a better insight in how the social sciences work and affect their premises, and we social scientists need a bigger insight in the natural sciences, and how they affect the work we do.

Could you elaborate upon how social sciences would affect natural science research? It's not as if scientists don't know that stem cell work is controversial or we should try and make a more fuel efficient cars.

Hey, a norweigean!

Well, a sort of adopted Norwegian anyway.

I say that because me and my fiancee has made several experiments where we say exactly the same thing and then compare how its taken by other people. He gets more respect for his opinions (even though it's the same thing we're saying), he gets to finish his sentences and he never, ever gets called "darling" or "sweetie" or "Lilla gumman" when the opposite part runs out of arguments.

Were these scientists or laypersons? I've never had a scientist do anything like that to me. Heck, I can't think of even a nonscientist doing that to me in an argument.

[Keevan_Colton]

I think it might stem from a seeming lack of proper scientific methodology on the part of many social scientists. The unwillingness to discard a model that makes predictions that dont match the results for example.

I did end up in the sociology department here critically comparing the theory of gravity to durkheims theory of suicide which they kept harping on about. This mostly involved dropping the lecturers things on the floor...my point was though that the predictions of that model matched the results and the one they were harping on about didnt. At the end of the day, reality is the final arbiter of science.

The other reason for some measure of disrespect probably stems from a lot of the bullshit that is allowed to fly under the banner of social science. There are some people that are striving to become a better scientific discipline, but there's also a lot of idiots with "Emperor's Clothes Syndrome", take for example the infamous case of the Social Text Affair.

Which has also led to such entertaining tools as the Post Modernist Essay Generator.

I'd say the problems often come down to an issue of intelectual rigour. In a world where all answers are equally valid, all are completely worthless.

[Darth Wong]

What's wrong with natural scientists disrespecting social scientists? Despite their focus, social scientists haven't done even a tiny fraction as much for social change and progress as natural scientists have. Electricity alone has done vastly more for human social progress than all the combined efforts of social scientists throughout the entire history of the field.

Whenever a scientists asks a question he/she constructs a problem. That does not mean that the problem in itself only exists within the scientist's own head, but that when he/she decides what's worth investigating and what's not that is, in fact, something he or she decides to do, out of the preference of society, the institution, or the scientists own liking. This is something that natural science has chosen to ignore to a large degree, and that is why PoMo, or at least Po Mo-inspired methods, can make a retribution to the world of positivist science aswell as the area of social science and culture studies.

Please give us an example of a scientific discovery which was made by postmodernism rather than science, since you are basically arguing that postmodernism is necessary in order to discover what science will "ignore".

[Psychodelica]

What's wrong with natural scientists disrespecting social scientists? Despite their focus, social scientists haven't done even a tiny fraction as much for social change and progress as natural scientists have. Electricity alone has done vastly more for human social progress than all the combined efforts of social scientists throughout the entire history of the field.

Whenever a scientists asks a question he/she constructs a problem. That does not mean that the problem in itself only exists within the scientist's own head, but that when he/she decides what's worth investigating and what's not that is, in fact, something he or she decides to do, out of the preference of society, the institution, or the scientists own liking. This is something that natural science has chosen to ignore to a large degree, and that is why PoMo, or at least Po Mo-inspired methods, can make a retribution to the world of positivist science aswell as the area of social science and culture studies.

Please give us an example of a scientific discovery which was made by postmodernism rather than science, since you are basically arguing that postmodernism is necessary in order to discover what science will "ignore".

Nope, I'm arguing that post modernism (if used correctly, which i agree that it seldom are) can be a tool to further understand science. The mere notion that there might be a personal bias in science was, from the start, a Post Modern notion, and now it is more or less accepted in the scientific community.

Natural science bring us the facts of things, but not necessarily the understandings.

I don't ask that you embrace Post Modernism as a package. Even I, being using post mdoernist approaches for some time, thinks the extreme relativism in pure rubbish and nothing but pseudo science. This doead not, however, mean that all things about the paradigm is utterly useless. Popperism has a few drawbacks too, but we still use it and embrace it, right?

This discussion tend to become so disturbingly black and white.

Yes, I would think that social science has done quite a HUGE part in social change. In my personal area of expertese (comparative equality analysis) conferences and studies has been a basis of quite a lot of political inmprovement, prominent examples in Sweden is better functioning laws on sexual violence and new plans on action in creating more equal opportunities in the labour market, not only between men and women, but between ethnical groups and minoroties.

Keevan_Colton: I would argue that political science has a vast number of proper scientific methodologies. Otherwise we wouldn't get results that can actually be used successfully in politics.

And, I've never said that all answers are equally valid. But all answers must be read through it's social context, which does not mean that they're useless. It's (in my opinion) only through the recognition of these contexts that we are given the tools to single out the more correct answers from the moronic ones.


Spin Echo: Sadly you are right. the low funding on social science departments has made it all to easy to take a class successfully even though you are a complete moran. To become good, on the other hand, takes at least as much work as in the natural sciences. In all classes I've taken, we've had about twnty people getting through doing nothing, and three or four people working their asses off. The only thing I can say in that regard is that it was me and my fellow workoholics that got the tutors attention, thus leading to amazing things like research assistant jobs in a market where most academics are unemployed.

I think most natural scientists would do good taking a class or two in science philosophy of science history. Even though some people do this erading outside their class rooms, I don't find this enough. Even if you're a destout positivist you still get a much deeper udnerstanding of you're actually doing if you know what positivism really are, it's roots, it's history and what branches of philosophy and ontology that has stemmed from it. This is not a part fo the social sciences (my mistake), but of the humanities. I wrote my latter posts late at night and apologize for the mistake.

I've gotten the "Lilla Gumman"approach from both laymen and scientists, the latter usually being elderly gentlemen trying to beat me at my own game. Not uncommonly stating things like "It will all pass when you get your first child and then all that drive and dedication will drain away". I don't appriciate this much, and you might understand.

[Keevan_Colton]

Perhaps a little bit of Dawkins might help move this along:

Postmodernism disrobed

by Richard Dawkins

[Published in Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143.]

Intellectual Impostures
by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
Profile: 1998. Pp. 274. £9.99
To be published in the USA by Picador as Fashionable Nonsense in November 1998

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mélange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered". Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing:

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

This calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):

Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought...

Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:

I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose.

This is from Medawar's 1968 lecture on "Science and Literature", reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice.

Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, think otherwise: "These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge."

But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans?

Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively, New York University and the University of Louvain in Belgium. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal. On Jacques Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout US and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics:

... although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish.

They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan:

Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely:

You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning that is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ

... is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).

We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.

The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:

The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.

You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve.

In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Jean-François Lyotard's 'post-modern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of Gödel's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view":

Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes.

I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense". They again call attention to "the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology -- inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning". Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticized here and lionized throughout America:

In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away.

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, and no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when someone punctures the established bag of wind.

As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the US journal Social Text a paper called "Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity". From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), an important book that deserves to become as well known in Britain as it is in the United States. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In the words of the journalist Gary Kamiya:

Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics,' 'transgressive,' 'Lacanian,' 'hegemony', to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted... Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy)... And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit -- a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city.

Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for literature.

Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic establishment. Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like, "I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them."

He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of the best universities in the United States. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know -- because many of them have told me -- that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left-wing credentials are impeccable.

In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes that, in addition to numerous half-truths, falsehoods and non sequiturs, his original article contained some "syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever". He regrets that there were not more of these: "I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack." If he were writing his parody today, he would surely be helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne, Australia: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it, at http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern, it will spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen.

I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000-word article called "Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context" by "David I. L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University" (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge that saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here is a typical passage from this impressively erudite work:

If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious.

Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate.

As for the harder task of reclaiming US literary departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed.

[Psychodelica]

I'm backing out from this thread, since it seems that you guys and gals are more interested in trashing the whole of Post Modernism instead of actually reading what I write: That Post Modernism has created methods and approaches that can be useful outside of relativism. (Nope, I'm not a relativist. Still I find the discourse analysis method useful. There is no contradiction there, if you are willing to evolve methods and theories outside of their original context)

Dawkins is brilliant man, and I admire his scope on both religion and creationism, but he is, like so many others, to inclined to judge the package instead of taking a closer look at the parts.

Over and out. If anyone is interested in actually discuss how this can be done treating Po Mo methods without guilt by association, you can easily reach me by pm.

[Ritterin Sophia]

I'm backing out from this thread, since it seems that you guys and gals are more interested in trashing the whole of Post Modernism instead of actually reading what I write:

We are reading what you're writing, the fact is that you aren't really explaining everything by repeating that Post Modernism has a purpose, you need to explain how, which you've yet to adequately do.

That Post Modernism has created methods and approaches that can be useful outside of relativism. (Nope, I'm not a relativist. Still I find the discourse analysis method useful. There is no contradiction there, if you are willing to evolve methods and theories outside of their original context)

Methods and Approaches? Mind clarifying that a bit, because just saying something doesn't make it true.

Dawkins is brilliant man, and I admire his scope on both religion and creationism, but he is, like so many others, to inclined to judge the package instead of taking a closer look at the parts.

Right, so if you get bashed just accuse everyone of ignorance without explaining how.

Over and out. If anyone is interested in actually discuss how this can be done treating Po Mo methods without guilt by association, you can easily reach me by pm.

Well you could, try, I don't know, explaining it in the thread that was made for the fucking discussion, instead of retreating when you found out you can't argue your point and, instead of conceding, maintain that you are correct without any evidence for your position.

[Darth Wong]

I'm backing out from this thread, since it seems that you guys and gals are more interested in trashing the whole of Post Modernism instead of actually reading what I write: That Post Modernism has created methods and approaches that can be useful outside of relativism.

Why haven't you described how any of these methods work, then? You keep vaguely harping on what post-modernism can do for us, without giving us even a shred of information on how your version of it actually works.

[SirNitram]

Given that postmodernism is most often defined as the rejection of objectivity(Thus being a late-term return to Sophism, not in the sense of rhetorical sleight-of-hand, but of a relativism in all things, including speaking of the world), it's capability to assist empiricism-driven science is.. Minimal. You can't help someone see the tree if you deny the tree is real.

[Darth Wong]

I would have been interested in seeing Psychodelica try to explain how post-modernism tests an idea for validity, since the ability to test ideas for validity is absolutely necessary for any kind of useful analysis, and it also seems like something that postmodernism is utterly incapable of doing.

However, it's pretty obvious that she won't give an answer to that challenge, because there is no answer to be given. Some people seem to like the idea of a method of "analysis" which can never ever say that an idea is simply wrong. It's so much less stressful to work in an environment where your ideas can't be shot down.

[SirNitram]

I would have been interested in seeing Psychodelica try to explain how post-modernism tests an idea for validity, since the ability to test ideas for validity is absolutely necessary for any kind of useful analysis, and it also seems like something that postmodernism is utterly incapable of doing.

However, it's pretty obvious that she won't give an answer to that challenge, because there is no answer to be given. Some people seem to like the idea of a method of "analysis" which can never ever say that an idea is simply wrong. It's so much less stressful to work in an environment where your ideas can't be shot down.

Oh, the nature of Postmodernism is to say every theory is wrong, because they're based on objectivity. Under Deconstruction, they'd augment this by trying to find linguistic finagling to turn theories back on themselves, thus proving there was no underlying meaning; it was just words thrown together.

I suppose some would argue Postmodernism is a 'check' on science by proclaiming the Emperor Has No Clothes, but you will only ever hear the times they did that and the Emperor was bare-ass naked. You will never hear how they do it even when he's in a three peice suit.

[Darth Wong]

Oh, the nature of Postmodernism is to say every theory is wrong, because they're based on objectivity.

What's the difference between saying that every theory is wrong, and saying that every theory is right? Either way, you fail to do the crucial (and potentially ego-injuring) act of saying that theory A is OK, but theory B is shit.

[SirNitram]

Oh, the nature of Postmodernism is to say every theory is wrong, because they're based on objectivity.

What's the difference between saying that every theory is wrong, and saying that every theory is right? Either way, you fail to do the crucial (and potentially ego-injuring) act of saying that theory A is OK, but theory B is shit.

Correct. It's Sophism(Every world view is right!), only in it's angsty, Teenage, I'm Rebelling Against Daddy stage. Literally, really: It grows from Modernism, which was all about reason and systems, and eventually spawning the idea that we make our own meanings. Postmodernism is the hellion offspring, insisting there's no meaning, just a thin veneer people pretend to put over it.

[Lord Zentei]

Correct. It's Sophism(Every world view is right!), only in it's angsty, Teenage, I'm Rebelling Against Daddy stage. Literally, really: It grows from Modernism, which was all about reason and systems, and eventually spawning the idea that we make our own meanings. Postmodernism is the hellion offspring, insisting there's no meaning, just a thin veneer people pretend to put over it.

Funnily enough: if "there is no meaning, just a thin veneer peolpe pretend to put over it" is true, would that not also apply to postmodernism itself?

Conversely, "anything goes" is itself a definitive statement.