At 05:54 PM 12/7/98 -0500, you wrote: >>From 12/7/98 article in the NY Times: > >Mr. Sokal has been attacked as a "left conservative" because he is trying >to stake out a territory free from the political claims of culture. That >would be the territory of reasoned argument, objective fact and >Enlightenment insight, where even debates like these might take place. > >*********** > >Entry on race in Diderot's Encyclopédie But, Louis, isn't it very much in the Enlightenment tradition that stuff like Diderot's racist rant should never be exempt from rational criticism (i.e., reasoned argument, reference to objective fact, etc.) The Enlightenment was clearly culture-bound (just like the pre-Enlightenment and the anti-Enlightenment). It was Eurocentric, imperialist, etc., etc. What makes the Enlightenment different is that it claims that application of the scientific method (logic, reference to fact, etc.) will allow _progress_ beyond culture-bound nonsense. And we see that Diderot-type nonsense has indeed faded away, so that today it would "embarrass a Ku Klux Klansman" (or woman). Of course, against the positivist view (one version of the Enlightenment tradition) and along the lines of Marx, the dropping of racist language from the mainstream resulted mostly because people fought against racism. It wasn't the application of the scientific method that did it. However, I would bet that scientifically-minded thinkers were less likely to accept racist stereotypes than were those who rejected scientific thinking in favor of faith-based thinking. Much of the Enlightenment tradition has been sucked up into the ideology of capitalism and the dominant power structure (including racism and sexism). But we should remember that Karl Marx was in the broad Enlightenment tradition, learning from the Enlightenment at the same time he criticized it. I would say that he _extended_ that tradition, by arguing that "objective, scientific ideas" can be biased and rendered ideological by the societal structure in which they are constructed, when that structure is taken for granted. He also suggested that the realization of Enlightenment ideals could only be achieved via struggle by the working class and other oppressed groups. Marx himself suffered from various ethnic biases, including against Jews, his own ethnic group. This doesn't mean that we should reject his views, ripping them out by the roots and tossing them in the trash can of history. I've always argued that his system of thought is made more coherent and thus stronger if one drops such ethnic stereotypes. I think that can also be said about the Enlightenment tradition. This dropping is strictly speaking very much within the Enlightenment tradition. When Sokal tries "to stake out a territory free from the political claims of culture," he is talking about physical science and its environs. I think he's right that physical science (especially physics) is a topic where it's much easier to attain a consensus of serious observers using the scientific method. (That's one reason why economists have physics-envy so bad that it hurts.) Though clearly physics has been employed by imperialism (the atomic bomb), it's useful to remember that many atomic scientists tried to avoid its misuse in that way. But I'll let Sokal make his own argument here. Suffice it to say, even though physics is relatively culture-free, it is is not totally free from being culture-bound. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
