Doug Henwood wrote:
> Devine, James wrote:
>
>> Similarly, I heard on pen-l that Alan Sokal was a "social democrat."
>> Who cares? Does his status as a social democrat imply that he's worse
>> than some creep who runs a small sect of five people which claims to
>> have the "correct line (or program)"? should we shun Sokal and reject
>> everything he says out of hand?
>
> Of course, he didn't really say much about the literature he parodied,
> in part because he's never really read it.
>
well he did write a book with bricmont ('intellectual impostors'),
as i am sure you know, offering an "analysis" of the illogic of the
folks he didn't like... a critique of the analysis could be that it
was simplistic and outdated, many of the criticisms he raised
having been hashed many times over in philosophy of science and
responded to (for eg, his criticism of feyerabend, and his dragging
out that old horse "context of discovery vs context of justification").
the "debate" was also carried out by chomsky, ehrenreich and the
usual suspects on z-magazine. i always find it amusing that chomsky
starts off his sokal'ish position in these debates with sentences of
the form "well, in the hard sciences, we....". is linguistics really
a hard science? appeal to authority doesn't hurt i guess (of course
none of this posturing diminishes my respect for chomsky).
--ravi
