> Attacking people you haven't read and/or > barely understand isn't my idea of what > intellectuals are supposed to do, but your > support for him does explain some of your > previously inexplicable sympathies. > > Doug
I read his book with Bircmont and was not under the impression that he did not read the literature. At least, he read some. Whether he understood the literature or not is another issue. I personally don't understand anything I read from Baudliard, for example. Apparently, Baudliard did not have in mind common people like me when he wrote his books. Most common people are not intellectuals as you know. By the way, the way we use the word intellectual in Turkish is very different than the way it is used in English. I cannot speak for Sokal but, in the Turkish version, I am not an intellectual because I am simply a specialists of a very particular area. An intellectual back home is the one who not only knows and learns a large variety of subjects to understand how the world fuctions as objectively as possible but also uses that knowledge to help change the world. Given this definition, I don't think I will ever qualify. I don't know Sokal so I don't know whether in this definition he counts as an intellectual or not. What I read in his book is a defensive reflex of a physicist against those who abuse his and related subjects without "sufficient" understanding. I don't see it as an analysis of anything. His (and Bricmont's) book gets boring at times because of too much detail but at least it is a proof that they went out their way and read some of that literature. It is said that it was not some social "scientists" who presumably have better understanding of that literature who stood against the abuse but it was some physicists who had to do that. I guess this explains my sympathies. Sabri
