At 12:15 PM -0500 1/15/07, William Scott wrote:
Stephen Black writes:
"If there's one thing that Alan Sokal's brilliant "Transgressing" hoax
on
the journal _Social Text_ tells us, it's that the people who claim to
understand such nonsense really don't. It's not even clear that the
people who _write_ the stuff understand it. Postmodernists seem to have
academic defecation disorder (ADD). It's writing to impress, not to
communicate. information.
So who cares what the author may or may not have been trying to say. If
it can't be understood without the need for someone else explain it to
us, let's just flush it down the toilet.
Note: I'm not talking about legitimately difficult exposition such as,
for example, in modern mathematics. Mere mortals cannot understand such
writing, not because it lacks meaning, but because it deals with
genuinely difficult matters which only the seriously smart can
understand. This, alas, is not the case with postmodernist babble."
--------------------------------------------------------------
The problem is one for math and physics also, as evidenced by the
Bogdanov affair.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair
Slightly different --
In the Bogdanov case the question is whether the papers were a hoax,
or whether they were too idiosyncratic to be understood.
Sokal on the other hand was an admitted and deliberate hoax.
--
* PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Psychology Department 507-389-6217 *
* 23 Armstrong Hall Minnesota State University, Mankato *
* http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~pkbrando/ *
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