[escepticos] (Fwd) Hawaii Rational Inquirer July 16, 1998

["carlitos" <180807@...>]

Hola, hola.

Creo que hace no mucho se hablo por aquí del libro de Alan Sokal.  Aquí van
extractos de una reseña.

Saludos, Carlos Ungil

************************************************************************
              H-A-W-A-I-I  R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L  I-N-Q-U-I-R-E-R

Vol. 3 No. 30                                              July 16, 1998
************************************************************************

A free, open newsletter on issues of interest to the University of
Hawaii and international academic communities.

Subscriptions are open to all. To subscribe send the following message,
with subject blank, to listproc en hawaii.edu subscribe hri-l first_name
last_name. To unsubscribe send: unsubscribe hri-l Do not send requests
to hri-l en hawaii.edu.

If you would like to comment to the list, reply to hri-l en hawaii.edu.
The editor reserves the right to decide which messages to post to the
list and to edit them as appropriate (without changing content) before
re-transmittal.

To contact the editor privately, send email to vstenger en hawaii.edu

This and earlier issues are archived at:
http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/rati.html.

Feel free to re-distribute this newsletter in full or in part, as long
as it is not being done for profit and due credit is given.


DAWKINS REVIEWS INTELLECTUAL IMPOSTURES

Excerpts from a review by Richard Dawkins of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and
Jean Bricmont, 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."

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 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'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."

Richard Dawkins is at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History,
Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK.

Thanks to Norm Levitt and Ian Pitchford for passing this on.