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Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in. Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.

by Marazan 10y ago

tsunamifury 10y ago
Or, again, unsarcastically, up is down from a facing direction. It simply is acknowledging that some facts are verifiable from chosen frames, and others verifiable in different frames of reference.
- mcguire 10y ago
  There are some pretty fair defense of the general field---if not all of specific extremists---in the article: "NORTON WISE, professor in the history of science, UCLA: I read Sokal’s Social Text article and thought it was pretty funny. It was just nonsense. Of course, Gross, Levitt, and the others were claiming that science-studies people were engaged in what they called radical relativism. You may be able to find such an extreme, but it’s not by any means the basic argument of the social-constructionist perspective. [...] "HELEN LONGINO, professor of philosophy, Stanford University: Certainly there are some deconstructionists who have tried to take on science. But that was, by far, the minority of the work that was being done in science studies. If Sokal had submitted it to a serious science-studies journal, people would have seen through it. Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so. "STANLEY FISH, professor of humanities and law, Florida International University: Thomas Hobbes said it hundreds of years ago: "Where there is no speech, there is no truth or falsehood." Knowledge is made, of course, by men and women in the context of assumptions, presuppositions, available vocabularies, and available methodologies. "WISE: You don’t need to believe in a particular theory of gravity in order to think that there is gravity. Whether you’re Aristotle or Newton, you’re not going to be jumping out windows, because there’s a validity to the view that falling bodies fall, and it doesn’t matter which view of the nature of gravity you hold in order to believe that. "What interests people in science studies is how one view versus another comes to be taken as "true" — here in scare quotes — and arguing that oftentimes that’s a matter of cultural conditions, which is not a very radical position." In a related context, what would quantum mechanics look like today if Louis de Broglie had a better argument in 1927 and pilot wave theory was the current standard model?
- Marazan 10y ago
  He wasn't mocking the notion of frames of reference.

Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in. Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.

by Marazan 10y ago

Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in. Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.

tsunamifury 10y ago

Or, again, unsarcastically, up is down from a facing direction. It simply is acknowledging that some facts are verifiable from chosen frames, and others verifiable in different frames of reference.

mcguire 10y ago
There are some pretty fair defense of the general field---if not all of specific extremists---in the article: "NORTON WISE, professor in the history of science, UCLA: I read Sokal’s Social Text article and thought it was pretty funny. It was just nonsense. Of course, Gross, Levitt, and the others were claiming that science-studies people were engaged in what they called radical relativism. You may be able to find such an extreme, but it’s not by any means the basic argument of the social-constructionist perspective. [...] "HELEN LONGINO, professor of philosophy, Stanford University: Certainly there are some deconstructionists who have tried to take on science. But that was, by far, the minority of the work that was being done in science studies. If Sokal had submitted it to a serious science-studies journal, people would have seen through it. Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so. "STANLEY FISH, professor of humanities and law, Florida International University: Thomas Hobbes said it hundreds of years ago: "Where there is no speech, there is no truth or falsehood." Knowledge is made, of course, by men and women in the context of assumptions, presuppositions, available vocabularies, and available methodologies. "WISE: You don’t need to believe in a particular theory of gravity in order to think that there is gravity. Whether you’re Aristotle or Newton, you’re not going to be jumping out windows, because there’s a validity to the view that falling bodies fall, and it doesn’t matter which view of the nature of gravity you hold in order to believe that. "What interests people in science studies is how one view versus another comes to be taken as "true" — here in scare quotes — and arguing that oftentimes that’s a matter of cultural conditions, which is not a very radical position." In a related context, what would quantum mechanics look like today if Louis de Broglie had a better argument in 1927 and pilot wave theory was the current standard model?
Marazan 10y ago
He wasn't mocking the notion of frames of reference.