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When people criticize post-structuralist academic studies in good faith, one of the most common counter-criticism is that they simply don't have sufficiently de
by colllectorof 8y ago
When people criticize post-structuralist academic studies in good faith, one of the most common counter-criticism is that they simply don't have sufficiently deep understanding of the subject, of its terminology, history and so on. At the very least these kinds of pranks demonstrate that no one has "sufficiently deep understanding" of this buzzword soup. People who think they have some secret knowledge or intellectual superpowers to parse the unparseable simply delude themselves.
- tptacek 8y agoThe papers that got accepted aren't "buzzword-soup". They're intelligible and in some cases include plausible methodological data. That's one of the things that's driving me so nuts about the prevailing narrative about this hoax: people think what these people did was "Sokal^2", but really it's log(Sokal).
- colllectorof 8y agoThe papers are exactly what one would expect from reading other types of postmodernist "critique". The whole reason reviewers missed the blatant absurdity of their thesis is because standard buzzwords of the field hide meaning. This is what Orwell warned us about in Politics and the English Language.
- tptacek 8y agoRespectfully, I think what you're doing here is taking what you know about the Sokal hoax and applying it directly to this hoax. It's hard to blame you, since that's what the media did as well. But, while the papers we're talking about were fabricated and often did make ludicrous arguments, they weren't "postmodernist critique", and, as I said, many of them included data and plausible methodology. Orwell wouldn't have much to say about them.