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> As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his

> As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either. I'll admit I'm biased here. Latan, Irigaray and co. sound like a bunch of charlatans to me. However, you're suggesting that I should try "understanding where they are coming from". So please explain to me where Irigaray is coming from when she suggests that fluid mechanics is neglected because "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."

cdavid 16y ago
First, it is Lacan, not Latan. Incorrectly spelling author names is not well seen in academia :) One thing that must be said is that not all authors attacked by Sokal are at the same level: some deserved it, and even for a given person, there may be a lot of different quality in their work. As for understanding where they are coming from: I cannot speak for Lacan (who certainly said stupid things, but who hasn't), but Bruno Latour has done some fascinating anthropological work on science. Reading "Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts" changed my vision of science. Contrary to what Bricmont claimed in one of his article about the affair (French title: "La vraie signification de l'affaire Sokal"), Latour has never claimed to my knowledge that science was just a social construct, but rather that the scientist activity cannot be thought independently of its social environment. When Bricmont says in the same article that "Comment peut-on soutenir sérieusement qu'il n'y aucune raison empirique de croire que le sang circule, que la Terre tourne..." (my quick and rough translation: could one really claim that there is no empirical ground for blood circulation or Earth rotation), that's disingenuous. But what bothers me the most in the whole affair is that for people who claim defending science and the scientific method, they prefered the polemic, uncontrolled manner rather than an actual experiment to prove their point. That's rather ironic.

cdavid 16y ago

First, it is Lacan, not Latan. Incorrectly spelling author names is not well seen in academia :) One thing that must be said is that not all authors attacked by Sokal are at the same level: some deserved it, and even for a given person, there may be a lot of different quality in their work. As for understanding where they are coming from: I cannot speak for Lacan (who certainly said stupid things, but who hasn't), but Bruno Latour has done some fascinating anthropological work on science. Reading "Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts" changed my vision of science. Contrary to what Bricmont claimed in one of his article about the affair (French title: "La vraie signification de l'affaire Sokal"), Latour has never claimed to my knowledge that science was just a social construct, but rather that the scientist activity cannot be thought independently of its social environment. When Bricmont says in the same article that "Comment peut-on soutenir sérieusement qu'il n'y aucune raison empirique de croire que le sang circule, que la Terre tourne..." (my quick and rough translation: could one really claim that there is no empirical ground for blood circulation or Earth rotation), that's disingenuous. But what bothers me the most in the whole affair is that for people who claim defending science and the scientific method, they prefered the polemic, uncontrolled manner rather than an actual experiment to prove their point. That's rather ironic.