3 ms·

Alan Sokal Won the Battle but Lost the ‘Science Wars’

3 points by hirundo 5y ago

hirundo 5y ago
https://archive.md/POKiE https://archive.md/POKiE
jfengel 5y ago
Sokal did lose the Science Wars, but TFA has no idea why. The clearest way to see it is this: who was he fighting against? Derrida? He never heard of Sokal. Social Text? Have you ever heard of Social Text except in the context of Sokal? Sokal lost the science wars because he was the only one who showed up. He defeated nobody, because there wasn't anybody there. Social Text published a paper they didn't understand... because that's what they do. They are looking to get outside conventional patterns of thought. They're the kinds of things that sound silly by definition. If it was something you understood at first glance, it wouldn't be very interesting. That made them easy to hoax, and he did. Their mistake was publishing somebody who didn't read their journal and engage with the material. More broadly, the whole movement tended to be disconnected: people spoke and few listened. And that's the mistake Commentary is making now. They're not listening. Social Text, and the movements that it spawned, are trying to solve real problems facing society. People suffer, and that's harder to solve than a physics problem because the solutions are murky even in the best case. The murkiness is genuine cause for caution -- but Commentary uses that to dismiss the problems, and that's even worse.
eesmith 5y ago
> Another was a version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in feminist jargon So rewritten it's difficult to identify how it's connected to Mein Kampf. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/10/09/nothing-squared-is-still-nothing/ https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/10/09/nothing-s... - "I read through their article Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism and then went through the chapter of Mein Kampf this article is supposed to be mimicking ... and couldn’t find a single phrase that matched." Or from https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2018/10/why-the-grievance-studies-hoax-was-not-unethical-but-its-not-very-interesting-either/ https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2018/10/why-the-grieva... - "However, the account of this given by the hoaxers is rather dishonest. Their re-writing of the text was so extensive that even a side-by-side comparison of the texts failed to show much similarity between them. Moreover, the part of Mein Kampf in question was making rather general claims about how to respond to (perceived) oppression. But to read the hoaxers’ account of things you’d think a Nazi diatribe had been published by a feminist journal with just a few words changed. And that’s not the case at all." > What do 400-odd cases matter, after all? It would be nice to put that in context, rather than make a rhetorical flourish. That context should include the politics around UNC's decision to deny Hannah-Jones tenure.

3 points by hirundo 5y ago

https://archive.md/POKiE https://archive.md/POKiE

Sokal did lose the Science Wars, but TFA has no idea why. The clearest way to see it is this: who was he fighting against? Derrida? He never heard of Sokal. Social Text? Have you ever heard of Social Text except in the context of Sokal? Sokal lost the science wars because he was the only one who showed up. He defeated nobody, because there wasn't anybody there. Social Text published a paper they didn't understand... because that's what they do. They are looking to get outside conventional patterns of thought. They're the kinds of things that sound silly by definition. If it was something you understood at first glance, it wouldn't be very interesting. That made them easy to hoax, and he did. Their mistake was publishing somebody who didn't read their journal and engage with the material. More broadly, the whole movement tended to be disconnected: people spoke and few listened. And that's the mistake Commentary is making now. They're not listening. Social Text, and the movements that it spawned, are trying to solve real problems facing society. People suffer, and that's harder to solve than a physics problem because the solutions are murky even in the best case. The murkiness is genuine cause for caution -- but Commentary uses that to dismiss the problems, and that's even worse.

eesmith 5y ago

> Another was a version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in feminist jargon So rewritten it's difficult to identify how it's connected to Mein Kampf. https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/10/09/nothing-squared-is-still-nothing/ https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2018/10/09/nothing-s... - "I read through their article Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism and then went through the chapter of Mein Kampf this article is supposed to be mimicking ... and couldn’t find a single phrase that matched." Or from https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2018/10/why-the-grievance-studies-hoax-was-not-unethical-but-its-not-very-interesting-either/ https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2018/10/why-the-grieva... - "However, the account of this given by the hoaxers is rather dishonest. Their re-writing of the text was so extensive that even a side-by-side comparison of the texts failed to show much similarity between them. Moreover, the part of Mein Kampf in question was making rather general claims about how to respond to (perceived) oppression. But to read the hoaxers’ account of things you’d think a Nazi diatribe had been published by a feminist journal with just a few words changed. And that’s not the case at all." > What do 400-odd cases matter, after all? It would be nice to put that in context, rather than make a rhetorical flourish. That context should include the politics around UNC's decision to deny Hannah-Jones tenure.