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This x1000. I am truly amazed, also, that so many people that are quite intelligent could fall in for such a paper-thin, sloppy "they don't believe what we beli

This x1000. I am truly amazed, also, that so many people that are quite intelligent could fall in for such a paper-thin, sloppy "they don't believe what we believe! let's completely talk past each other" bad faith argument and think they somehow "owned" the targets. Hyperspecialization has done massive damage to the overall intellectual health of society. What Sokal did is roughly equivalent to a humanities scholar creating a spoof hit piece to show how some mathematician did not employ a literary metaphor correctly in an article about geometry. The only reason it was even remotely successful is because the western (particularly American) perspective is so heavily biased toward STEM at the expense of basically producing individuals who can adequately solve practical problems but who (on average, there are exceptions) have the humanities knowledge of a stick and revere their favorite Netflix show or animated superhero blockbuster as though it were high art on par with anything hanging in the Guggenheim.

DiscourseFan 3y ago
Well, I like the Guggenheim but I still feel there is a place for critiques of popular media and literary merit/appreciation of certain Netflix shows (though I am pretty tired of capeshit, aside from The Boys and shows of that ilk). But I by and large agree, even if I'm biased because I chose to study literature and learn all about "postmodernism." But look there is something about logical positivist styles of thinking that was very attractive to many of the people Sokal attacks (which is why he is even able to attack them in the first place!), and also to me. I can't tell if that's because I have some deeply repressed control and power fantasies (probably), or because there is something to the analysis of the structure and order of logic and language in a rigorous fashion that reveals something about the order of social and psychological life, even if unintentionally. If these more radical authors used the mathematic and logical formulae in this manner, I don't see how a criticism of "it's poorly defined" works, because anything would be poorly defined in an algebra of society, psychology, history--if you only defined it in terms of contemporary mathematics and logic which seeks to divorce itself from those things. And modern literary education isn't much better. My inner-authoritarian wants every humanities major to get a rigorous classical education and required courses in logic. Trying to break history is very hard when you have no consciousness of it whatsoever, and the humanities disciplines today are almost designed to keep students away from contributing their work to a "rigorous" STEM field, as they are deemed too reactionary to be worth critiquing or engaging with. It is for the very reason I listed above that its imperative humanities students receive the same basis of education as the STEM majors, and vica versa!

DiscourseFan 3y ago

Well, I like the Guggenheim but I still feel there is a place for critiques of popular media and literary merit/appreciation of certain Netflix shows (though I am pretty tired of capeshit, aside from The Boys and shows of that ilk). But I by and large agree, even if I'm biased because I chose to study literature and learn all about "postmodernism." But look there is something about logical positivist styles of thinking that was very attractive to many of the people Sokal attacks (which is why he is even able to attack them in the first place!), and also to me. I can't tell if that's because I have some deeply repressed control and power fantasies (probably), or because there is something to the analysis of the structure and order of logic and language in a rigorous fashion that reveals something about the order of social and psychological life, even if unintentionally. If these more radical authors used the mathematic and logical formulae in this manner, I don't see how a criticism of "it's poorly defined" works, because anything would be poorly defined in an algebra of society, psychology, history--if you only defined it in terms of contemporary mathematics and logic which seeks to divorce itself from those things. And modern literary education isn't much better. My inner-authoritarian wants every humanities major to get a rigorous classical education and required courses in logic. Trying to break history is very hard when you have no consciousness of it whatsoever, and the humanities disciplines today are almost designed to keep students away from contributing their work to a "rigorous" STEM field, as they are deemed too reactionary to be worth critiquing or engaging with. It is for the very reason I listed above that its imperative humanities students receive the same basis of education as the STEM majors, and vica versa!