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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Today's Random Wilde

A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

3 comments:

Michael Anissimov said...

I do like Oscar Wilde, but to go off topic, here are a couple links which reminded me of you for some reason:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Superstition:_The_Academic_Left_and_Its_Quarrels_With_Science
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense

You've probably heard of the Sokal hoax, I'm curious to hear how you would distinguish yourself from other intellectuals from the Left (btw, I consider myself to be one) who view scientific works primarily in the context of their political implications rather than factual merit.

Michael Anissimov said...

Full first link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Higher_Superstition:_The_Academic_Left_and_Its_Quarrels_With_Science

Dale Carrico said...

Yes, I slogged through all that stuff years ago. It annoyed me.

I think there is a lot of mutual incomprehension on the part of both of the "sides" in these debates, to be honest, but I have to say that the "dismissively anti-postmodernist" glosses on the Sokal Affair seem to me the most insufferable... if only because I've actually read enough of the figures that get skewered by the "fashionable nonsense" crowd to know that they are not reading the texts they criticize very carefully. (And I don't particularly see myself as a "postmodernist," by the way, since the term has always seemed to me an awfully blunt and obfuscatory instrument.)

"[H]ow you would distinguish yourself from other intellectuals from the Left (btw, I consider myself to be one) who view scientific works primarily in the context of their political implications rather than factual merit." Must I?

Who do you mean here, Michael? Who does this on your view? In what arguments with what consequences, concretely? Are you talking about Richard Rorty here, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler (all brilliant thinkers, in my view, all enormously formative for me)? This phrasing feels like a rather facile accusation masquerading as a "question" -- But I don't want to be unfair to you, and perhaps I've grown a bit oversensitive on this score from one too many debates with cocksure critics of texts they've never read while I've devoted quite a lot of time to understanding them.

I have to suggest (gently) that the attribution of the status of "factuality" to some justified descriptions isn't exactly unrelated to the "political implications" of scientific works, so I am not entirely sure I can even accept the premise on which you may be basing your leading questions.

Have you read Andrew Ross's volume on the so-called "science wars" or actually read Bruno Latour or any of the key STS figures with an eye to understanding them rather than dismissing them out of hand with only a second-hand acquaintance with their work? I'm just curious.