Jim: > we on the left should expect to be attacked (denigrated). > Thus, we should try to avoid doing things that can be > used to attack us.
I do not agree with this. That the Sokal affair is still a subject of debate after so many years indicates to me that what he did made an impact whether he is attacked or not. Further, especially since I know almost nothing about the US political scene, I have never viewed Sokal as someone on the left but as some physicist, so I do not understand what this fuss about what Sokal did and its impact on the left or about that whether what he did confirmed a lot of pre-existing prejudices about the authority of science. Being an applied mathematician who has never been able to take science seriously (after all, I am against western rationality, remember) but did much work in physics, I think I understand Sokal quite well. Unlike Doug, I doubt that "the problem with the ST crowd, from his point of view, was not that they weren't doing science studies very well (i.e., informed by a knowledge of both science and politics), but that they were doing it at all." A self-respecting scientist cannot expect nonscientists or part time scientists to be as well informed as the full time scientists, especially in these days, since many full time scientists of different scientific areas, even in the same scientific discipline, do not have much idea about the areas of one another. Not only that, any self-respecting scientist knows that science, like art or music, is a social activity, and as such, is not a collection of absolute truths. All science at its base depends on some claims that we either believe or disbelieve. If you disbelieve any of those claims, much but not necessarily all science collapses. And believing those claims or not is just a choice you make. I cannot imagine that Sokal does not know these. If he does not, then he is not a scientist, so all the attacks on him are on him, not on science or left, which means there is nothing to worry about. By the way Doug, if you asked me how I'd feel about a Frankfurt-style critique of instrumental reason, you would have discovered that I had no idea what you were talking about either. But because I know this, I do not sit and write some essay in some symbolic language that looks like scientific notation on the Frankfurt-style instrumental reason that even those who know some of that symbolic language have no clue of what I am talking about. That was what Sokal was bothered with the way I see it. Whether he was mechanistic materialist not dialectic materialist, or liberal not socialist or whatever are all garbage as far as I am concerned. You are over-intellectualizing a simple affair. Sometimes an affair is just an affair and most of the time it is for sexual reasons. Best, Sabri
