tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12471112.post8114445135342517434..comments2023-08-20T11:07:28.396+01:00Comments on Freeborn John: Fatuity is a feminist issuePeter Risdonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17792275403997179926noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12471112.post-60583005969319928782008-08-09T13:56:00.000+01:002008-08-09T13:56:00.000+01:00I would say that the Sokal case is grossly oversta...I would say that the Sokal case is grossly overstated. So you have a bunch of magazine editors who got caught in making fools of themselves. That does NOT mean the end of postmodernism.<BR/>In fact I see "reverse Sokal" cases every day. An example: Scientists prove that the brains of men and women function entirely different. The proof? They had a bunch of men and women cooking an egg, ironing a shirt and do the dishes. The women did this quicker than the men. Now, I would love to have somebody to jump up and shout: "it's a hoax! You were fooled!". The problem is that everybody; the scientists responsible for the study, the magazine editors, the journalists publishing the story, actually believe that this is good science! <BR/>Ben Goldacre did a very funny piece on the “pink affair”, but this reverse Sokal didn’t seem to reverberate through the scientific community with the kind of force it deserved (in my opinion, that is). <BR/>I took a course in university in feminist epistemology. Epistemology can roughly be translated to “how we know that we know something, and how we go about to get knowledge”. Sandra Harding was one of the scholars represented in the curriculum. Maybe we only got to read the sane bits, but her texts seemed very reasonable to me. She and the other scholars did not promote some kind of new science. The issue was more of a science critique. Are we as scientists neutral, value-free (in the Weberian sense), without prejudices etc? The good thing with “hard” sciences like physics is that these things do not really matter. You will get the same results if you are a gay, Jewish, African American priestess, or if you are a middle aged, heterosexual ,white, male. But sometimes the scientist is well capable of “contaminating” his or her data. Ben Goldacre’s blog is all about pseudoscience and bad science. Cases where presumably hard science is twisted and tampered with to get the results you want. You need to deconstruct the science qua science in order to detect these flaws (that is, when the method itself is flawed). That we are able to do this is actually a result of postmodernist critique. <BR/>Postmodernism does not suspend natural science; it is not a substitute. It is a critique of the blind spots that make some scientists believe they are neutral and value-free when they are in fact looking through a colored lens, so to speak. I am sure there are lots of crackpots who call themselves postmodernists, but they do not define postmodernists. Or rather, you should not let them define it. Now, can we “Sokal” these idiots who claim to have proved that men are adulterous based on cockroach research? Please?Faustinahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03149514993374789050noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12471112.post-37113718877867663422007-03-07T16:42:00.000+00:002007-03-07T16:42:00.000+00:00Both Gross and Levitt's Higher Superstition and Fa...Both Gross and Levitt's <I>Higher Superstition</I> and <I>Fashionable Nonsense</I> (Sokal and Bricmont's devastating critique of post-modernism) have pride of place on my bookshelf. Anyone wishing to examine the animating spirit of the po-mo academic world should read both as soon as possible.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com