>From the thread a couple of days ago on Sokal & ? book review, Brad de
Long wrote:
Incompetence at the use of language borrowed from other fields does not "invalidate the whole effort", but it is a sign that you haven't worked very hard at trying to communicate--and thus a clue to readers that perhaps they might find something else more interesting and fruitful than trying to read your works.
There is a awful lot of good stuff to be read out there, written by people who have sweated blood to try to make it as easy as possible for readers to learn what they know. Why should anyone waste their time reading your works if you haven't sweated blood to make your stuff as easy as possible to read? To not make the attempt at clarity is to show disrespect to your readers.
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My very first impression of several pomo essays I read several years ago, in an effort to re-educate myself in the current intellectual climate, generated nausea followed by rage. But these symptoms passed as I began to enjoy myself.
Almost immediately, I realized that some of the more famous pomo french authors had picked up something of their ideas from popular conceptions about the various parts of physical science and mathematics. I am thinking particularly about Deleuze rambling on about rhizomes and flight paths. It stuck me that what he was describing was something like an elementary topological space--very little structure where any linear combination of elements can be performed (spider webs, woven patterns, leaf veins, roots, rope knots, mirror images, Klein bottles, and so forth). This was an enjoyable insight but I didn't mistake it for a rational critique of the evil phallocentric hegemony of rationalism.
After reading the review of Sokal's book I will probably get the
book and see for myself.
"incompetence at the use of language...is a sign that you haven't worked very hard at trying to communicate.."
But there is more here than a matter of bad language. If you really want to make the sciences and the humanities commensurate with each other, then I have found, I had to become a schizophrenic historian--share a dual consciousness, or double voice, and start back in time with maybe the last period when letters and sciences did communicate with each other through the medium of philosophy--that is in the Enlightenment.
For the science crew interested in this kind of project, you might try what I am reading at the moment, Ernst Cassirer, "The Philosophy of the Enlightenment", Princeton Uni Press, 1951. This is a very clear survey of all the threads that lead out of the enlightenment philosophers and tradition of letters and sciences aimed at illucidating the emerging issues of substance, rather than covering the detailed writings of each of the many participants. It is essentially an introduction to the ideas and themes that later became what is now called Modernism. For the other voices, the other side of the hall, the rabble of the humanities, I would suggest, Carl Boyer's "The History of Mathematics", Wiley, NY 1968. Mathematics has been at various points in history considered either one of the sciences or one of the humanities.
If your interested in specifically a science, say, physics, then try Galileo's "Dialogues Concerning Two World Systems" and of course Newton's "Principia", Cajori, Univ of Cal Press, 1934. You don't actually read the Principia, but play with Book I (the mathematical development) at whatever level you can. The later books and _The System of the World_ are much easier to follow. For a current survey of math and physics, see, "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose, Penguin, 1989. I didn't like Penrose much, since he is often so clear and plodding that I kept falling asleep. A much better written book is John Barrow, "Pi in the Sky", Little Brown, NY, 1992, which follows some modern mathematical history with more explicit mathematical discussions.
The most serious problem with the scientific community is its own arrogant belief that because the membership have highly technical educations and have often assumed positions of eminence and bureaucratic power, that they have complete and easy access to the entire intellectual world. This just isn't so and the reason is not bad language or a failure to communicate. On the other hand, the humanities people certainly have their own conceits and assume because they are conversant with the worlds of history, society, culture and lanuage, then that is all there is to know.
The problem for the scientist is that letters or the humanities all have traditions of their own, with histories much older than many sciences and technical fields. In addition, many ideas in the humanities do not age or become obsolete, nor are they demonstrably false in quite the same way. Some ideas which should have died before they were born, are still with us. So, it is possible to revisit Plato, Aristotle, or Anaximander, right along with Machiavelli, Milton, or Locke and never feel any discord at all. What this means is, if you are coming into such a history laden discourse from the empirical world of science, it is very easy to find yourself in what appears to be a meaningless mire. Well, you could be, but you have to reserve judgment much longer than the end of the essay or book or even that particular few years of your life. That is, the nature of truth and judgment in the humanities is much different. For one thing, truth and judgment are qualitatively circumscribed by and are expressions of both sensibility and aesthetics. And these latter domains are never completed projects, either in the world of letters or in the readers and writers who compose that world.
Chuck Grimes