James Farmelant wrote:
>
> December 7, 1998
>
> CONNECTIONS
>
> It's a Battlefield Out There, Culturally Speaking
>
> By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
> ...
>
> Don't count on it. Two years ago, Alan Sokal, a New York University
> physicist, wrote a satirical paper full of absurdities and
> scientific howlers arguing that even "physical reality" was at
> bottom a "social and linguistic construct," that even famous
> numerical constants like pi are culturally dependent, that science
> -- presumably the most "objective" of human enterprises -- is
> culturally determined.
Even tho' I sympathize with Sokal, I am often alarmed by his defenders who sometimes sound less science literate than his victims. As when Pi becomes the poster child for trans-cultural reality in the above article. What is that "thing" that Pi is the name for? The formal answer would be the limit of some (infinite) sequence of operations, like Pi = (2 x 2 x 4 x 4 x 6 x 6 x ...)/ (1 x 1 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 5 ...). A "thing", in this case an irrational/transcendental number defined as a limit, that is not palpably real, but requires immense cultural conditioning to be perceived as such; witness the resistance of mathematicians of past centuries that have denied such notions. Even in its more intutive definition as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, Pi does not have a referent in a non-Euclidean universe whose geometery is warped by gravity at every scale. Maybe there is a more sophisticated argument for "physical reality", but heck, if recognizing reality takes so much human labor, maybe its time to quit beating up strawman dualties...
raju