>>Intellectual debate rarely works the way you seem to demand. And
for good reason: intellectuals try to resolve things in debate,
and they simply can't do so by criticizing each others'
*positions*. When that occurs, the discussion degenerates into
"your opinion" vs. "my opinion," nothing gets resolved, and the
whole thing gets replayed ad infinitum. So instead, in order to
resolve things, intellectual debate (when it is honest) is almost
always a debate over *arguments*. One weakens the other position
by demolishing one or more arguments that support it.<<<
If you look at Habermas' work on discourse ethics, your view of debate is not the only one. For Habermas (following Toulmin and others), the goal of argument is to find consensus as a basis for praxis. I suggest that your view of argument is what leads to the sterility of most academic debates--long on words short on getting anything done. Of course, the pomos are notorious for their opposition to Habermas--and I only bring him in to show that there are other views of what constitutes the goal of discourse and intellectual debate.
Since I find myself in agreement with the pomo's anti-systematic views, I'll opt for their notion that argument begins with a dialog that is irreducible to pat answers and definitions. Even in the cases of a scientific debate, where a value is or is not what it is, the standard for objectivity lie within the primordial encounter of the face-to-face with the other. The _nature_ of dialog is not goal-oriented per se, but instead is open and never closed. This openness arises from the irreducibility of the Other, the interlocutor, to a POV or a set of maxims that we can say comprises the other as other.
>>>This Sokal has surely done. He has shown -- and this is perhaps
his major point, to which he continually returns -- that the
arguments brought forth in support of the social construction of
reality are fatally flawed. As I noted, he has shown that the
pomos in question confuse and conflate the social construction of
knowledge with the social construction of reality.<<<
I think Sokal, at least, is wrong here. Instead of lumping all pomos in the same heap, he seems to be at least guilty of reductionism. I am now reading Levinas and Derrida, and I do not see this as their "error" at all. In most cases, they do not really talk about the social construction of reality at all. Indeed, Levinas eschews sociological and anthropological categories in his analysis.
Instead, what you find in these two writers is an emphasis on the irreducibility of reality to knowledge, either scientific or anything else. The real abides in the good and the just as it comes into being through the intersubjective encounter with the Other. Ultimately, Levinas and Derrida would say that our being in the world arises from the exigencies of this primordial event.
>>>The pomos have failed to defend their arguments. Indeed, they
have hardly tried. They have preferred instead to backpedal
without acknowledging that they are backpedalling, and especially
they've tried to divert the discussion away from the TRUTH-VALUE
OF THEIR ARGUMENTS and onto Sokal's motives, behavior, and
philosophic position.<<<
The "truth-value" of their arguments... That sounds like something that a logician would put forth. What exactly is the truth-value of an argument? Does it relate to a truth table? I did my thesis on Wittgenstein, and I am familiar with the notion that the Later W did not limit "truth" to truth values. I, for one, am interested in hearing what you think the truth-value of their arguments is/isn't.
Perhaps we can get at the truth! :-)