"They're being coy. The point of Sokal's initial prank was to discredit a whole kind of thought, most of which he was ignorant of - and still is. To retreat now to saying they're just cataloguing the abuse of scientific metaphor, without commenting on the rest, is either silly or dishonest."
I haven't read Sokal, & I'm not sure I'm going to, but Doug is developing tunnel vision here.
First of all, this habit of hauling (pseudo)science into historical (humanist, literary, etc) discourse is not at all new, and it has *always* been pretty stupid -- Keats on Newton and the rainbow leaves a bit to be desired. Moreover, it has always been proper to hit this misuse of science (or "science") -- even if the science was accurate. Endless confusion was created in the humanities because of Einstein's decision to call his theory of the absolute speed of light "relativity theory." Similar confusion is being created by someone's calling the discovery of order in unexpected places "chaos theory."
Carrol Cox
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This is for Carrol, Doug, Jim, Bill and others on this business of Sokal versus Social Text.
There is a more interesting issue here than either Sokal or Social Text captures, and that is the little understood, but suspected concordance between mathematical forms and many sorts of form in the arts and humanities. I tried something along these lines a few posts back on Butler's over use of dialectical reason. Nobody responded, so I figured most people thought it was weird, or ridiculous or un-intelligible or all of the above--and it probably was.
In any case, it seems to me that whether a particular writer is any good at elucidating or demonstrating such a correspondence is not the same as demonstrating such correspondences don't exist. I should go and read Sokal, but for the moment, I'll assume the book merely develops the arguments in his various written responses put out on the web last year.
I think any self-respecting scientist would want to think a little about what is going on when a writer in the humanities or arts tries to draw on half sensed parallels in mathematics and the sciences. Such efforts should be examined not as bogus attempts to shore up poor thinking with fancy metaphors, but might indicate some motive beyond bad intellectual faith--a presumed bad faith on both sides, I might add.
The most sustained effort that I know about that attempts to use mathematical ideas and apply them in a range of fields associated with the arts and humanities was structuralism. In particular the work of Levi-Strauss and Piaget. Nobody reads these guys anymore and of course structuralism itself is considered completely discredited, but it still remains as such an effort. Piaget attempted to found a theory of knowledge, based on what he thought were various stages of childhood intellectual development and found these to roughly correspond to a sequence of logico-mathematical fields, beginning with the most abstract and general, meta-mathematics and set theory, and finishing in the more concrete (and ad hoc?) field of analysis.
I'd like to suggest a short essay. The essay is called, "Reflections on the Concept of Group and Theory of Perception" from, _Symbol, Myth, and Culture, essays and lectures of Ernest Cassirer 1935-1945_, Verene, DP ed., Yale Univ Press, 1979.
Since this was published long before Levi-Strauss and Piaget tried to use group theory in their work, I suspect they must have read this essay and been influenced by it. It is worth reading. Cassirer knew and thoroughly understood the mathematical physics behind relativity and its historical context. He began his career as a philosopher of science. He was also well acquainted with the arts and humanities. I think Jim Farmelant mentioned Cassirer's mis-understanding of Carlyle.* Well, there is no excuse, of course, but I want to defend Cassirer a little here and say, Cassirer was a German Jewish academic and no doubt his sense of humor and irony on race matters were probably suffering from severe reality corrections from the 1930's on.
Chuck Grimes
* For Jim Farmelant. I was curious what Cassirer missed and went looking around for references to Carlyle. The only one I found was a little obscure and occurs in an essay on race that compares Carlyle to Gobineau ("The Theory of the Totalitarian Race", from _The Myth of State_). Since I don't know anything about Carlyle I would like to hear more about where Carlyle stood on this business and why Cassirer missed the point. Seriously.