>You imply that Sokal "did harm" by exposing the fatuous b.s. he did?
>Are pomos in such pathetic intellectual shape that they should be so
>damaged? Are you saying Sokal's piece wasn't original? I'd never
>seen anything like it ... Katha Pollitt thought it was a gas...
Katha & I have had some disagreements on this; if any journalist could actually engage the writers Sokal was mocking it's her, but she won't do it. And yes I think it's damaging, because it deepened the chasm between people who should be talking to each other, and because it confirmed that people could write sentences like this:
>Well, to discredit a whole kind of thought of people who felt that
>they could simply invent things out of thin air and claim things like
>objective truth is simply a social construction.
...which is itself an invention out of thin air. Who exactly makes such a claim? And what's so simple about a social construction? The status of "objective truth" and the relations between "reality" and our perception of reality are ancient philosophical problems in the Western tradition. I sure don't know enough about philosphy to comment on this wisely, but the question ain't been solved, and never will be.
On lbo-talk, Rakesh Bhandari quoted this from Paul Mattick Jr the other day:
<quote> As Marx put it, in a concise statement of the culturally constructed character of social reality, "The specific shape in which the value components [of social wealth] confront one another is presupposed because it is constantly reproduced, and it is constantly reproduced because it is constantly presupposed.'" p. 84-85 </quote>
That's about socially constructed truth, and it ain't very simple.
Doug