>
> As I remember the heat of the Sokal affair, there
> were all kinds of
> claims for the rigor of experimental science, which
> can easily tell
> truth from untruth, while charlatans like Derrida
> and Harding can
> pull one over on standardless humanists like Stanley
> A. Maybe you had
> to be there.
>
Well, once all the qualifications about the lack of hard and fast in principle distinctions between the natural (hard) sciences and other kinds of human inquiry are taken into account, there is this to be said. The natural sciences have developed a huge body of knowledge that is rigorous, precise, replicable, useful in lots of practical ways, and generally reliable. You can spend seven or eight years in underegrad and early grad school getting your head around just the basics of any one of many such fields, all of which knowledge is pretty much absolutely solid. Quantum mechanics allows you to predict unexpected behavior of particles to almost as many decimal places as you can write down. Celestial astronomy will tell you exactly where the planets will be whenever. Etc.
The natural sciences have also developed quantitative and experimental methods that (with appropriate adaptations) are useful in providing more or less reliable knowledge about (for example) society and human behavior. This is less reliable, so don't start on that. I've just been dealing with a lying dirtbag of an economist "expert witness" who presuppositions are pure Chicago School crap and whose ethics shrunk as his fees swelled. but then our criticism is not that he applies scientific method, but that he doesn't.
There's a lot of fuzzy stuff at the edges. That's always been true. Newton believed wierder stuff than you can imagine. Frankly there's wierd stuff at the core. Newton's theory of gravitation was maintain in the face of the obvious impossibility and logical incoherence of action at a distance. It made nos ense, but it was obviously right. It worked, anyway. Quantum mechanics is totally insane. But it works. Who'da thunk that Bell's Theorem could be true? (Action at a distance again, just when you thought Einstein had put in back in its coffin.)
There's also a lot of stuff that just plain bats. That doesn't mean that you ought to allow skeptical doubts to infect your view of, say, statistical mechanics or evolutionary biology. Or treat Stephen Hawkings as the intellectual equivalent of Derrida.
Yours in boring scientific realism.
jks
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