>Miles Jackson wrote:
>>
>> I don't mean to share inappropriately intimate info onlist, but
>> I have a point: crude generalizations--"visual fantasies
>> are important to men", "all men get off on lezzie sex"--aren't
>> going to help us understand the astonishing diversity of
>> human sexual activities and desires.
>>
>
>The theories continue to pour in, none of the theorists even nodding in
>the direction of Miles's argument.
>
>And those theories increasingly remind me of what Stephen J. Gould and
>others in the field of evolutionary biology have labelled "Just So
>Stories." The beauty of Just So Stories is that as long as they have
>literary coherence, they cannot be challenged (except by another equally
>foolish Just-So Story) nor can they usefully explain anything. This
>incapacity is related to their internal coherence, which is achieved by
>creating a world inside the poem <g> which is hermetically sealed from
>contamination from the outer world. One can write critiques of them as
>poetry, but there is no way to discuss their propsitional adequacy.
So is Marxism the only "true" theory in intellectual history?
Doug