Foucault & Chmsky ( Was Re: [lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion)

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Thu Dec 7 22:02:08 PST 2006


On 12/8/06, Tayssir John Gabbour <tayssir.john at googlemail.com> wrote:
> The criticisms on this forum have largely been answered in detail by
> Chomsky, for example in 1995:
> http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

By the way, for more info on what Chomsky means by "pseudo-scientific posturing" of so-called theorists, I think high profile physicist Feynman's entertaining essay on Cargo Cult Science is helpful. http://wwwcdf.pd.infn.it/~loreti/science.html

People like Zizek often mention how forbidding scientists seem. But Feynman thinks "ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience" from many social theorists.

And he discusses the history that physicists are "ashamed of" -- painful lessons on integrity:

"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

I suspect Chomsky was enormously lucky to have academic success in the hard sciences, because the social sciences would've filtered him out fast.

Tayssir



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