I agree with you about the techie language issue (though I will add that techies have a particular penchant for terminology that goes over and beyond need). WRT critics of pomo, I had posted on PEN-L a bit by the mathematician Doron Zeilberger where he writes that the attacks on pomo are an attack on their language (And as you mention, that they are motivated by a deeper issue: that the pomos are questioning the preisthood):
http://platosbeard.org/archives/11
Quoting:
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion11.html
> The intersection of the sets of great mathematicians or scientists
> and great philosophers is a rapidly decreasing function of time. Of
> course we have Pythagoras, Pascal, and Descartes, but even Euler was
> a rank amateur.
>
> Most of us know how he made fun of Diderot by proving the existence
> of God : ``Sir, (a+b^n)/n=x, hence God exists; reply!'' (E.T. Bell,
> Men of Math, p. 147). In his attempts at a more serious theology,
> Euler (unintenionally) made fun of himself.
>
> Nowadays, Traditional God has been replaced, in part, by another God:
> `Absolute Truth'. Practicing scientists get really annoyed when they
> are reminded that after all they are also human, and their view of
> science is time- and fashion- dependent. So Alan Sokal had a good
> laugh at the expense of post-modern cultural-relativists. But he used
> the same cheap trick of Euler, intimidation by jargon. He went one
> step farther: making fun of the sociologists' jargon. He had the
> advantage that their jargon is closer to spoken English than his, so
> he could master it superficially.
>
> Making fun of other people's language is the lowest form of humor.
> Like Euler, Sokal did not prove anything, except that physical
> scientists and mathematicians are arrogant and look down on everybody
> else. They are also religious fanatics, for whatever religion they
> may have. Social science has probably lots of rubbish, but so does
> regular science, and in either case it is not the content that
> matters so much as the act of expressing
For a more weighty response to the anti-pomo campaign, see another mathematician (as I have noted before, it is a matter of great pride to me that it is mathematicians who represent a humanist and tolerant perspective here in questioning arrogance) Gabriel Stolzenberg:
http://platosbeard.org/archives/12
with quotes from and link to:
Reading and Relativism (PDF) http://math.bu.edu/people/nk/rr/bkln.pdf
where Stolzenberg looks into the motives and credibility of various pomo critics (among them Thomas Nagel and Stephen Weinberg), and offers this at the start:
> When Larry was a kid his mother...sometimes, out of curiosity,
> stopped the dial at a place where foreign languages came curling out
> of the radio's plastic grillwork: Italian or Portuguese or Polish...
> "Jibber jabber," Larry's father called this talk, shaking his head,
> apparently convinced, despite all reason, that these "noises" meant
> nothing, that they were no more than a form of elaborate nonsense.
> Everything ran together; and there weren't any real words the way
> there were in English. These foreigners were just pretending to
> talk, trying to fool everyone. (Carol Shields, Larry's Party)
In the section titled "Hatchet Jobs" (page 4) Stolzenberg talks about how to read texts, and offers two options: the unforgiving and the forgiving reading:
(from footnote 17)
> [...] How to Read a Book (1940: 14), [...] the author, Mortimer Adler,
> writes, "When [men and women] are in love and are reading a love
> letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three
> ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they grow
> sensitive to context and ambiguity...Then, if never before or after,
> they read."
Chomsky, being at the fringes of the anti-pomo crowd (and having contributed to the Zmag attack on postmodernism, and also expressed his puzzlement about pomo elsewhere), I believe has not given them a forgiving reading (except perhaps in the case of Foucault, who is less representative of pomo than the chief targets of Sokal and gang).
Berube, and the rest of the new wave anti-Chomsky crowd, however are guilty of worse, with regard to their attack on Chomsky.
--ravi
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