ravi wrote:
> At around 22/7/06 1:39 pm, info at pulpculture.org wrote:
>> people always tell me that the language i use to talk about Web
>> design is daunting and hard to understand, even though I'm saying
>> words that they know.
>>
>> <...> I would submit that, in addition to the fact that techy
>> language is an insider's language in many way, it's also made more
>> difficult (and why people get hostile), because the language it uses
>> also reflects the instability of the world their language is trying
>> to describe.
>>
>> <...>
>>
>> You have the same thing in software design, where one coder will do
>> something one way and another still another.
>>
>> the hostility isn't, I would submit, due to the language (which all
>> disciplines have. I didn't fuckin' understand what the hell secular
>> meant in Econ for years but then I didn't try to hard either because
>> it was my own mental block, of knowing the word in one context
>> (religion) and not seeing how it applied at all in another. I
>> understand know because I lazily asked the list).
>>
>> the hostility is to the underlying thing that postmodernists are
>> trying to describe.
>>
>
> 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
>