--- On Fri, 9/18/09, Alan Rudy, except of course that no textbook I have ever seen stresses that the key to understanding the shift from mechanical to organic societies lies in the issue of population growth, social differentiation and human beings who "naturally" walk/flee rather than compete/fight... much less that the reason that organic society wasn't equilibrated was because there was too much left over mechanical crap floating around, e.g., religion, royalty, and unwarranted privilege of all sorts. (You don't even want to know how awful the textbook I reviewed for Sage this summer was... almost made me give up that it could have gotten to the reviewer stage.) -----------------i like those physcics analogies (unlike people who criticvize them (eg mirowski), sometimes rightly, as representing physics envy or dressing up bad ideas. they go back of course to comte, ptolemy, and kurt lewin (field theory) and claude levy strauss (mathematical group theory in lingustics); nowadays a ton of this stuff is done in 'complexity'. i think there is as much in them as other approches, and may be complementary. but this stuff is polarized so you get bad arguments on both sides---math people claim it can cure cancer, while antis say it causes it. (to me its like alot of law and economics----there are actually some ok arguments, but the people i've read who do that stuff either tajke it to absurd extremes or else say there is nothing there; and that is bs.) also the people who criticize the non-math types i think in some ways are to blame---they are like preachers who throw people out of the church, and then criticize them for drinking on the street. education in the sciences is often like going through a hazing procedure---'rigor mortis'. supposedly its seen as neccesary, but i dought it at least to the extent its done now. its basically a way of weeding people out, and scaring the remaining ones into conformity so they'll design weapons, work for the NSA, or train people in the ivory tower to do it. (feynman had some pretty good stuff, that actually included what are phiklosophical topics --- foundations of quantum theory and space-time-relativity----but his book is not used and seen as 'too advanced' (and it may be for people who can do complex calculations but basically have no interest or understanding of some of theoretical problems. its like perople who go to music school and can
do jingles for ads really fast versus people who may not erver be able to write one (such as myself) yet claim to be musicians (and i've given that claim up, just as now i do 'natural philosophy' and let scientists do science). the jingle writers will find real music 'too advanced'.. alot of this has been drummed out of people by abodiance to authority. its a form of brainwashing, and i guess the idea is unless people are brainwashed they will lose attention and then the world as we know it will end. i'm not sure of that---and another world may be possible and desirable. it also works the other way---i think some pomos are actually quite addicted to their own view, which partly is to essentially trivialize everything (derrida never deconstructed his own position, paycheck, etc. and he flipped out it seemed at the end, when he decided 'justice' was not deconstructible ('don't go there----my retirement account'). in a sense they are like gangsta rappers, professional parodists in my view. but some also have real arguments (just as some gangsta rappers actually had something to say and knew what they were talking about, where today alot are posing.) this also creates a hierarchy, because only the top scinetists get to deal with the philosophical and abstract issues, so they are wiorshipped and even become public intellectuals to go 'wow' over or who get featured on Science friday on NPR. but this makes the claim, held up in college that only a few can ,look into these areas, while most people, if they want to do science, have to do practical things GM corn for doritos. (this was my point about academic socialists who are inspiring writers---it'd be like going to see einstein and he told you 'if you love physics, how about designing the trigger for nuclear devices'. i tend towards 'every cook a governor, neurosurgeon, rocket scientist, president, dictator, saint , mass murderer, mozart, psychopth....(clr james) and the wisdom of crowds, though in reality its probably more like the wisdom of the elites who write sociology texts you mention. (proof of no intelligent design). tons more could be said on this......maybe i'll run out and rant in the street and get hit by a car or picked up by the cops.
> IN sciences, especially philosophy of science, you get similar debates (eg
> about memes, or group selection, or selfish genes); in physics, you have
> the 2nd law of thermodynamics; and more examples exist --- some of these
> are real, but some people involved are just blabbing for a living
> (philosophy of mind seems to be a big one here).
>
Most scientists wouldn't accept that philosophers of science are scientists, no? -------------if you look at pitt.edu philo sci archives, a fair number of those people do get published in physics journals. alot of that stuff there i consider either generic or crap (or i cant tell) but some of it----and often by philosophers who also publish in the fields they write about, is ok, state of the art, or cutting edge. (though some of that is also hyped.) to me this suggests for every einstein, there is a philosopher -- eg mach. and i consider the pomos/decons to be a bit like mach----there is a point there, its just they dont quite know how to make it in the formalism, if it belongs in the formalism, so i give them that. i was actually thinking of trying to make some of those arguments sokal cricized rigorous---even godel had a very abstract rigorous proof for the existence of god. so iriguay or derrida could be given a makeover so they can get into the scientific conference. the scientists are often oblivious to the fact that such points can be made---though scientist critics of sokal made the same point (that most of those ideas sokal joked about had been discussed by leading physicists. i think people like sojkal are gatekeepers, and are fearful like anti-tax-the rich poorer people----they think if you charge bill gates another 1 or 10 percent or something then tomorow the US
will be like afghanistan or the congo; its a slippery slope. there's also envy in that scientists seek phiklsophers and humanities people as slackers who dont pay their way 9design bombs, computers...) ). (elliot sober who is somewhat leftist writes on biology and even the second law, and is pretty good philosopher, though those are not the most abstract topics, but are seen as confusing in biology itself. he coauthored a book with d s wilson, a biologist. some of the philo of biology is bogged down in very useless, and basically wrong (ill posed problems) debates---and its partly because the people spend most of their time promoting their own take, and little actually filling in the gaps in their reading. but thats how you get a CV, even if its mostly crap.) some philo sci is fairly detailed and tedious and possibly almost irrelevant (---the stuff on quantum and relativity theory----like set theory or metamathematics) and is considered bs by some scientists (who often really dont care about what quantum theory or relativity mean or is interpreted or whether empirically equivalent different models exist ----- because they just want to get numbers that can be comparedf with experiments). you can take years of physics and basically never get a discussion or proof of bell's theorem for example (was my experience---at least i dont remember it. i do remembering asking my main prof about it, and he said 'who cares'---quantum mechanics works. all he did was calculate infinite approximation to the spectrum of hydrogen and helium was my impression. those same people (who often have the sokal view---discourage anything that is 'off topic') probably wouldn't have discovered current sciences. they'd be memorizing newton line and verse. The thing is I am not talking about debates, these folks (he says about to sound like James Heartfield) are just plain WRONG about Marx and Weber and present unbelievably incomplete and inaccurate introductions to Durkheim. (AND don't get me started on Conley's brutalization of Simmel and Formal Sociology). If there's a debate, and I'm not talking about the bullshit kind of "balance" the contemporary news media treats as "debate", then I expect that debate to be fairly, not ideologically or falsely, presented. -----by debate i meant your take on weber/marx/etc versus conley's. of course alot of these debates are a waste of time---if people have tenure they can be wrong, or just popular and shoddy, and it wont matter. places like hnn (history news network? cover this sort of stuff and there are debate journals like Brain and behavioral sciences where people go back and forth over stuff like chomsky's language instinct, or the bell curve, etc. have you ever talked to or written conley? is he just lazy and poorly read, or miseducated, etc. or is it ideological? to an extent debates dont change anything neccesarily----it'd be like debating bush or cheney or pat robertson. but i guess one could organize a boycott of texts (and some do this for jounrals----some editors have resigned on mass to protest prices and started their own journals. ) if i was a teacher, i might just use only open source stuff (like wikipedia, which may not be any more hazardous than texts.)-------------------------
>
> while i tend to side with alan sokal (who seems a bit humorless with his
> belgian sidekick) and think if you step out your window in your highrise
> pomo department at NYU to get down with the fellow oppressed, you will break
> your skull, the pomos i think actually had a point----they just didnt know
> how to say it, so they made a joke poem.
But this just shows how little Sokal understood what the folks he attacked were writing. No one ever said that you wouldn't fall if you stepped out a window, and while there are idealists among the science studies crowd there are also idealists among scientists so the dualism he predicates his position on was crap and his argument was based on a staggering misinterpretation of the folks he was critiquing --------------the physics journals (physics today) did publish a paper showing that alot of nobles in physics pretty much made points made by the pomos. i think its partly 'who' said it, rather than what was said (though also vocabulary and formalism was invovled). however i think that some of the people who make these kinds of arguments may be fronting. that itself is a technique---king's fool. but some do make those kinds of statements (and the same occurs in physics, or math econ---free will doesn't exist (except when NSF is giving grants), or the world maximizes. Chomsky has some of the most extreme statement in my view, on language. Skinner, hi nemesis, of course was equally out there (eg the skinner box---never touch your children or you'll ruin them). i don't understand derrida or lacan myself, though i havent put much energy into it. and the reviews of their stuyff (one by louis menand) i have read, make me basically say 'ok' but alot of that stuff is fairly well known (and one could even say 'manufacturing consent' is just a different version, just as i might say bourdieu is a version of foucault and both come from g h mead symbolic interactionism, and frederick jameson is not much different from giddens or David Korten, just different dialects. And i personallly l.ike the simpler dialects. (the samne occurts in math, where you can have your 4th grade version of arithmatic, or you can do it like bertran russel in 2 volumes using set theory and logic; ior you can prove general equilibrium in a very simple setting (eg set s=d where s is supply and d is demand) or you can use Brower's or kakutani's fixed point theorem in a very general topoligical setting and impress
people. (if it was me, i'd basically use as a core with situationist stuff and biourdieu and math sociology (which is basically physics now-----reimann geometry, alternative set theories, gauge theory are all represnted ) , but i really havent explored what is around in depth.) i did read one book by that editor of social text aronowitz who discussed quantum theory; i dont think he really got it right, but his basic idea was not that different than the kind of stuff david bohm writes, and thats what he was talking about. i dont think it was any worse than what professional biolgists write about biology, which often is wrong. but alot of this also overlaps into that flaky deeprak chopra 'quantum healing' stuff (charlene spretnak i think went this way a bit---green politics as quantum thoery, or rupert sheldrake (interesting but a bit out there, along with josephson) or that guy in berkely who got a PhD under chew (bootstrap theory---which is underrated i think) who was more down to earth. i wonder whta you would write as 'advanced'. ---------------------- and - for all that Andrew Ross was pretty darned weasley during the whole thing - Sokal also didn't report in his Hoax article that the Social Text folks asked him more than once to edit out or revise some of the most inane crap he wrote (and he didn't appear to know that they published it knowing it to be deeply deeply flawed.) Sure there's some obscurantism in science studies... as if there wasn't any in other disciplines... ------------------------- if ross is the guy who testified for the discovery institute on ID then in my book he is an idiot, even if he wasnt during the sokal thing. i'll check that out. never support anything the discovery institute does. also ross, if it was him, doesnt know enough biology or have an interest in it to be competent to discuss the issue. he just wants to spout off, on tv. and perhaps make some cash. and biology is alot more interesting (maybe this is a bias) than aklot of what he talks about (just as science is often more interesting thasn science studies, or the stuff on that on sokal's web site). there's a ton of people who want to discurse on stuff they know nothing about and have no interest. its really just a super upscale version of street corner gossip, or more like small town people who dont have sh-t to talk about except making up rumors about they hate and envy. (i can actually get into that---------------in fact philosophy of science is often for people who basically dont want to do the heavy lifting, but instead write papers commenting on or criticizing the abilities of those who do the heavy lifting. ) if worst comes to worst, leave the sdiscovery institute defense to the aclu, who even defend the klan. i actually think teaching ID is biology is ok since its evidently bs, but raises some interesting points, and even if wrong is an introduction to worthwhile questions---same reason to study general equilibrium or the ideal gas. in our world its wrong but in a certain sense whats wrong is 'our' world since humans are stupid. so in a sense those ideas are right. one can do the kant thing and then try to refine the theories so they are more in attune with whats possible in 'our' world (if notn 'the' world). i actually dont think ideas like are verifiable, so ID has a point (who designed the number system? G C Rota?)
> ...SNIP...
>
> i would like to see some examples. (perhaps these debates continue in some
> 'philosophy of sociology' journal, where the various camps deconstruct and
> tear each other apart.)
>
>
I think the points you made about textbooks being more industrial and
careerist than contributions to students' intellectual development are fair
but I don't believe they'd look the way they do if large numbers of Intro
teachers hadn't been taught much of the same crap in their Intro courses,
and their Grad Theory courses. Unfortunately, I get rid of just about all
the Intro books publishers send to me after confirming that they're every
bit as bad as the one's fro the previous year. I like Conley's book in
general but am seriously considering going back to Giddens, even though it'd
gotten kinda stale after so many years of teaching with it.
And, no, I can't and won't write one myself since I am more than sure that it'd be seen to be too far over most Intro students' heads by publishers and reviewers and the opinion would develop that the thing would never sell. I'll do it if someone offers me a tenure-track job with writing a textbook as a requisite part of the job, though... just so long as they don't insist that it be published... ------------------i would insist a textbook deal be included, and no other duties, and also my book be required for all students in the us. (maybe even for every class, but a different copy of the book for each class. and all copies will be recycled each year to preserve the environment.) then i'd outsource writing it to someone in the underdevloped for $3 hour, 10 hours max. free at last, no money down. this got out of control dont you think. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk