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eridu comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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I dislike the "post utopian" example, and here's why:
Language is pretty much a set of labels. When we call something "white", we are saying it has some property of "whiteness." NOW we can discuss wavelengths and how light works, or whatnot, but 200 years ago, they had no clue. They could still know that snow is white, though. At the same time, even with our knowledge of how colors work, we can still have difficulties knowing exactly where the label "white" ends, and grey or yellow begins.
Say I'm carving up music-space. I can pretty easily classify the differences between Classical and Rap, in ways that are easy to follow. I could say that classical features a lot of instrumentation, and rap features rhythmic language, or something. But if I had lots of people spending all their lives studying music, they're going to end up breaking music space into much smaller pieces. For example, dub step and house.
Now, I can RECOGNIZE dubstep when I hear it, but if you asked me to teach you what it was, I would have difficulties. I couldn't necessarily say "It's the one that goes, like, WOPWOPWOPWOP iiinnnnnggg" if I'm a learned professor, so I'll use jargon like "synthetic rhythm," or something.
But not having a complete explainable System 2 algorithm for "How to Tell if it's Dubstep" doesn't mean that my System 1 can't readily identify it. In fact, it's probably easier to just listen to a bunch of music until your System 1 can identify the various genres, even if your System 2 can't codify it. The example is treating the fact that your professor can't really codify "post utopianism" to mean that it's not "true". (this example has been used in other sequence posts, and I disagreed with it then too)
Have someone write a bunch of short stories. Give them to English Literature professors. If they tend to agree which ones are post utopian, and which ones aren't, then they ARE in fact carving up literature-space in a meaningful way. The fact that they can't quite articulate the distinction doesn't make it any less true than knowing that snow was white before you knew about wavelengths. They're both labels, we just understand one better.
Anyways, I know it's just an example, but without a better example, i can't really understand the question well enough to think of a relevant answer.
To over-extend your metaphor, dubstep is electronic music with a breakbeat and certain BPM. Bassnectar described it in an inverview once as hip-hop beats at half time in breakbeat BPMs.
It's really easy to tell the difference between dubstep and house, because dubstep has a broken kick..kickSNARE beat, while house has a 4/4 kick.kick.kick.kick beat.
(Interestingly, the dubstep you seem to describe is what people who listened to earlier dubstep commonly call "brostep," and was inspired by one Rusko song ("Cockney Thug," if I remember correctly).)
The point I mean to make by this is that most concepts do have system 2 algorithms that identify them, even if most people on LW would disagree with the social groups that advance those concepts.
I have many friends and comrades that are liberal arts students, and most of the time, if they said something like "post-utopian" or "colonial alienation" they'd have a coherent system-2 algorithm for identifying which authors or texts are more or less post-utopian.
Really, I agree that this is a bad example, because there are two things going on: the students have to guess the teacher's password (which is the same as if you had Skirllex teaching MUSC 202: Dubstep Identification, and only accepted "songs with that heavy wobble bass shit" as "real dubstep, bro"), and there's an alleged unspoken conspiracy of academics to have a meaningless classifier (which is maybe the same as subgenres of hard noise music, where there truly is no difference between typical songs in each subgenre, and only artist self-identification or consensus among raters can be used as a grouping strategy).
As others have said better than me, the Sokal affair seems to be better evidence of how easy it is to publish a bad paper than it is evidence that postmodernism is a flawed field.