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All of PhilSandifer's Comments + Replies

Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
PhilSandifer40

I would agree if one is writing about Victorian sexual politics straight-up, however I was careful to specify the sexual politics of Victorian literature. For which Freudianism, notoriously wrong as it is, is highly relevant because it was enormously popular for a chunk of the time period, and did directly influence writers (more particularly in the early 20th century than the late 19th, but still). Certainly it had much more influence than post-Victorian science that the authors could not possibly have been aware of.

Which seems to me one of the hedges tha... (read more)

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Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
PhilSandifer10

Well, I'm not entirely convinced the phrase "order academic fields by rigor and exactness" is a completely meaningful one. It implies a level of direct comparability that I'm not confident exists. I certainly agree that humanities makes for very bad science, but then, so does basket weaving. The flip side is that science has not developed a particularly useful vocabulary for dealing with nuance, ambiguity, or irony.

I'm also not sure a philosopher/cultural critic without significant scientific training is bound to write nonsense, so long as they a... (read more)

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Vladimir_M120

But I think that one can write for a very, very long time about sexual politics in Victorian literature without ever running into a situation where lack of knowledge of science beyond a high school level is going to be a problem. It's certainly difficult to imagine it resulting in nonsense production that goes beyond a stray sentence here or there.

I strongly disagree here. To write meaningfully about sexual politics, you must have a model of sexual and other related aspects of human thought and behavior, and modern science has a whole lot to say about t... (read more)

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Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
PhilSandifer70

To be perfectly honest, I know far more people in hard sciences who look down on postmodernist scholars as wooly nonsense-peddlers than I do postmodernists who reject the sciences or rationalism. This is, admittedly, anecdotal evidence, but I can honestly say that I have never seen a piece of anti-science writing out of the humanities half as perniciously irresponsible as Alan Sokal's "work." Certainly nothing that is as reflexively cited in discussions. To be honest, I find an exasperating tendency among math/science people to simply stop their ... (read more)

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9Vladimir_M
Oh, I certainly don't think that the average hard scientist's view and knowledge of humanities are much better. However, when you order academic fields by rigor and exactness, with pure mathematics on one end and humanities on the other, then as a very general rule, in order to avoid writing nonsense in your own field, you must not have misconceptions about fields that are more exact than yours, whereas knowledge of less exact fields is normally not important for scholarly work. Thus, for example, a physicist can be completely ignorant about philosophy and humanities and nevertheless consistently produce top-quality physics, whereas a philosopher or a cultural critic who is completely ignorant of natural sciences will inevitably end up writing nonsense at least occasionally. So while both of them may have an equally distorted and ignorant view of each other's field, the latter's work will likely suffer far more as a consequence. Regarding the Sokal affair, I agree that it's usually overblown far beyond its real significance (and physicists should also be more humble in light of the more recent Bogdanoff affair). However, I think your minimization of it is also exaggerated. Regardless of whether a journal is peer-reviewed, editors should be held responsible for what they decide to publish. I don't think the editors of Social Text would have been so eager to publish Sokal's essay if it hadn't pandered so consistently to their ideology.
Costs and Benefits of Scholarship
PhilSandifer100

I'd delight in telling you you're wrong, but you're mostly not.

I would say that I don't think that postmodernism is lacking in rigor. Certainly, having been on both ends of peer review in the humanities, it does not seem to me that the process lets through a lot of flamingly inaccurate crap, beyond the sort of expected problems you get in the margins of well-studied ground. Frankly, in my own research, I'd have an easier time sailing a howler about the history of video games past peer review than I would a howler about the applications of Derrida.

I'm also ... (read more)

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8Vladimir_M
Actually, one of my major objections to the modern intellectual currents that are commonly called "postmodernist" is their bias -- part ideological, part fashion-induced -- in choosing which authors to consider as classics and standard sources of citations and inspiration. We keep seeing an endless stream of discussions using concepts from Marx, Freud, and others whose work has long been shown to be largely bunk (even if later authors have salvaged some of these concepts by reinterpretation), while on the other hand, there are many authors who have made important points about issues that postmodernists are directly concerned with, but I can hardly imagine them getting cited and discussed. To take an example I find very interesting, one topic that has long fascinated me is political and ideological language and its meanings that reach beyond what's being plainly said, and even beyond any conscious deceit and manipulation. (The link with the Overcoming Bias signaling leitmotifs is pretty clear here, and obviously the topic is of direct concern for all sorts of social and critical theorists -- it's falls squarely under the concept of "epistemological differences when dealing with communications.") Yet when it comest to the best writings on the subject I've seen, they're completely off the radar for postmodern academics, either because of ideological differences or otherwise because dropping their names won't earn any prestige points.