Who knows, this thousandth monkey at his thousandth keyboard
exercise may even had said something some people could find
useful and stimulating. My impression is that he kept so closely
to the register and genre that not everything he said could
possibly have been nonsense to everyone. Authors are not the
final authority on what their texts mean, so how can we consider
them such authorities on what their texts didn't mean?
Both conservative science (meaning people who want to believe
they have an iron-clad lock on nearness-to-truth, and who want
other people to pay them for it) and the old Left (people who
want their politics to be based on some sort of positive science and
its certitude) are deep into reaction against postmodern ways of
talking about meaning and truth. Physics itself is just barely
holding on to its exemption from deconstruction (by outsiders),
and it's just possible that one of the pomo broadsides might
eventually hit home.
My Odense paper from last year
does bring Niels Bohr and Heisenberg in (and I could get
Sandra Harding into such an argument easily), so Sokal's turning
the apparatus of pomo thinking on quantum gravity is not
necessarily as silly as the commentator assumes.
It might be worth looking at the original article in full,
and I think the special issue it's in is well worth seeing.
JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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