Did the Sokal affair "destroy postmodernism"?
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- čas přidán 20. 05. 2018
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The specific Sokal quotations come from:
Page 4 of emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-conten... and
www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/nore...
Derrida’s response to the Sokal affair:
www.critical-theory.com/read-d...
On the Star Wars hoax paper:
gizmodo.com/scientific-journa...
Postmodernists and critical theorists always say : It's more complicated than that, it's more nuanced than that. Maybe the Emperor's clothes are translucent rather than absent.
Good one :)
critical theory is not that complicated, maybe the reason people always say "is not that simple" to you is becouse you're a simpleton
@@mine1231939 Nice - every time a postmodernist (or CT-er) has no more arguments (which happens quite quickly and often), they start insulting and attacking people.
And they always move the goalpost, denying what they've said before.
They do indeed claim that it's complicated and "complex".
I wonder how many of sokals recent fans know he considers himself ''an old fashioned socialist''.
Yes, exactly. Was kinda my point. Post modernism was itself a reaction against socialism and Marxist philosophy. The best contemporary critics of post modernism are Marxist: Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Calinicos to name a few.
In our lifetime, we’re probably going to find out that postmodernist philosophy and ‘theory’ more generally are a CIA psy op designed to cripple and discredit the left.
@300bpm youre wrong.
@300bpm CIA is on the public record talking how the postmodernist philosophers in France (which they refer to as Anti-Marxist) were instrumental in dismantling the Marxist movement and removing the influence of Marxism from academia and how that furthered American interests.
www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.PDF
“According to the spy agency itself,” Rockhill observed, “post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism…” Here the professor was making particular reference to a recently declassified CIA report, authored in 1985, that focuses on the intellectual milieu around Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan.
shout-out to Bruno Latour for having his picture inexplicably thrown up with all the videos about the Sokal Affair and the "destruction of postmodernism"
Damn! I thought I was going crazy
@@dmichael2097 I still see it to this day when people speak of the Sokal Affair, this is so just weird to me.
Why is Bruno Latour in the thumbnail? Can u explain? Did they get it wrong? Confused between Bruno Latour and Sokal?
@@giuseppe5686 someone please answer this I need to know
@@patricktan7120 i think it’s because Latour was (and is) gaining fame in the „political ecology“ discussions and the „new green“ movement, afaik he also claimed that law of physics etc are socially constructed therefore not necessarily universal truth. And I think he was a pretty hard defender of shitting on sciences that claim such universal truths, thus getting hate from conservative believers of the god called ‚true science‘. He opened a totally new ontological discussion and asked critical questions about the role of science(s).
He was great, may he rest in peace.
That's a cool vid, but how about 'Shrek 2 - Marxist Analysis'?
How about Cars 2.
Cars 1 will obviously be required reading.
Hnas: I don't know if you are joking or not, but one of the videos in my suggestion bar is "Shrek: a Marxist analysis."
@Agora1, that's my favorite movie!
"Socialists are like onions"
- Leonid Sherksky
jorney: Socialism is like onions. Some of it makes everything better. However, you can't have a meal with nothing but onions.
My subjective impression is that a lot of postmodernist writing is less obscure than obscurantist. Once you fight your way through the impenetrable prose to the thoughts beneath, it's often disappointingly banal.
i dont give a hoot!
Pointlessly banal as it posits nothing useful, nothing testable and nothing worthy of consideration
I've been a long-term critic of postmodernism because I've seen it produce a great deal of impenetrable prose, while remaining frustratingly vague on its own essentials. Your videos are the best defense of it I've come across. What I'd love to see from you is a video that defines postmodern philosophy, and then explains its value to us as both individuals and as a society. Thanks!
Postmodernism is a rejection of the central tenet of modernism, which is that human beings through sensory perception and rationality can access capital-t Truths about the universe.
The value is that you don't ever get to a point where beliefs become dogmatic orthodoxies.
One difficulty is that postmodern philosophy is not unitary. The philosophers often had different interests and ideas. "Postmodern" is more an umbrella term. The same goes for modern philosophy, which includes Marx, Hume, Freud, and many others. It's better to look at the benefits of one particular think or tradition within the postmodern.
Aaand that's where it goes wrong. In fact, the whole postmodern project is a mistake.
That is like saying Language was a mistake. Or Hunting.
@@pietzsche i.e., knowing the impossibility of ever really knowing.
People who've never bothered to read Sokal's book often like to cite his name and claim he "debunked postmodernism". Sokal set out to do no such thing.
By his own admission, he was only concerned with what he felt to be the misuse of scientific terms and concepts in postmodern philosophy. Which yes, postmodern thinkers tend to do.
Though being familiar with Deleuze, Sokal misunderstood what he was doing. Deleuze wrote much of his work in a sort of modernist James Joyce style. He even writes in the intro to _A Thousand Plateaus_ that you don't need to read the book chronologically. This means that he often entertained different concepts not because he felt they were true, but because they enabled one to explore knowledge from different angles. Concepts for him were sort of like Instagram filters which highlighted different aspects of the world, and that no one concept should be held up as the One Truth.
However, Sokal was absolutely correct in saying Deleuze is needlessly difficult to read. Reading his prose is as unpleasant as chewing tinfoil.
Exactly. A good analogy I've heard to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is that it's like a jazz record - you don't have to listen to it chronologically, and you can skip the "tracks" as you wish. Each concept is introduced as a general "theme" that is then unfolded like a jazz improvisation. And this style of writing reflects Deleuze's ontological views. I agree that he's needlessly difficult to read too. Manuel Delanda is able to introduce Deleuzian thought way more clearly and without trivializing it either.
Voltairine Kropotkin
look you can do a response to Saad in this video in 2:24:28 he is talking about french postmodernist czcams.com/video/NAalq9lrjQA/video.html
But chewing tinfoil is actually alot of fun..?
@300bpm
Which means you're probably an idiot who can't comprehend nuance.
@@voltairinekropotkin5581 He's been all over this thread today, and yeah, that's it.
One thing to take in mind, that one of my first professor mentioned, is that you don’t need to have a good, or even knowledgeable paper, to get published.
Man, this channel deserves way more attention than it gets. Riveting work, sir.
I think even more interesting than Sokal is the Schön Scandal. This guy Jan Schön published fraudulent papers on semi-conductor physics for ~6 years while working at Bell Labs (very prestigious, birthplace of the transistor and many other technological advancements). These papers *were* peer reviewed, and yet he continued to get published until a couple of grad students noticed he literally copy/pasted a graph from a previous paper and falsified data.
It's really disturbing bc you want to have faith in the peer review process, but at a certain point, academic work becomes so complex that it is very difficult to verify, even by experts in your field.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal
I'd say there is a difference in quality between these incidents. Jan Schön and other scientific fraudsters are actual scientists who use their knowledge and status to commit fraud. They succeed to varying extents because peer review is not actually very good at detecting fraud, nor is it intended to be. The purpose of peer review is mostly to point out honest mistakes and sloppyness. To detect actual, competent fraud would often require trying to replicate the findings of the fraudster. This would be a lot of work and not always possible because most labs use specialized, or even custom-made equipment. That said, journals should at least require the raw data to be submitted.
Hoax articles in the social sciences try to expose something else. If editors and reviewers are incapable of telling the difference between actual research and complete gibberish, this does point at one out of three things:
- Said editors and reviewers are incompetent.
- They are lazy.
- The field as a whole is utter nonsense.
The latter option would be a sound conclusion if such hoaxes succeeded in a variety of peer reviewed journals in a given field.
I know the thumbnail is a reference to the other video 'Postmodernism Destroyed Forever'. But that's not even Sokal, that's Bruno Latour.
What are people smoking?
I.N.F. L.X. I was looking for this comment. And if there is a connection between Sokal and Latour. Latour did call the affair a “tempest in a teacup” according the Wikipedia page on the Sokal Affair.
Did they get confused between Latour and Sokal?
Maybe it's a meta-joke. Associating one face with another's work, a slight of hand to test you in the way Sokal tested the editors.
Thank you for the indepth look at this. Really important for those of us just beginning to hear of the controversy.
really great video, I've had a few people bring this up with me but its really cool to hear more about what Sokal thought about it. Most people who bring this up really seem to think it's some kind of checkmate but he himself didn't see it that way at all and that is good to know.
"The journal "social text" was not peer-reviewed at the time"
I had to stop the video and laugh out loud.
Well, of course it wasn't. To have things peer reviewed would be hierarchical, and Postmodernists hate hierarchy.
@@infinitum8558 I can't tell which you misunderstand the most between peer review, hierarchy, and postmodernism.
@@kyyowa129 now now, let's not get persnickety.
You can call it "scientific metaphor", but the Postmodernists were really trying to misappropriate scientific authority through nonsensical scientific claims. Sokal showed that fairly effectively.
I defended my Bachelor's thesis in the field philosophy, it mostly covered science & technology studies issues. That thumbnail with Latour's photograph was the most personalised clickbait I've ever come across
You have a very great point how the publishers contribute to the problem, however in the latest hoax "grievance studies" there were many peer reviews for a plethora of so called studies, which gave a very solid indication that even with peer review (some were returned for correction but then accepted) are completely bogus.
"a media scandal" "an imposture" parody is quiet avant garde and post modern actually.
Also "Badiou studies", a post modern peer reviewed journal was fooled by one such parody recently.
Badiou Studies is not Post Modern. Alain Badiou, the philosopher the review is based on, is actually one of the biggest and more sophisticated critics of post-structuralism and the great intellectual rival of Gilles Deleuze btw (although both liked each other personally). He's actually known for trying to rethink an objective conception of truth and give an new account of the Hegelian philosophy, also being inspired by Althusser and Lacan
Wonderful narration! Glad I found your video first while searching for the Sokal affair.
"Destroyed!" -this is the aftermath of US being plagued by WWF imagery
This is a good video. As a scientist, I lament the way in which academic writing is often lacking in rigor not just in cultural or post-modern studies but across the board in academia, even in hard sciences. People often use journal publications as ways to justify their political or social beliefs, and ultimately I think that's what Sokal was trying to prevent. I like and admire Sokal for what he did, also for addressing the misuse of mathematical or scientific language to add some sense of rigor to otherwise vacuous arguments.
Hi, really like your work, do you think you could do a video about the "Grievance Studies affair" since it differs from this one in spite of being sometimes called Sokal squarred ? Thank you !
Yes please!!!!! Especially since it forms a large part of the recent anti-science & wokeism campaign of conflicts & is conflated with capture of Academia etc…
We need more content like this. Keep up the good work mah boi
Great breakdown of the controversy. Just found your channel and love your content :)
Mad Blender yall been missing out
Are you pre-op?
nice video!
I want to express my feeling of postmodernism. I'm not an expert of postmodernism, but in terms of my limited reading experience, I really hate postmodernism literature and various social science literature quoting them without showing accessible context. When I for the first time tried to read Deleuze's work several years ago, most of the time I can't understand his argument. I thought it's because I was inexperienced, impatient and stupid. However, after more reading, although I don't believe I have enough knowledge and wisdom to specifically accuse certain writer's work as nonsense, I think the generally low accessibility of postmodernism literature makes them *SERIOUSLY SUSPICIOUS* . I often wonder: how could anyone be sure about the meaning and argument of these literature? There seems no way to know for sure what do those words mean, not to mention they are often filled with fancy metaphor borrowed from other fields.
In university, I saw many peers and professors using or quoting postmodernism literature without explicitly explaining them. Usually, nearly all students in the class don't understand or fully understand what they just heard, but no one asks a dang question about it. It seems that "having a vague grasp of postmodernism quote is enough for building arguments" is extensively believed and practiced. And I really really hate this phenomenon. I know its likely that I'm too biased or intellectually incompetent to change my view, but I still believe postmodernism's style of discussion and argument-buliding is harmful. It makes people believe or pretend they know something while they don't, and makes people prone to use vague phrase to justify their argument or ideology.
I'm not saying I'm right and postmodernism is wrong (I'm definitely not qualified to say that). All I want to say is I understand why some people hate postmodernism and blame it for various things. Because I'm one of them.
Postmodernism is a catch-all term. It encompasses so much that it is practically nonsensical to talk about one's feelings *of* it. No doubt you can be generally sceptical: I agree, for instance, that Deleuze is a bit of maverick; stylistically provocative and experimental, he is very difficult to understand at the best of times. But making claims for postmodernism *as a whole* based on arguments such as this is a bit like dismissing all avant-gard art on the basis of disliking the works of a select few painters from the tradition. Take Foucault, for instance. He writes in a far more lucid style, and (to me at least) offers insights which are manifestly true and pertinent. In their application to neoliberal governmentality, human capital and the entrepreneur(ship) of the self -- for starters.
As a humanities student who has had to dabble in nearly all these postmodern theorists I can say I also share your frustration. People can accuse them of writing so obscurely out of pretentiousness. But really I think it’s also the fact that these are such linguistically skilled academics (Baudrillard for example) who spent their entire lives retreating into academia, that when putting their thoughts into writing and specifically translating them from other languages into English, it becomes very hard for a moderately educated english speaker to read and understand their words. Maybe Baudrillard was covering up his a fraudulence with complicated writing. but looking at this work now and at least guessing what he might have meant by all his jargon he still seems to have been right in his predictions about the mass media.
@@superstar082100 agreed. his ideas on hyperreality seem especially prescient in these isolated times
@@superstar082100 as a Frenchman I can assure you that many of these authors are extraordinarily difficult to make sense of even in French. Some authors, like the Freud-inspired Kristeva and Lacan are largely regarded as complete charlatans, when others are taken very seriously, even though you still need interpreters to tell you what the texts really are about...
You can't be an expert on something, that doesn't exist 😅
glad i just subscribed. this i good stuff. :)
I'm learning a lot from your stuff. Thanks for all this and keep it up!
could you write in a sentence what have you learned about postmodernistic theory based on this video and why it has not been destroyed?
i was wondering what felt off about the ending of your videos, and i realized it's that you don't ask us to "like and subscribe" or check out any of your other videos. i like the abrupt endings, though, they feel more genuine, less alienated. great work.
Hey, your thumbnail is not a picture of Sokal, but is one of Latour.
Great video...once again. This is what I have been thinking and communicating to most of these antiPoMo outrage community --- that they are themselves the children of the post modern condition --- where the surface, the appearance, the superficial do not only matter more than the substance or authorised core, but rather emphasising their importance problematises the notion of a core or substance itself.
These people do not take Sokal's critique as a moment of critical insight into the workings of academic institutions, but rather as an occasion to ridicule and entire academic tradition (ironically used wrt post modernism) because they see it primarily as part of a grand conspiracy, as a partisan force trying to destroy western civilisation. Their distaste for post modernism stems from fear mongering and not from an actual engagement with the texts. If they read the texts they'd realise how close they actually are to such scholars.
I like the way you, dare I say, deconstruct the topics you choose on your videos! Cheers and to my fellow members of the audience, I wish you gain insight and new perspectives! :)
This is great! Finally some actual precise thinking, nuance (w/ reference to the source material!). This channel is an antidote -a φάρμακον in the best possible way ;)
I see postmodernism as a dialectical swing of the pendulum, that was once liberating when it began, in that it was a clear critic of the modern era. It took the observation serious that the initial liberating aspects of enlightment and modernity have led to hell on earth in the brutal World Wars and coldness of the industrial age.
And now, we are beginning to see the downfalls of postmodernism itself. The biggest one being arbritary relativism, which has been abused even by criminals and Wallstreet CEO's to excuse their psychopathy.
This new critic is leading to the era of so-called _New Realism,_ that while preserving the pluralistic aspects of postmodernism, uses a negative ontology as a foolproof against _anything-goes-ism._
Great video. You are a serious creator of content and can only respect that. I am sad I can’t not give you more than one thumbs up.
On a different note, I have tried to watch PhilosophyInsights videos and they are painful to watch due to his naked bias for whatever Peterson is spewing. The positive consequence of Peterson being popular in certain CZcams circles and now in the media is that I have to go back and reread Foucault and Derrida and Habermas and refresh my 20th century History studies and I hope that other people do the same.
lol the truth in the last sentence... i was just thinking that i gotta brush up cos vultures are hollowing out every thing
Lol, good luck making sense of them. I think Deleuze and Baudrillard are probably more important in todays cultural context. At least I find them more interesting.
oaxacachaka
Your comment just makes me realize that Peterson might just be a Francophobe. I hope somebody could explore that especially considering the context of Canadian political culture and how you can make a division between the Quebecois left and Anglo-Saxon Ontario.
Daniel Alveo I’m not really sure but maybe. I think it probably has to do with the fact that he works in the liberal arts and that’s where political correctness seems to have its stronghold.
You think that Peterson's opposition to compelled speech is just cover for anti-French bigotry? Really?
Philosophy is so broad that I think events like this serve as a non- requested excuse for those who want to discard before reading, which is often a symptom usually called out by the authors of the books that are often target of this reductionist accusations.
Paradoxical indeed.
Wonderful. I enjoy these interpersonal episodes, it really shows me where some of our Institutional woes might come from.
1:55 exactly, this is what I was getting at in the comments at my video last week: his act was postmodernist itself.
You could say he was giving them a taste of their own medicine.
Well, I think his effective use of postmodernist performance validates postmodernism to a certain extent, and undermines his attack of it. It's also important to note that this was an attack on postmodernism coming from a hard scientist, and not an attack on hard science coming from a postmodernist. That is to say, the hostilities have been generated more on the side of science here than on the side of postmodernist theory.
I don't think the two are equivalent. Scientists have successfully posed as humanities scholars on several occasions just by dialing down on clarity and saying what they correctly assumed their audience wanted to hear. Now try to imagine the reverse, a humanities scholar trying to publish a fake paper in a physics journal. The idea makes me giggle.
As to who started hostilities, I disagree. Humanities scholars, especially the activist types, have been accusing people who prefer their statements backed by evidence of "scientism", "reductionism" etc. since long before the Sokal hoax.
I'm not saying the two are equivalent, but I would not put the humanities below the hard sciences on a hierarchy. Didn't the publishers of the Sokal paper admit they couldn't understand what he'd written? That seems significant. What is wrong with criticizing the hard sciences for trying to subsume the humanities?
The hard sciences aren't trying to subsume the humanities. However, it may happen that, through new methods and technological progress, questions that were once the domain of speculative deliberation in the humanities become accessible to evidence-based research. Famous historical examples include the shape of the universe and the origin of species, while the current battleground appears to be certain key aspects of the human condition.
In each case, claims that humanities scholars have been making (motivated by religion, political ideology, or some other type of Weltanschauung) eventually became testable and were found to be false. In each case, the response was an attack on the sciences by the humanities - ultimately futile, but quite destructive nonetheless.
....Now do the grievance study affairs.
Has the society of the spectacle ever ceased to be so? "Bread and circuses", fellow Romans!
Your videos are getting better and better man!
I've really enjoyed your videos. See I am (un) fortunate enough to be a certain age where I got to read, for example, Judith Butler's Gender Trouble in uncorrected proofs in an academic seminar in the 1980s, and this video reminds me of that era. I also appreciate your defense of sincere and important intellectuals from Continental Europe, and America, from mischaracterizations by certain conservative (and at times even philistine) commentators. Deleuze and Baudrillard are still valid and valuable, (Even if they are not right about everything ). I also appreciated Sokal, so it is complicated.
A criticism of postmodernism is not the same as rejecting everything it brings up. Philosophy , in my plebian view, (I'm not as well read in philosophy as I feel I want to be) is a reassessment of previous modes of thought as new ideas come to the forefront. Sometimes this is done through rejection, but often times it is building off of what came before.
Also plenty of people who would be labeled as 'postmodernist neo-marxist' actually criticize postmodernism, which I keep trying to tell everyone, haha . The best example is postmodern feminism , and the criticism of that. Yes, even people on the left criticze the idea that gender is nothing but a social construct, but people who are conservative don't want you to believe that. TERFS tend to take this to the extreme, though.
Some marxists criticize postmodernism too , saying that it doesn't take into account that human lives are very much shaped by pre-determined factors. That and it is steeped in late capitalism. Frederic Jameson is a really good source, and I'm not sure if you have talked about him, but I think it's a great idea to. There is a reason that postmodernism came out after mass media. He talks all about it :) in " Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism". It's also funny became the same thing conservatives say about moral relativism being a danger is there in his writing. I think we can make the argument that moral relativism is actually kind of inevitable in a system that packages up ideas like you can purchase them. The idea that you are 'buying ideas' and 'the best ideas = the best product' is really weird. Mainly because products are usually made to produce comfort...Anyway....
My opinion is the move away from postmodernism is just as much there in leftist circles..It's even in the art(which is where I come at everything from ). I think the proliferation of identity politics,....maybe is actually a sign that postmodernism is waning. I'm interested in what you think about that.
Sorry for rambling so long.
Yeah. Terms like "the marketplace of ideas" kind of give away the game. I think a lot of conservative criticism of what they understand to be postmodernism is really projection of their own modes of thought. Certainly true with the moral panics over things like moral relativism or "cancel culture."
As for gender, what precisely it "is" is kind of undecidable from this point. I mean, how exactly would you even go about extricating the social and cultural from the biological in something as diffuse and ubiquitous as gender? It seems very likely that a whole lot of it is cultural. We know that gender has varied tremendously between cultures, and subcultures and individuals. That may not be all that gender is, but it's certainly a huge chunk of what it is.
Since you brought up TERFs, I think it's important to be clear that someone else's right to live in a way that feels right to them shouldn't hinge on my (or anyone's) ability to fully understand their inner life or history, or fit them neatly in some framework, scientific or not. Conservatives and TERFs often appropriate scientific terminology to attack the rights of trans people to live their lives, in the same way they've attacked gays, blacks, etc. That's a much more worrying, and much more influential sort of illogic than anything Sokal gestured at.
@@DavidLessemRight the earth is flat and Jesus created the earth
"Some marxists criticize postmodernism" ??
All Marxists (people who actually study Marxism, not declarative Marxists) have huge problems with postmodernism.
Thank you for the thoughtful critique.
That Guy Debord reference at the end was devastatingly on point.
I think a big part in why the controversy has persisted for so long is that describing it is much easier than refuting it, esp for someone who isn't well versed in the subject. It takes seconds to say "Sokal got a nonsense paper on post-modernism published by a journal" and most people just aren't interested enough to listen to anything beyond that.
Hey, really enjoyed the video my dude
Interesting, I never knew the context and detail around Sokal's writing.
You saves me or losing my time reading a book from Sokal. Thank you
A masterpiece of a video.
I know that you don't talk about it in the video, and I agree with what you said in it, but as the thumbnail suggests, it makes no sense to link Latour to postmodern theory, as he has always viciously critiqued it, specially in "we have never been modern".
"Nothing goes over my head! my reflexes are too fast and I would catch it!"
Excellent video. These types of videos are absolute essential to counter the corrupt narratives being spun through the CZcams algorithm.
I did not exactly understand this video, but it made me realize that I had to admit not understanding this video. So, great?
I did not understand how the Sokal affair (which I've just now learned about) was in any way discrediting to postmodernism. Isn't it confirming it, rather? Isn't postmodernism all about "relative this, relative that"? That a bogus paper gets published seems to confirm this.
...Or is there an aspect of postmodernism I don't know?
I have some questions, as someone old enough to remember the Sokal Hoax.
1. Why do you take the SOCIAL TEXT editors' face-saving ex-post-fact statements of how they felt about Sokal's paper (e.g., that it was poorly written and hokey) at face value? And while the journal (they say) was not refereed at the time, it was clearly read by numerous editors -- including many big names in the field. Why not talk about _why_ they we either fooled, or so foolish?
2. Why focus, instead, on the putative bashing of Derrida? As far as I can tell and recall, the press coverage at the time (The NYT, the Globe, Newsweek, TLS, NPR, etc.) did not attack or even joke about Derrida's work? (And isn't Derrida's "they've got nothing on me!" reaction a little sad too?) Why not focus, instead, on the real role Derrida, et al., played in the Sokal paper: they were signals of postmodern seriousness to the SOCIAL TEXT crew, which the editors gobbled up because they thought they had found a political ally (their term)?
3. Why, when you quote Sokal's 1997 reflections, do you only focus on the short paragraph where he acknowledges the limits of his hoax, but ignore the rest of the essay -- where he talks about the sociology of science (and "Theory" at large) had fallen prey to *"meaningless statements, name-dropping, displays of false erudition, ... sloppy thinking, poor philosophy [conflating ethics and epistemology], and glib relativism."* Agree or disagree, this is decidedly NOT just a claim about how some Humanities people occasionally misuse physics and math. It's a broad statement about intellectual hubris, academic silliness, and/or political blindness.
I know that your video had smaller and slimier fish to fry: grandiose CZcams claims that Sokal had "destroyed postmodernism." And you honestly did a good job stomping that bug (and, in the age of Peterson, it does need continual stomping).
But in the process, you ignored the real content and, in my opinion, the real import of the Sokal hoax -- occasionally falling into the same "Science Wars" thinking that took down SOCIAL TEXT.
1. It's true that the statements made by Social Text after the fact aren't necessarily accurate, but it IS true that they asked Sokal to excise most of the philosophical speculation and footnotes in his paper. It's also true that the journal had big names, but they were big names in philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, etc. not in physics. So although they did show a lack of rigour, the lack of rigour was in physics, not in their own field of expertise.
2. I mention Derrida because I have seen the Sokal affair being mentioned to "debunk" a wide range of philosophers, including Derrida. I speak here of not just the intentions and actions of Sokal, but the affair as an event, which includes also how it was reported, and how it is viewed to this day. I don't think Derrida's reaction is sad, his reaction is correct as far as I can see. He himself has never abused scientific terminology.
3. I focus on Sokal's acknowledgment of the limits of his hoax, because that's what most pertains to the affair. It's definitely true that he has great suspicions of the field as a whole, and sees postmodernism as a fraud, but that's not what he proves, or even tries to prove, neither with his hoax nor his more extensive work in Fashionable Nonsense, and demonstrating that sociology or cultural studies has fallen prey to "meaningless statements, name-dropping, displays of false erudition, ... sloppy thinking, poor philosophy [conflating ethics and epistemology], and glib relativism." would require a lot more than the Sokal affair did.
Of course, the Sokal affair could be covered a lot more extensively, and with different angles too, but as you say, I had smaller fish to fry. This video was meant to be less a defence of the theory under attack, but just pointing out that the hoax never closed the debate. I don't see how this makes me fall into "Science Wars" thinking, I just merely tried to break down an obstacle to considering postmodern theory, which is the mis-use of Sokal's hoax.
Thank you for the well thought out comment, I appreciate it
And thank you for your thoughtful response. Not sure if "I just subscribed" means a lot, but... "I just subscribed!"
I'm not going to take up a bunch of your time with a continued bite-by-bite rejoinder, but I do want to wonder aloud about your claim that the SOCIAL TEXT editors' lack of rigor was in physics, but not in their own field.
Here's why I don't think that works. The article was accepted _within_ their own field, according to their own rules and standards (even if those standards were relaxed to let in this apparently fannish physicist). To be sure, they didn't understand the physics, but they _did_ understand the references to and the application of Arnowitz, Latour, Irigaray, Lyotard, and (of course) Derrida. And the editors were, apparently, just fine enough with this part of the argument that the physics hardly mattered. (And those parts of the essay were just as bad, just as "silly" a mishmash of names and Theories, weren't they?)
I am a longtime fan of many of these authors, including the ST editors, but I think that the "Hoax" exposed a lack of rigor on both sides of the equation. And it did change the way I thought about critical theory and the academy for a long time.
Take care, and thanks for the conversation
Have you read the Stephen Hick books Explaining postmodernism ? What do you think of this book ?
From the little I've read of it, it doesn't seem very accurate. I'm considering reading the whole book to then make a video response to it, but I'm not sure yet, I don't want my reading material to be determined entirely by the videos I make for the channel
Short answer no. Post modernism continues and both humors and alarms . Social media has given it a new phoenix
I think you do a good job, but most academics I've talked to have a very strained relationship with publishers. The fact that public research is not open to the public for free, the professors often pier review these papers for free, the policy that the only way to get tenure is to get published atleast 3 times, there's no system in place that would allow for more autonomy for working professor in the realm of research ( not that research is the only thing an intelligence Institution can do for it communities) anyway it's pretty easy to see what needs to be fixed, Private Universities tend to have enough pride in their work that they have a dedicated publishing house, why not public universities?
You're great dude! Despite listening to a lecture of Sokal and reading a little about the debacle on Wikipedia, I had no idea about the details.
All these cultural reactionaries seem to have caused a surge of informed leftist responses and thought. Hopefully it keeps building up.
Ixian Technocrat Hopefully not in the wrong way.
1. Peer reviews can be fooled to, the problems sokal points out kinda persistet through scientific degrees of freedom and other bs. A "truth bias" of popular publications who are not producable nor hold any scientific value but can lead to drastic consequences remains in social sciences and social psychology and is probably going to brake the fragile neck of those subjects someday.
2. To claim one would be open for discussion a posteriori is an easy thing to do. Possible outcomes are . The question remains wether it is at all practical to discuss something with a deconstructionist since his views will lead you into philosophical questions unable to be answered without axioms. You can twist that discussion in the way you want it to end at any time and theres never gonna be an result, if ure capable.
3. Social Texts got absolutely pwnd with their own weapons. I hate how philosophers always have to speak so that nobody figures out what their actual positions are and give this aura of superior intellect and understanding to their words. Makes me very aggressive, they could just present it as simple as possible. I defo think that would be an option for a lot of philosophical theories.
I have a first printing of Fashionable Nonsense and loved it when released.
I think Jordan Peterson’s generalizations about postmodernism are already getting old and are beginning instead to bring a huge amount of positive and critical attention to postmodernism and will both bring out real critiques and reveal missed insights.
What if that was his plan all along?!🤔
Dorian sapiens then he's running one hell of a psychology experiment that will be talked about for a long time.
I actually think Peterson has some interesting things to say about myth and religion but when it comes to postmodernism and cultural Marxism he’s basically a conspiracy theorist.
Nathan Dyck if he was in literature he'd be following in the acclaimed footsteps of people like Northrop Frye and be pretty well regarded, I'm sure. I like archetypal theory in literature, it's fun but that's about the extent of it for me.
Dorian sapiens : "What if that was his plan all along?!" Are you serious? In other words everything about him is a lie and he is an actor with pure intentions to bring out serious discussion? Come on man. How could anyone pull that off? And in what way does he seriously engage with any serious thinker? CZcams celebrities are not serious thinkers! They are the Kardashians of the intellect!
Far more plausible is that he is frustrated with not understanding the world and wants black and white explanations which simply cannot be offered.
And so he comes out like this angry white male and countless others feeling equally frustrated "find" themselves in him and a glorious sense of bonding is experienced.
But when you look for what he offers its scarcely anything.
"Clean your room first," he says.
Oh come on man. What next?
Climb the corporate ladder?
JP has no actual idea what postmodernism actually is, from what I've seen of him. Also he talks about it like it was all the rage and the latest fad, when it's a thing from the 70s lol.
*early 60s*
It's almost as if people are deliberately missing the point when they criticize Jordan Peterson. Postmodernism evolved into applied postmodernism in the fields of Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, Gender Studies, Queer Theory etc. While not postmodernists in the purist sense, the founders of those fields explicitly draw from postmodern theory and place it in the foundations of their ideology. What Jordan Peterson is criticizing is the use of postmodernist tools by activists scholars that have reasoned their way into believing that free speech is bad that that all white people are racists. And all of those fields are alive and well today.
@@thenormalyears Post-modernism began with Protagoras, who had been dead for almost 2000 years by the 1960s.
The content on this channel is a lot more nuanced and genuinely educational than most of what you see on CZcams. I don't always agree with it, but it's clearly far above the type of propaganda and clickbait flooding this website.
How can a hoax to destroy postmodernism? Are we now in Sokalian post-postmodernism? I think Sokal has not understood postmodernism and attacking a windmill.
Grievance studies, 7 out of 20 papers peer reviewed and accepted.
I avoid videos and articles that claim to "destroy" like a plagueis x3
My conclusion from this saga is that much damage to all intellectual disciplines has been done though the pursuit of publication in open access journals. This well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided pursuit, has resulted in predatory journals, who thrive on the authors' money rather than the quality of content. Surprisingly, even the previously high-quality journals have been affected. In order to maintain their eminence, with the belief that they need to remain competitive, some have become more hype-journals with their published results being either non-reproducible by others or plainly wrong.
Subbed. Great video and great YT handle!
all of this apologia misses the clear and unavoidable point: sokal exposed the fraudulent, turgid, intentionally incoherent gibberish that is regularly passed off as "theory" in post structural and CT academia. derrida's attempt to deflect the tarnish onto sokal and suggest people instead try harder to penetrate his and lacan's insufferable bullshit is another version of the ever repeated defense for purveying CT gibberish: "you are just failing (or not trying hard enough) to understand it." this excuse is exactly why Sokal's best option was to execute a hoax. any less deceptive critique is met with some version of "we're just smarter than you" rebuttal by the "philosophers." in fact they (derrida, lacan etc) are NOT. they are charlatans.
The fact that not only Sokal affair, but also you, instead of directly interacting with the text, rather construct quasi-conspiracy theories, about entire fields of knowledge, actually shows how your point in the one not based in rational values and scientifical and critical groundings. To vaguely claim that a lot of different authors and an entire section of social sciences are charlatans are an empty attack, but nothing rather than that.
If you want to engage critically, what you totally can and should if you think you disagree, instead of appealing to vague and generic bold claims about an strawman, directly engage and criticize these authors.
The funniest part about your claim, is that if we are strictly and scientifical in our approach, this study doesn't mean nothing at all. Just that one specifical review failed one time at peew reviewing. This is what both Derrida, and Sokal himseld, stated.
The curious part about the vague statements that "postmodernists" (i do hardly believe that something as "postmodernism" exists, and i am convinced that is a pseud-concept) are vague and not scientifically strict, is that these claims are vague and lack scientifical strictness.
3:42 "It's critique of Baudrillard amounts to 7 pages, the first 2 of which simply show examples of him using scientific terms metaphorically."
And then he states the problem. For some reason you neglect to mention that, and the pages where he explains that go by conveniently fast.
In Sokal's own words: "But what could this metaphor mean? Indeed what could [it's opposite,] a _Euclidean_ space of war look like?"
please do a video on "the subaltern speaks" by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak. I am finding it a very hard read.
postmodern condition: appearance over substance (drama about the hoax rather than thoughtful discussion) (society of spectacle)
I was a bit reluctant to say this since i haven't read any Foucault, but isn't that point that he makes about institutions not being driven by the search of knowledge just a symptom of the profit motive? Truth is generally useful: true science gives way to good engineering that improves our lives and true statements in society in general removes the need of people to waste their precious time discerning the truth from the lies. So for an institution to not pursue truth, it needs to be surpassed in utility by something else, and in our society that is profit.
This is a hypothesis but I'd wager that if multiple institutions were researched to see how many lies each perpetuated, the result would be that for profit companies were the most dishonest, non-profit who relied on donations or a variable budget less dishonest, and state institutions that had a fixed budget the least of them all. So it basically comes down to Marx and the removal of the profit motive to fix this problem.
What is true isn't necessarily "useful" for generating a profit. If profit were the only concern for academic researchers, do you think we'd have telescopes taking extremely high quality images of galaxies that we couldn't get to even in millions of years of travelling just below the speed of light?
Or do you think we would be seeing people doing research on when and why dinosaurs evolved winged feathers?
A lot of research doesn't usually start becoming applicable in areas of economic importance until literally decades, or even centuries after it first becomes formulated and incorporated into a theory.
Perhaps post-modern philosophy will not have much of a strong positive impact on society any time soon, but I don't think it should be totally excluded from academic environments, since many post-modern philosophers and social scientists' ideas may be of interest to academics, if only in a "negative" way (that is to say, for reminding them that all institutions and systems can and should become subject to criticism).
Sokal didn't destroy postmodern theory, but it did ruin the respective careers of Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz (my dissertation advisor at UC Irvine) both of "Social Text." Ross was getting a lot of mainstream press attention at the time and was made head of the American Studies Dept. at NYU and I suspect others there (Sokal?) resented this. Beyond the "Sokal Affair," about 80 percent of academic articles are worthless except for merits/promotions and 20 percent have some value to the given field. Most academics publish a polished up version of their doctoral dissertation and never do anything else for the next thirty or forty years of schmoozing and plotting to advance themselves without doing any scholarly work or else striving to get into administration where the big bucks are. While May 1968 was an abject failure as revolutions go, postmodern theory and its unfortunate offshoots like "queer theory" have done quite well at the university. Its corporatist masters prefer that otherwise intelligent academic specialists be mired in arcane arguments instead of resisting the systematic debasement of humanity and the world it inhabits.
Professor Hamamoto - That's an important last sentence. MSM does the same - "Oh, look, Rosie O'Donnell's tweets!", "Oh, look, whom XYZ had sex with!", "Oh, look, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are very naughty boys!"... while millions of innocents are being killed, millions more made homeless, millions of children are scarred for life with PTSD in the Middle East so that we may make the world safe for privately-held central banks who conjure money out of thin air and lend it to governments at interest, for the powers-that-be to change democratically-elected governments at will in order to control pipelines, oil fields, and through MSM control people's mind... More wars = more debt = more profits = more control = more passive zombie workers...
It's trickle-down ideology: either teach and internalise our values or we turn off the money faucet to institutions, professors and students... It's the same people left and right, neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, it's a biological survival strategy and a means to extract revenge... Just argue about irrelevancies and you'll be fine... Discuss getting off the Petrodollar or expelling privately-held central banks are you and your country will be bombed to smithereens... And fuck the innocent children. Who cares?
We are living in a far from optimal world - equal opportunity for all, a safe and encouraging environment to raise a family, free thinking and speaking without fear or favour - as vested interests create false flags around the world - including 9/11 - to divide and to keep us distracted and frightened and hating each other in order to continuously take away freedoms and tighten control. Population numbers in the West are falling due to the financial stress of providing for children and due to a materialistic, rat-race ideology, and the population that is left over is progressively being dumbed down, distracted by baubles, frightened by taboos.
There's huge difference between mass-produced articles without much content, and articles that are a clear sham.
Or maybe there isn't in postmodernist academia, and that's why you go off on this tangent about polished versions of doctoral dissertations? Surely that's not what you're saying?
"What appears is good, and what is good appears."
Adorno did deestroy it with "The Jargon of Authenticity" & "Negative Dialectics"
What I find funny about Derrida being linked to this hoax is that even in Sokal's book he only mentions him and Foucault at the start and he mentions them specifically to say he wont be mentioning them throughout the rest of his work. I criticized this aspect of his arguments in a book review once, as if we see things from the Pre/modernist perspective people like Sokal would want you to take you should dedicate your work to debunking the strongest perceived figureheads and flag bearers of a movement instead of a few people and their pet critiques at the margins like Julia Kristeva.
It's also dually hilarious that a lot of the pop-scientists who still trot this out, like to do so as admitted defenders of capitalism. Saying science has no dog in the political fight and then hearing people like Steven Pinker, list right wing think tanks, Thomas Sowell and Identarians like Charles Murray as an influence shows exactly why a left critique of science is necessary as historically science has been linked to capital and defense of the majority against disaffected groups. I see a similar strain in people like Sam Harris, Matt Ridley, Dan Dennet, Gad Saad etc. Almost all of them cite the Sokal Affair as a good turning point and a touchstone for their own intellectual development.
Yeah you do know that most of science right now actually supports gays being normal, races being equals, transexuality being a natural phenomena, unfair working conditions being the cause of serious health problems, wealth accumulation being an addiction, an anual salary of more than $100000 bringing no additional happiness, men and women being able of the same feats, traditions being full of bull, etc, etc...
What was that thing again about science being the tool of the capital and the majority?
You did see that I said "historically" and then listed a few outlying contemporaneous examples right? Also, while scientists may have those beliefs, the perception of science shaped by the pop-scientists I listed is being deliberately warped and there are whole fields of contemporary science with a particularly rightward trend politically like Evo-psych. Also a lot what you listed is sociology or more generally in the domain of the humanities except in regards to certain genetic arguments in between like in regards to the proclamations about racism and sexism.
As was already outlined in the video above given the Sokal example... In the US the humanities are constantly demonized and delegitimized as a source of knowledge and the "hard" sciences are used as a cudgel to try to destroy critiques and knowledge from these areas of inquiry. Which means that a lot of this knowledge and findings listed are apriori disregarded by younger right wingers because their heroes assure them constantly that the humanities are just the domain of crazy left wingers. Part of the reason people in the "hard" sciences get to do this is a lot of them hide behind a shield of pretend "neutrality" science gives them in regartds to political issues when in reality a lot of these practitioners are hiding agendas of their own which are usually tied directly to their own corruption and political leanings. Which is what i was alluding to in my earlier post.
I was also alluding to the fact that historically science was used as a way to denigrate minorities and protect the status quo. The US and European history of eugenics support being the largest and most important ongoing example I can think of. I know you will probably jump to saying this wasn't "legitimate" science, but that was not what people including educated professionals and scientists at the time thought. Supreme court justices, US presidents and even Winston Churchill made decisions with the scientific framework and justification of Eugenics in mind. Look up the Buck V. Bell supreme court decision which I consider to be the second worst SC decision in history after Dred Scott. Eugenics also helped with the genocide of the native Americans and a little known event called the Holocaust.
Derrida has listed the certainty of the people who committed the Holocaust and his own experiences growing up as a Jew in France as a reason why he wanted philosophy to be more trepidatious and skeptical than it had previously been in regards to scientific and logical certainty.
This is also not an abstract example as with the already mentioned Charles Murray eugenics and scientific racism arguments are coming back in style and a lot of prominent people are willing to host shows and entertain these peoples ideas and unfortunately not a lot of pop-scientists are out debunking these people, probably because they aren't being paid by a right wing think tank to do so.
As per your own listed examples, Trans people and gays were considered abnormal aberrations and mental disorders and deviants before societies attitudes changed about these things and subsequently so did the science. Women's orgasms were considered a doctor prescribed cure for their "hysteria" and "wandering wombs." We did this amazing technique because there is still a widely held belief then backed up by science that women were more emotional than men. Which shows that science is not an invariant abstract neutral activity but is in part a reflection of the users of science and what they're trying to prove in the first place.
The use of POC's as lab rats and "test bodies" as in the case of Tuskegee experiment and involuntary radiation experiments are another key example. I can go on for days though, I'm sure you get the belabored point.
I am not saying scientists have those beliefs, in fact it doesn't matter if they do, I'm saying the modern scientific method (as in the one in place since the middle of the 20th century) brings about those conclusions.
Most pop-scientist do not represent science as a whole and the fact that it does feel like they reinforce the system is normal as they are the one that the system lets talk. Evo-psych is mostly unfalsifiable so it's not a really respected field (I'll give you that it's used by right leaning idiots), scientific racism findings don't get reproduced even though a lot of scientists are conservatives, what is happening? Is there a filter for racists at the entry of the university? No, it's just that the political leaning of scientists doesn't matter.
Humanities are not demonized as a source of knowledge, they're are rightly put in their place when they venture outside their realm of competence, they have nothing to say about falsifiable facts and reproducible experiments, and when they pretend that science is no better than indigenous knowledge that can be SHOWN to be wrong in a double blind study, there is a problem. The other edge of that sword is that science has nothing to say of epistemology (of which it depends) or ethics, and the humanities should put them in their place when they do go there. Like Sam Harris (which is a hack by the way) does.
Sociology is science not humanities (I won't go in the whole Critical Theory shting), also all of what I listed is actually psychology (money, homosexuality, sexism), biology (health and working conditions, racism) and neuroscience (transexuality), nothing in genetics actually (seriously dude, do you even know what you're talking about?)
You seem to live in a world where scientists are right wing assholes trying to influence the debate, I think you don't really know how the scientific consensus is reached (experiments have to work everytime and all that, it's kind of impossible to impose your fake results, just look at the Lysenko debacle) also the crazy left-wingers use science at every occasion they have, everybody wants to have science on their side, because it works, so if it's on your side you must be right (the catch being you follow science where it leads you, not the other way around).
I wont comment on the quote marks on hard and neutral, you kind of exposed yourself as a cognitive relativist on this one. Then there is the old eugenics canard, eugenics are not science, they are an application of science, it's based on the assumed superiority of certain traits, science cannot determine superiority, as it is not measurable, you can't do an experiment on it. Also, stupid argument, it would be like blaming modern day Germans for the Holocaust.
The Genocide of the Native Americans happened mostly because of religious fervor, the Nazis were notoriously anti-intellectual and didn't apply the scientific method, like at all, rejecting relativity and natural selection, both of which are better model for predicting reality, also it's not because Derrida said it (he said a lot of smart stuff, but still) that it's true.
So you're telling me that people in the humanities were fighting for gay rights then? No way, nobody was. In fact the classification of mental pathologies is always a delicate matter which relies more on moral preconceptions inherent in society than in the scientific method, and the fact that homosexuality was seen as one has more to do with the philosophy of the time (ergo the humanities, kidding it was religion). Society changed attitudes way after science did, in fact most people don't agree with the science on trans people, and gays are still getting shit all the time. The fact that women were hysterical was not backed up by facts, it was simply assumed, the fact that POC were used as lab rats was not justified by science but by society's racist biases. Scientists don't try to prove anything, I don't know where you get this idea but it's not really well seen in research to start with the end already written, you seem to conflate a lot of things and well, I already spent too much time adressing your misconceptions.
Kisses on your right cheek and a slap on the left one. Sorry for the repetitive style, I'm kinda tired.
You have misread or are reading things into my post. I'm not under the impression that scientists are mostly right wingers. Most academics in study after study lean at least slightly left. I find your original comment a mostly uncontroversial one in regards to it describing the beliefs of most scientists, I was more trying to elaborate on my intentions with my own first comment.
The problem is again that the "mainstream" of most academic scientists is not represented well by self appointed popularizers of science and I think it's evident I don't mean most scientists when I say this as i am bringing up specific examples over and over again.
Humanities can mean different things depending on the specific college or region you're from. For the sake of moving forward though I'll drop the term and say I'm referring to the "soft sciences." Which should clear up some of the confusion. you might have about my prior post. I'll only add that there are a lot of people even just on this website that constantly dispute the legitimacy and usefulness of these fields.
I'm surprised you dispute the fact that genetics is often the source of a lot of race and sex arguments. Also the primary argument for the "legitimacy" of homosexuality from a scientific standpoint and the one that was used the most as I was growing up was that being gay has a genetic basis. I put quotes around legitimacy because I don't think we should need arguments like this to justify people's lives, but unfortunately we did. Genetics is also the back bone of biology along with evolution, seriously dude do you know what you're talking about?
Speaking of quotes, I wouldn't describe myself as a cognitive relativist. I quoted those sarcastically because I'm against the idea that people can be unbiased or neutral or at the very least the specific examples I gave. The method of science is the best one we have so far to gain incremental inductive knowledge. The problem is as humans we taint the process and bring in individual and cultural biases, but some of these biases are so deeply rooted and sometimes based on ideology so pervasive we need larger more systematic criticisms to counter the bias. Of which I have already previously alluded to.
I'm aware of how peer-review is supposed to work in an ideal world, you're aware that you're bringing up this ideal scenario on a video where the maker already gave a specific example (the Midi Chlorian one) that showed this doesn't always work as intended? I think you should calm down a bit and actually read and try to take in people's arguments before commenting.
You seem to think I'm under the impression the soft sciences and/or the humanities were always angels or that I was making the argument they were better on social issues in the past than other scientific fields which I was not and am not. They are just biased and susceptible to corruption as other fields. Assuming that was my position for a second though, I think "two wrongs make a right" is a poor defense of anything and I certainly won't accept it here.
I think it's an almost ahistorical interpretation to say the Native American genocide was mostly due to "religious fervor." I would say racial superiority, economic concerns and unintentional and intentional biological germ warfare would come long before we consider religion.
I lump everything you said in regards to the nazi's here and just say, you're aware that bad people can still do science right? Just because you don't like the way something is applied doesn't mean it wasn't applied right and as the rest of my argument was establishing this was a widely held belief of the broader scientific community and one that was held by the wider culture. Calling it "bad science" is a lame excuse because most of the things we believe scientifically are based on incremental inductive knowledge subject to constant scrutiny. In this imperfect world with the imperfect half knowledge we have, people can still use scientific knowledge in isolated ways and means to justify ideas they have. If the wider culture believes these things it also wont matter that it's not true in an ideal world where everything is peer reviewed perfectly and numerous times to enumerate it's correctness. Which ironically as studies show often doesn't happen anyway since science journals and monetary funding favor innovation and novelty in covering experiments rather than in people reaffirming past ones which has led to a lack of peer review study for a lot of experiments.
I don't know what you're referring to with this, maybe instead of calling people stupid, you should flesh out your sentence fragments so a person can know what you're talking about:
"Also, stupid argument, it would be like blaming modern day Germans for the Holocaust."
If I try to interpret this I think you seem to be under the impression throughout both of your posts that I'm some kind of science hater trying to tear it down in favor of something else. I'm not, I'm just skeptical of it and it's application and I don't brush aside past misuses of it as aberrations especially when these arguments are coming back en vogue.
I listed practices done by doctors (which are practicing biologists doing applied work) and discovered by the science at the time to treat "hysteria." You might not think of it as science now, but you would be laughed out of the medical journals if you disputed the reality of "hysteria" at the time. In regards to homosexuality and trans, people actually did have to fight the idea that these were abnormalities or mental disorders. In fact the DSM's listing of these up until the late 70's as a negative was often cited as a reason for the necessity of LGBT activism at the time.
Science doesn't rarely gives us 2 + 2 = 4 deductive truths, (I would argue this never happens but that is a much bigger philosophical argument) so people have to apply their own knowledge and interpretation to the process even when they might not necessarily want to. Biases seep in, where interpretation starts. This was especially true in the past which again I' said "historically" in my first post.
Hot damn I had a response ready but it went away. Short one: Yeah I was tired, misread a lot of your points and might have given you intentions that weren't there, didn't call you stupid, called the conflating of application of science and science itself stupid, agree with you on most issues (when you put them in nuanced terms I actually arrived to the same conclusions on my own), you're still wrong here and there (nazis, genetics for gays and sex, bad science staying longer than it actually does) but I don't want to expose why as it would be pointless, didn't talk about the same thing when saying "humanities" (I was talking about non-scientific academia, history, philosophy, cultural studies, etc...) so that explains a lot. There you go, I was wrong to comment as soon as you answered, I should have waited now, you would't had to write another short story to counter me.
Great thing about Sokal and his book is that he emphasised the fact humanities are not sciences. Great thing about postmodernism actually proved that even science is not science sometimes.
how postmodernism prooved that science is not science???? plz plz explain
It's funny how people often name "science" in singular as if it were only one discipline with a defined set of knowledge and principles, but then name the "Humanities" in plural as some odd category of several dozens of disciplines that are supposed to have nothing in common except for a concern with what is "human".
Thanks. A very good and balanced analysis, I think.
what book reader you're using? :)
Why would you present a picture of Bruno Latour for a video about Sokal?
As I see your repeated disdain for Peterson's critique, and since this is the 2nd video of yours in which you defend postmodernism, I would be interested to see you respond or refute the argument against Postmodernism made by Dr. Stephen Hicks, especially since that seems to be where Peterson is deriving his conclusions from (although far more short-handedly than Hicks is).
That has been suggested several times so I might do it. I'm just a bit conflicted right now between the viewers who want to see more content about postmodernism, and those who think I should focus more on other fields of philosophy
Thanks for letting me know about Sokal's book. Good criticism is always useful.
Great video.
However, as someone really interested in situationnism, what do you refers to exactly by saying "Society of the Spectacle" ?
"the true is a moment of the false" and we care more about its representation than about the thing itself, but maybe you could be more specific ? The use of the term seems a bit dubious to me.
Isn't the preview picture on this video Bruno Latour and not Alan Sokal?
And here we see how dishonest are people when they want to discredit something.
True that.
Probably said more about *the state of academic publishing* than it said about science or postmodernism.
I would be interested in a video that explains the metaphors Baudrillard was using in the quotes Sokal used.
I think a lot of the gleeful public reaction to the Sokal affair is to do with scientism. Many see this affair as proof that philosophy is useless wank and only the hard sciences constitute 'real' knowledge. All par for the course for an intellectually philistine culture, obsessed with easy to quantify facts and suspicious of qualitative knowledge. I'm starting to sound like the Frankfurt School now.
I completely agree
haha, very true. Lots of atheists are like this too. Their devotion to pragmatism is pretty impressive though.
I would rather say that people who put their faith in hard sciences are suspicious of people who claim to have qualitative knowledge, especially when they start telling you how to live your life, or that you are evil, an infidel, or philistine.
You're talking about a different topic. I'm referring to the STEM circlejerk and the common dismissal of the humanities that is so prevalent today.
No - same topic. Humanities are dismissed by many because they have contained so much utter dross responsible for vast amounts of human misery, even as they claim to be guides to living the good life, individually or collectively: just like religions. By contrast, people see that their TV works, so they know that scientists are good for something, even if they do not get it right all the time.
If you tell people that they are intellectually philistine because they mistrust your particular brand of qualitative "knowledge", you should expect to be dismissed, since the term "Philistine" has no real determinate content: it is just being used as an insult meaning something like "not as cool as me".
Anyway, a post-modernist (which you may or may not be) has no "real" basis to say what constitutes "real knowledge" if knowledge is no more than an extension of power. The rejoinder "He would say that wouldn't he" apples to post-modernists just as well as to anyone else.
They tried to do it again, and it's just as rubbish as last time haha
Why is there a picture of Bruno Latour in the thumbnail?
It just sounds like one of the many examples of "academic" journals not having academic standards
In some ways this affair is reminiscent of Stanisław Andrzejewski (or Stanislav Andreski) who published a book, Social Sciences as Sorcery. As far as I know, no hoaxes were involved, but there are the same complaints about impenetrable academic jargon that indict nearly all the social sciences.
In any event, since reproducibility is essential in the sciences, I think more hoaxes are called for.
THIS VIDEO IS RIDICULOUS: What Sokal and Bricmont prove is that, despite in a Postmodern World there are no criteria to judge any aspect of the reality - let alone reality itself -, Postmodernists nevertheless engaged in a critique of science which they were not capable of engaging with, and that it would have been wiser not even start. All the rest in this video is nonsense .
0:39 The Truth About Krazy Kat? Holy shit where can I get a copy of that magazine...
I would like to quote some of this for a peer-reviewed paper but don't want to use "Cuck 2018" (!). How can I send Cuck a pm?
Philosophyinsights a channel that is fraudulently named
Not all philosophy has to be collectivist.
"Collectivist" is a term that's so vague that it's almost meaningless. There is no field of philosophy simply called "collectivism". The problem with PhilosophyInsights isn't that it's not "collectivist" (whatever that would mean), it's that it barely contains any philosophy at all.
NathansHVAC philosophy is a broad term for all of academic thought, ideology, intellectualism, politics, history, and I think even the sciences regardless of how scientists feel is philosophy, education is all philosophy, if the channel was into philosophy itself they would explore it from a frame of trying to get deeper into philosophy, instead the point is that they are trying to capitalize on rightwing philosophy while selling the channel under that name as unbiased and into philosophy, which they are not
I'm sold and subscribed to this channel. I"m definitely waiting for the right to get "rekt". I am on a life long quest to be convinced that merit has no place in society. The only ones that try to argue that point are the left. The left getting "rekt" videos are becoming boring. They all pretend to defend special privileges without ever truthfully saying they are defending special privileges. It is pretty easy to show the immorality of that argument.
Oh sure, bring in all that nuance and facts and context and RUIN the fun of smarty-pants bloodsport! People don't want truth, they want those lilly-livered -liberals- erm... intellectuals get REKT!
Oh shiet!!!11111!!1!!
Facinating, I learned of this during a lecture that specificly mentioned this to underline the importance of peer review and careful publishing. I had no idea it was used in this warped way.
Fantastic work as always