Page 94 - Gabrijela Kišiček and Igor Ž. Žagar (eds.), What do we know about the world? Rhetorical and argumentative perspectives, Digital Library, Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana 2013
P. 94
What Do We Know about the World?
sue the identification of subversive tendencies in the discourse in vogue
in the field of humanities in the 1990s. According to Sokal, the focus of
this influential book was “the analysis of a curious historical volte-face”
concerning one of the fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment legacy
– the belief that “rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective
reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mys-
tifications promoted by the powerful – not to mention being desirable
human ends in their own right” (Sokal, 2010: 116).
However, Sokal continues as follows:
[O]ver the past two decades, a large number of “progressive” or “leftist” ac-
ademic humanists and social scientists [...] have turned away from this En-
lightenment legacy and – bolstered by French imports such as deconstruc-
tion as well as by home-grown doctrines like feminist standpoint epistemol-
ogy – have embraced one or another version of epistemic relativism. More-
over, a small but growing subset of these scholars have turned their critiques
on the natural sciences, questioning not only the political and economic or-
ganisation of scientific research but also the alleged “cultural prejudices in-
scribed in the very epistemology of scientific inquiry” [...]. Gross and Levitt
contend that these latter scholars, combining an inadequate philosophy of
science with an utter ignorance of the science they purport to criticize, have
made fools of themselves and subverted the standard of scholarship. (ibid.)
In Sokal’s view, the subversive quality of the criticised aspects of the
work of “some of the most prominent French and American intellectu-
als” (Sokal, 2010: 153), whom he describes as “pontificating on science
and its philosophy and making a complete bungle of both” (Sokal, 2010:
xiii) included the following features: the advancing of “meaningless or
absurd statements”, “name-dropping”, the display of “ false erudition”,
“sloppy thinking and poor philosophy” (Sokal, 2010: 153).
Categorising the reasons for his resorting to parody as “pragmatic”,
Sokal gives the following explanation of his choice of strategy for attack-
ing the targeted forms of discourse as well as their protagonists:
The targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academ-
ic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the
outside. In such a situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture’s
intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the emperor
has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon [...] (Sokal, 1996a).
In terms of the proposed classification of anti-subversive strategies,
the “reasoned criticism from the outside” would probably represent a
kind of application of the “appeal to norm” strategy with the intention
of demonstrating that the kind of discourse in question fails to comply
sue the identification of subversive tendencies in the discourse in vogue
in the field of humanities in the 1990s. According to Sokal, the focus of
this influential book was “the analysis of a curious historical volte-face”
concerning one of the fundamental tenets of the Enlightenment legacy
– the belief that “rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective
reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mys-
tifications promoted by the powerful – not to mention being desirable
human ends in their own right” (Sokal, 2010: 116).
However, Sokal continues as follows:
[O]ver the past two decades, a large number of “progressive” or “leftist” ac-
ademic humanists and social scientists [...] have turned away from this En-
lightenment legacy and – bolstered by French imports such as deconstruc-
tion as well as by home-grown doctrines like feminist standpoint epistemol-
ogy – have embraced one or another version of epistemic relativism. More-
over, a small but growing subset of these scholars have turned their critiques
on the natural sciences, questioning not only the political and economic or-
ganisation of scientific research but also the alleged “cultural prejudices in-
scribed in the very epistemology of scientific inquiry” [...]. Gross and Levitt
contend that these latter scholars, combining an inadequate philosophy of
science with an utter ignorance of the science they purport to criticize, have
made fools of themselves and subverted the standard of scholarship. (ibid.)
In Sokal’s view, the subversive quality of the criticised aspects of the
work of “some of the most prominent French and American intellectu-
als” (Sokal, 2010: 153), whom he describes as “pontificating on science
and its philosophy and making a complete bungle of both” (Sokal, 2010:
xiii) included the following features: the advancing of “meaningless or
absurd statements”, “name-dropping”, the display of “ false erudition”,
“sloppy thinking and poor philosophy” (Sokal, 2010: 153).
Categorising the reasons for his resorting to parody as “pragmatic”,
Sokal gives the following explanation of his choice of strategy for attack-
ing the targeted forms of discourse as well as their protagonists:
The targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academ-
ic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the
outside. In such a situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture’s
intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the emperor
has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon [...] (Sokal, 1996a).
In terms of the proposed classification of anti-subversive strategies,
the “reasoned criticism from the outside” would probably represent a
kind of application of the “appeal to norm” strategy with the intention
of demonstrating that the kind of discourse in question fails to comply
