by cofty 99 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Outlaw let go of the imaginary friend.
Grow up and take responsibility or your own bullshit and hostility.....cofty
You spend your life here..
Hunting down and attacking anyone who disagrees with you..
You started this thread because your Pissed Off with Slimboyfat..
This is from your OP on this thread..
SBF you annoyed me enough to deserve this......cofty
You should really consider taking your own advice..
get a life and stop being a prick.....cofty
That should earn you about 9 or 10 Likes Outlaw.
Popularity being your one and only concern.
Cofty,
I am with you and I am with some of the ideas of the 20th century schools, including the constructivists, for example. I believe Kant was the strongest voice of the idea that objectivity and science are human constructs (I hope I got that right). I agree, but regardless of who were the forerunners of constructivism, My point is that the way we do science and handle social interactions has worked pretty well so far. So, questioning our perception of reality without offering a better method is an effort into futility, especially considering the amazing discoveries and inventions that have not only improved the life of so many, but also are getting us closer to understanding the biggest mystery and the very source of our perception of reality, the human brain.
sbf, thanks for the link.
The first 30%, or 2 minutes, of this video goes absolutely nowhere. Deserves no further time.
hmmmm..... while Alan Sokal is famous for this critique of postmodernity and not for his science/mathematics (according to Derrida anyway), Jean Bricmont is famous for his (dare I say it) postmodernity - according to this quote anyway imo
One of the arguments imperialist powers use to justify going to war is that they are preventing the rise of new Hitlers. Bricmont reminds us that those same ruling classes were quite happy to let Hitler smash any sign of working class resistance and today are also promoting dictators who have nothing to do with human rights.
As for Focault he denied that he was postmodern (I agree with him)
Bruno Latour denies that we have ever been modern (I agree)
Indeed Latour claims that France exported postmodernity to the US and worldwide in the form of coke while in France itself they only partake of the sipping kind of coke
here is Richard Dawkins on Sokal and Bricmont's book in typical style
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html
what is going on with him??????
Ruby - Thank you for the link to Dawkins' critique of pomo. Excellent!
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously....
The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us"..
Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
cofty problem is that Gaad (evolutionary psychology) uses scientific terms differently from Dawkins (evolutionary biology) and yet both conflate each others' meanings - so this is rather like the pot calling the kettle black.
