All

Val's correctness or incorrectness is irrelevant. What follows is nonsense.

regards

sdv

David Zachmann wrote:

> Val,
>
> You must be aware that your are making an utter fool out of yourself by
> spreading your unalloyed nonsense about science and technology -- this
> especially from a person who shows NO SIGN of knowing any significant
> science whatsoever. As the perspicacious Normal Levitt has it
>
> "Specifically, there are those who claim to have tamed the monster [i.e.,
> science] by declaring that somehow [we are NEVER told how] it is all a
> fake, science isn't 'real' knowledge, it's just a 'narative.'  It's not
> abstractly preferable to other systems of belief -- myth for instance --
> merely attached to a culture that is, for the moment, more powerful than
> others.  To make this strange doctrine even marginally plausible would seem
> to require an intellectual engine at least comparably powerful to that
> deployed by the sciences.  How could one hope to reveal the errors of a
> flawed knowledge-system without having some keener insturment at hand to
> dissect [analyze] it.?" (from More Higher Superstitions:  Knowledge,
> Knowingness, and Reality, by Norman Levitt, pages 78-82, Skeptic, Vol. 4,
> No4., 1996)
>
> Val, as science IS manifestly growing ever more powerful, at an exponential
> rate, paralleling the development of Supercomputers, your RSTR critiques
> look,
> and are indeed, untenable, vacuous, and fatuous.   So while we may, even
> now, be in the process of being replaced by our own digitially created
> progeny, you Val, and your like-minded RSTSR ignorminiousness' continue
> spinning out postmoderenist 'theorie' and social constructivism while the
> world goes to the Circles of Outer Cognitive Darkness ruled by The Sultan of
> Postmondern Sophistry -- Derrida himself -- always attended with an
> honor-guard of Orwellian double-speak.  OTOH, the Earth's ecosystem could
> easily collapse before you lifed a finger to do the real work that it takes
> to make changes with regard to the REAL-WORLD-ENVIRONMENTAL-PROBLEMS.  Val,
> the pervasive magical thinking and mystical superstitions that permeates all
> that you think and write and do and say really amounts to the inane
> proposition that a mere change in "discourse" (i.e., from scientific
> materialism, scientisim, and Enlightenment Rationality to Postmodernist
> DoubleSpeak) equates to a change in objective actuality itself -- is
> thorougly laughable.
>
> Val, do the human race a favor, as you say you are doing, by adopting a
> Popperian clarity-of-style and learning some _real_ science.  Until then, we
> have the best of reasons for ignoring anything and everything you have to
> say about it (i.e. science, technology, etc.).
>
> A Caveat:  You have already lost the battle before the first shot was fired,
> for science is now so very powerful that, for good or ill, its sweep
> and tide are taking up more and more space and faculty and research at major
> universities, and in all Economies of Scale,  while the radical STS
> racketeers, like yourself, continue to propagate (what seems to me)
> Communist propoganda and unalloyed obscurantism in the name of some
> pernicious Romanticism -- and ruining the humanities departments at the same
> time with your nihilistic anti-art-art, anti-literature-literature, and so
> forth.  So go ahead with this kind of
> drivel if you like; but for an accurate estimate of the REAL dangers facing
> a Global Technocracy can only be had by using both science and technology.
> A better strategy for you, Val, would be to make an Enlightenment
> Rationalist Case for your position/positions rather than defending
> Postmodernism and its acolytes (e.g., the pathetic and bethetic Derrida,
> Lacan, Foucault,  and the Nazis Heidigger and de Mann)
>
> So much, then,  for your review (of Fashionable Nonsense) which you do not
> even have an iota of the requisite scientific background nor expertise nor
> experience in scientific practice to even remotely do such a review
> competently.  Grossly incompetent is the job we see before us below.
>
> Since far too many postmodernist humanists have apotheosized ABSOLUTE
> UGLINESS in their literary analyses, art, and music, I will end this missive
> with an ironic wink and a deconstructionst nod to two baneful icons of
> postmodernist artistic and musical sensibility, viz., Andy Warhol and John
> Cage.
>
> DZ
>
> ------------------
> Review of Intellectual Impostures
>
> by Val Dusek
> [To appear in Metascience 9.3]
> Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont.
> Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science.
> London: Profile Books, 1998.
>
> Sokal and Bricmont in their exposé of allegedly meaningless statements about
> science by recent French philosophers take errors of particular applications
> of philosophical ideas to science as refutations of the whole general
> framework utilized. They also seem to think that taking snippets out of
> context is sufficient to expose the "fashionable nonsense." In the early
> twentieth century, British analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell
> and A. N. Whitehead did the same with Hegel on mathematics. After deciding
> not to bother to read Hegel because of distaste for what he wrote about
> mathematics, Whitehead was later surprised to learn that his own relational
> process philosophy resembled that of Hegel in various respects.
>
> Sokal and Bricmont, like a number of other physicist and mathematician
> science warriors, strive to maintain a view of science that preserves the
> attitudes of the past century by reinterpreting the apparently unsettling
> developments of twentieth century science. They wish to reassure
> non-scientists that chaos theory and quantum mechanics have not radically
> changed to nature of the universe presented by science. They debunk claims
> that twentieth century science has undermined determinism or the
> independence of the observer from the observed.
>
> During the first half of the twentieth century, many leading theorists of
> modern physics were also philosophers and humanistic scholars. Werner
> Heisenberg first learned of atoms, not in a physics text, but from reading
> Plato's Timaeus. He claimed that later reading of the same work (in Greek)
> for relaxation during lunch break had some influence on his conception of
> uncertainty in physical reality. Schrödinger took his lab notes in classical
> Greek and wrote as did Heisenberg about the Presocratic philosophers in his
> search for a way to understand subatomic reality.
>
> After W.W.II, with the congealing of the official interpretation of quantum
> theory, and the rise of big science, philistinism took over. Feynman, a
> leading genius of the period, despised philosophy, though he often
> misrepresented the positions of the philosophers he ridiculed. His proudly
> dismissive attitude toward philosophers was linked with unconscious
> personifications of Nature and an implicit philosophy of a plurality of
> causes in mechanics resembling that (he would be horrified to hear) of
> Aristotle. One perceptive reviewer of Feynman's anecdotes says that someone
> familiar only with the beauty of Feynman's physics papers, would, on reading
> his books of humorous anecdotes, react like Antonio Salieri on his first
> encounter with Mozart. Physicist and science essayist Jeremy Bernstein, in
> reaction to the mention of the influence of Hindu thought on Schrödinger's
> later writings, replied simply "Yogic, Schmogic," and claimed recently that
> only an historian of physics would have any interest in reading Niels Bohr,
> the creator of the standard, "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum
> mechanics. Einstein and Heisenberg read the philosopher Kant as teenagers,
> and the Kantian strain in Bohr and Heisenberg is an alien realm to late
> twentieth century Anglo-American physicists.
>
> The changed situation in twentieth century philosophy is similar. In the
> 1920s, not only Henri Bergson, but also Whitehead, and George Herbert Mead
> with their "objective relativism," strove mightily to grapple with the
> general philosophical consequences of Einstein's relativity theory (whatever
> one may think of their particular conclusions). Today in Anglo-American
> philosophy the philosophers of science discuss such issues, but usually
> without attempting in any way to discuss their implications for culture or
> for patterns of thought in general, saying, with W. V. O. Quine, that
> "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough." On the other hand, most
> general analytical social philosophers don't even try to grapple with the
> consequences of contemporary science and math for our worldview, and often
> uncritically and tacitly presuppose older, flawed interpretations. (One
> source of the "overdetermined" support for Sokal and Bricmont's position,
> besides neo-conservatives denouncing "political correctness" and traditional
> literary critics angry at French theory, is the community of analytical
> philosophers who reject continental philosophy.) Would Sokal and Bricmont be
> happier if general philosophers were to ignore science totally? Would they
> admire the Oxford ordinary language philosophers of the 1950s who sneeringly
> ignored both science and politics as irrelevant to "ordinary language" (the
> supposed font of all wisdom)? Would they agree with neo-conservative
> Straussian Alan Bloom that science has no relevance to human life? They
> ought to welcome the sometimes fumbling attempts of recent philosophers to
> make sense of science as a cultural phenomenon and to speculate about the
> cosmological metaphysics that science reveals.
>
> Alan Sokal calls the founders of quantum mechanics Bohr and Heisenberg,
> "vulgarizers (in both senses)."(p. 255 fn 14) Odd that they should have
> invented the things of which they are mere vulgarizers. Similarly, Sokal and
> Bricmont sharply distinguish Einstein's "pedagogy" (discussed by Latour, and
> explicitly called pedagogy by him, contra Sokal and Bricmont) and Einstein's
> real theory (p. 116). What they ignore is that the early Einstein (who
> credited Hume and Mach for inspiration, and Mach in turn credited Berkeley)
> really did approach relativity in terms of the thought experiments
> concerning possible measurements by conscious observers that he describes in
> his popular book. Logical positivism and Percy Bridgman's operationalism
> were inspired precisely by this approach of Einstein.
>
> Sokal and Bricmont likewise are distrustful of philosophical claims
> concerning implications of chaos theory (Ch. 7, pp. 125-136 ). Sokal
> satirizes and with Bricmont certainly exhibits and exposes some confused and
> misleading statements about non-linearity and chaos. Yet not all such
> extrapolations from chaos theory are solely the product of mathematical
> ignorance. One wonders what they think of André Lichnerowicz, one of the
> great mathematicians our time, lending his name and authority to a
> collaborative work that, although it does not, like Prigogine or Bohm, use
> the word postmodernism, ranges afield into speculative applications of chaos
> theory to biology, economics and philosophy, mentioning suspect, supposedly
> anti-scientific figures such as Bergson, Tielhard d' Chardin, Freud, and
> Foucault.
>
> In the original French version of their book, Sokal and Bricmont discuss
> Bergson's misunderstandings of Einstein and then trace what they consider
> the sad history of French philosophers praising Bergson. Bergson probably
> suffered from writing too well and deceptively simply. This made him
> extraordinarily popular, that led to his soon being dismissed by "serious
> philosophers." Part of Bergson's loss of respect in the English speaking
> world is due to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (with a
> quotation from which Sokal and Bricmont's chapter on Bergson begins) that
> portrays Bergson's intuitionism as proto-Nazi, when in fact Bergson died
> from illness contracted while waiting on a bread line in occupied France
> after he refused the Nazis' offer to give him special treatment as an
> "honorary Aryan."
>
> Before dismissing Bergson as a fool, and his philosophy of the intuition of
> time and of the fundamental reality of process as nonsense, one needs to
> separate several issues. Bergson indeed made mistakes (pointed out by
> Einstein himself) in arguing about special relativity theory. Bergson
> himself recognized his lack of expertise in physics, and refused to allow
> further editions of his work to appear during the thirties. Do these
> mistakes mean that Bergson's views on time ought to be dismissed, or that
> his philosophical claims about time have no value? Bergson was not, contrary
> to Bricmont's opinion, trying to "refute" Einstein. Bergson rejected
> Newtonian absolute space and he accepted the demise of the classical aether,
> unlike a number of reactionary philosophical holdouts against relativity
> theory. Several physicists, such as de Broglie, Watanabe and Costa de
> Beauregard have seen value in Bergson's ideas in relation to wave mechanics
> and thermodynamics, despite his particular errors in relativity theory. Two
> major mathematicians whom Sokal and Bricmont cannot accuse of ignorance of
> mathematics made sympathetic use of Bergson. Norbert Wiener, in his
> Cybernetics, opened with a discussion of "Newtonian vs. Bergsonian time,"
> and A. N. Whitehead incorporated parts of Bergson's philosophy of process
> into his own interpretation of relativity theory.
>
> The spirit of Bergson's earlier writings contradicts the letter of his
> unfortunate sally into relativity theory. Bergson's own, earlier Matter and
> Memory contradicted the later denial of multiple temporal rhythms in his
> discussion of relativity theory. Milic Capek points out in Bergson's
> emphasis on the difference between time and space and his denial of
> absolutely separate material particles fits well with much of relativity
> theory and quantum mechanics, but that Bergson's own treatment of time in
> reaction to Einstein mistakenly treated Minkowski's diagram as a dreaded
> "spatialization of time" similar to that of classical treatments of time as
> a fourth dimension in d'Alembert and others (a mistake shared, by the way,
> by some of the physicist defenders of Einstein's theory as portraying a
> "block universe" without genuine change).
>
> At the center of the debate between Bergson and Einstein was the "twin
> paradox." If rapid travel shows down time, then a twin sent into space at
> high speed would return younger than the twin who remained on earth. Yet if
> velocity is relative, should not the twin on earth be younger than the space
> traveler, since, relative to the space traveler, the twin on earth receded
> and then approached at high speed? Even if Bergson's claims about the twin
> paradox are confused, that's not to say that the twin paradox is totally
> cleared up. When physicist Herbert Dingle argued in Nature for the genuine
> paradoxicality of the twin paradox, a number of physicists indignantly
> claimed the solution was clear and simple, but gave "obvious solutions"
> inconsistent with one another. Marder edited a whole book of such "obvious
> solutions" to the twin paradox some of which are mutually incompatible.
>
> Contd.