Sometime, oh sometimes, I have to admit loving the thrust and parry found in the reviews. Witnessing courteous delivery of comeuppance appeals to a sense of justice.
Where language is concerned, Sokal and Bricmont, bigots to the last, lose the plot altogether, and sink to the low point of declaring that their gallery of impostors have no title to any ‘poetic licence’ (a concept I was startled to discover was still in the land of the living), for ‘their intention is clearly to produce theory, and … their style is usually heavy and pompous, so it is highly unlikely that their goal is principally literary or poetic.’ The noise you hear, reading an insultingly simplistic sentence like that, is of the ocean rushing hungrily back to fill the channel dividing those time-honoured adversaries, the Two Cultures.
John Sturrock “Le pauvre Sokal” (London Review of Books, 16 July 1998) reprinted in The Meaninglessness of Meaning.
For an insightful set of lectures on the history of the controversy over the arts-science divide see Lisa Jardine’s 2012 Tanner Lectures.
https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Jardine%20Lecture.pdf
And so for day 2808
20.08.2014