http://stormofdesire.blogspot.com/2006/05/wanda-speaks-her-mind-ii-couple-of.html

One of the more intriguing theories to me is language began with gesture. For example infants can learn sign language in advance of speech. Roughly three months earlier.

Motherese might have some validity in terms of how women seem to assume language skills earlier than boys with more robust usage of language to connect to others mainly female, and seem to dominate in terms of the invention and development of language itself.

However, there is considerable confusion here. For example, is language the ‘whole’ of thought or just a part? What sort of brain structures give the right basis for language? For example, some birds seem rather able in using language, but the underlying brain structures are organized quite differently.
Doyle

It is not sufficient that the elections BE fair. They must also be PERCEIVED as fair.

thank you for the kind comments. The above is a bit of a mixed bag though, isn’t it? I have some non-end-user apps (iTerm, Ecto, Eavesdrop) mixed in with more user relevant ones.

Since I wrote the above, I have a few more to recommend… including some really useful Firefox extensions. Keep your eyes open for a post soon!

Also, if you want to just read my rare Mac tips and skip the political and/or philosophical rants and news bits, you can subscribe (RSS) to just the Mac category:

http://platosbeard.wordpress.com/tag/computing/macstuff/feed/

I think the open source model is just a prelimenary until we gain better understanding of human cognitive abilities; emotion structure, the distinction between language and other forms of mental work processes.

Bit Torrent demonstrates how networked processes are difficult to construct and the necessary experience base is limited. It’s success of course shows how unexplored the possibilities are.

In my view what really drives networked culture is the large size of files that could be further utilized if the network properties were better served by support applications. This requires I think some gathering of design ideas from nervous system structures, more generally available tools to work with, and better networked hardware.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

I think your point about if one goes looking for it in the real world they’ll not find it so ‘romantic’ is probably true. I’ve been on the streets at night when something goes down, it lacks the framing that organized sort of basement sports events provide. Secondly, a gun trumps fists and feet, so there is always a question if someone has one sort of advantage.

Or political demos with the cops all around ready for a little sport. Takes the idea of duking it out into another place. That place is where you lose go to jail and deal with jail life. All of which seems to me gives the fantasy of basement fighting a bit of delusionary aspect.

To speak to being in fight, I’ve been but there is always a question in my mind what will I do. I’ve mostly lost the fear of losing. I’ll walk into a bunch of teenagers who are being provocative to give them a little frisson of threat. Or if a guy is beating a woman or trying to really intimidate a women or children then I’ll intervene, step between them. I never know when I do it if I can stay there or not. But it never feels like I’m macho. It feels if I can use the moral framing thingy, ‘the right thing to do at the time’ sort of thing. But scares the bejabbers out of someone with me.
Doyle

perhaps I should have put “real man” in quotes — I meant the general stereotype of the “real man”: someone who is big and brawny and deals with the “real world”. While that stereotype is a bit silly, I still find this geek fight club thing ludicrous, and think that if they really desire a beating, they should go looking elsewhere (and that will quickly change their mind about their “machismo” etc).

Have I been in a physical fight? Not really anything significant, in my adult life.

To me a fight is never about ‘manlyness’. It’s usually about some degree of both people not estimating how effective the other person is in a fight. Anybody will to some degree resort to physical violence if the scenario is right for them. That’s male or female, gay or straight. Jean Genet was a murderer in prison.

I’ve seen a lot of fights in my time. I’ve never had any question come up about manlyness. What I’ve seen of course is people saying a lot to distract the other into inaction. That usually is not realistic talk, just fantasy land.
Doyle

But I’m not sure how much I’d call it “inheritence” if the trait doesn’t persist through multiple generations. (But I can imagine ways this might be possible …)

Now, if only someone can explain to me why prion protiens persist in the genome …

What about eating bugs? I’ve often that a substitute for mammal protein. Also what about the natural environment? One has to do more than just stop eating animals. One can just as easily kill be occupying habitat. And establishing nature reserves? And city sprawl? And housing development? And who maintains the land? How does one figure out what to do?

All suitable questions if one gets a substantial move away from meat eating.
thanks,
Doyle

At home I mostly use Safari.
Doyle

People get up in arms about disabled tokens who are craven ass kissers with no disabled voice but over all, it’s the lack of voice that really matters. What I mean is that the pain of having so much barriers to get across is the real source of pain. The parvenu who falsified their work often can’t be distinguished from the Andy Warhol who wallows in ‘bad’ art.

I’ve run into amongst AA (African Americans) a certain amount of not wanting to ‘represent’ the race. They don’t want to be the role model. The resonates for me also. Failure is the artists ever present haint (spectral figure looming in the shadows). Some like myself see representation of the group as a very hard place to live one’s life. To calculate what would really be right as the norm creates a mask of false face for the world. See existentialism.

Your concern of course is that representation is lacking. So you feel quite opposite me. There is no doubt a substantial racist component to the lack of representation. But the people who must break through are never up to standard. Their flaws are there always. It’s the readiness in my view to hold all the messy assemblage in ones arms. Weeping over the problems and pains and inhaling the fumes of the process to extrude like magma from the earth to fill in the gaps. That’s what creates art.
thanks,
Doyle

Singer’s point about eating is alright in it’s way. The problem I have with him is his ‘ethics’ is metaphysics not reality. I’ve seen him say (probably when threatened by something) he can out argue people on logical and ethical grounds. This reliance on ethics is a lacuna in his analytical tool chest.

At best ethics is a method for living better in larger societies. At worst it tells us nothing concretely why some are ethically unworthy. It ends up with the old story of putting people out of society if the ethical traditions are broken.

The arguments against corporate farming are overwhelming. At the same time the way they are going toward nano tech their mischief is likely to increase rather than be reined in by Singer or others of the PETA community.
Doyle

[I still have to read your post, which I very much want to... hope you know which one I am referring to!]

Roach writes,
India’s macro story is the mirror image of China’s in many key respects. Constrained by a lower saving rate, limited inflows of FDI, and a sorely neglected infrastructure, India has turned to a fragmented services sector as the sustenance of economic growth. The labour-intensive character of services has provided support to India’s newly emerging middle class — a key building block for India’s consumption-led recovery. As a result, private consumption currently accounts for 61% of Indian GDP — far outstripping the 40% share in China. The growth contribution of India’s export and investment sectors pales in comparison to that in China.
http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20060522-mon.html

Doyle,
I know you were deliberately trying to not suggest calamity. However, your bringing this up seems to me also quite valid as a very interesting event given the current friction between China and the U.S. This path that works for India with a more service based economy and how it fits into U.S. global schemes is probably a pivotal event in terms of U.S. aims for power. India was gaining grounds with neo-liberalism.

If India gets burned by neo-liberalism which was the big influence over the last few years, that puts a lot of stress on the U.S. which seems likely to use India as a cop to watch China with.
Doyle

I think your point is valid. I do not know enough about where the Indian market stands (in terms of valuation of companies) to attempt further analysis. In the case of the US dot-com bubble, there were certain clear indicators, such as the exhorbitant valuations of non-revenue generating startups that were often nothing more than a web site.

Indian growth is probably still with some foundation at this stage.

Was this a panic in Indian investors or the ever present foreign funds?
Doyle

There is a very interesting essay on scanning and libraries in the NY Times this last week also. I’ll quote it a little bit.

From Scan this Book!
“You might get an alert that your friend Carl has annotated a favorite book of yours. A moment later, his links are yours. In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.”

Doyle,
This seems to me a good paradigm of information production work to come. I find wiki’s relatively inert. I think there is a lot to do with thinking about the editing and reviewing process in terms of automating the work. This excites me that it is coming.
Doyle

another very effective way to create shared documents is to use Wiki software. If you do not want to go through the trouble of setting one up, there are services that provide Wikis for you (try XWiki or any hosting provider, like BlueHost, which provides a Wiki installation). Wiki’s make it easier for multiple user’s to share a document and they provide “revision” control: a historical record of the document.

When you are ready to create the site itself, there are a bunch of free CMS (content management system) applications that can help you (e.g: Drupal, XOOPS, PHPNuke, etc…). Ping me if you have questions or if you would like to try out something that I can setup temporarily for you on my hosting site.

I heard about Google Notebook but haven’t read enough yet to comment. From the little I read it seems like exactly the functionality your friend and you are looking for…

wicked cool . Thanks for the heads up — I am trying to learn CamelBones (a Perl ObjectiveC bridge). Once I am more comfortable with it, I could write up something that uses this API to two-way synchronize between Google Calendar and iCal.

In the meantime, here is a horrible hack I use to make it possible (with care) to edit in two places: I publish a local iCal calendar to a public location (unfortunately Google does not support publishing yet. I use ScheduleWorld) which permits editing. I then subscribe to it under a different name in iCal. This way I can make entries in both iCal (the published local calendar) and the web interface, and also view all entries both on the web and in iCal (the second subscribed calendar).

Google just released a new, open protocol to allow people to edit their google calendar through an XML based API. It’s not just for “publish-subscribe” (though you can do that, too, through iCal feeds.) There are also some open source toolkits to get you over the learning curve. Hack away.

The GData Protocol specs and toolkits are here: http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/index.html

I was thinking the new Google Notebook for an online shared notes was mighty interesting. You?
Doyle

The problem for disabled people is jobs. 70% of the disabled are unemployed. The blind and the deaf provide lots of examples.

But as you say this amounts to pitting people against each other. It’s uniting that is hard. In a technical sense jobs for disabled people ought to be easier because computing suggests ‘universal’ design. In reality the existing adaptive technology languishes because two bit businesses are subsidized to produce computing products that don’t work. In other words the government ought to regulate and nationalize adaptive technology in order that it serve a set standard of universal access. Short of that disabled people are excluded simply because they have no support to do most work they could.

All immigrants who don’t speak English face similar cognitive problems that disabled people have. There is a strong common ground there for ‘rights’ to unite.
thanks,
Doyle

The probability analysis of the words to indicate plagiarism seems to me not quite right in how to understand thinking. Let’s take the market place where this woman hit the charts quickly. I remember in the bio film of Ray Charles that he sounded a great deal like Nat King Cole in his early career. Was Charles plagiarising Cole?

It seems to me all I see is how corporate entities can legally shape the market place. But the scandal is amiss in some deep way about copying and human thinking.

Suppose I took Plato’s Beard’s words and did a little re-write here? Copying in some sort of way, to make fun, or give homage? There is no commercial value to it so no one is going to go ballistic about the copying. All that is being ‘privileged’ is the commercial market value.

I see that this is also an academic issue where creation is being challenged in a student context. Again this seems to me to question not so much the student but the academic environment. What seems to me is that the tools of the trade don’t admit to ‘copying’ in some way that is deeply entrenched in the commercial protection of intellectual property rights.
Doyle

I think your point about courtesy is probably right by me. But let’s try to go a little deeper?

Warhol’s appropriations of pop culture images had a profound impact on me about so-called plagiarism (literal copying). With writing there is a subculture in academic writing to attribute to an author and a text that I think is really about how to do text based research. That’s the value of attribution and well worth preserving. Most of the issue for writers is not I think the ethics because these conversations are not that technical, it’s about being paid a living wage for the work.

What I’m driving at is that attribution is a good area (technically or economically as Michael Perelman does in his writings) to expand upon in terms of the value of information to social structure. What’s the point of linkage work? What does it do to society?

To me the best contemporary metaphor is Google. Even if the writer doesn’t attribute to her favorite writer Google can easily detect copying. But the larger question to me in terms of society is how do we merge information for everyone to use?

You write,
These sort of modes deny much deserved attention to better writers and artists who may not have the access that a Harvard bound hotshot might.

me,
I think the issue is the networked properties of text or other forms of art. We know capitalism is elitist. I’m not for kissing this young woman’s ass. But I think automation will address attention issues or attribution issues in ways which by pass whether or not someone is self involved or not courteous.

As you know I’m involved in disability issues. What I work with is the whole topic of how mental disabilities just do all sorts of ‘anti-social’ things. That’s a hell of knot to untie.

But I think it related to attention structure as automation takes over presenting information to people. Automation renders personal attribution devalued. It’s sort of like big science, various smarties do a lot of technical work but in the thousands on some physics experiment. The whole attribution process is usually ignoring the grunts and giving the experiment heads ‘credit’. But so what? It’s meaningless. The attribution process is really about how to quickly google information when you need it in a way that you can take in (pay attention). Listing all the sources of information is unworkable in that way. It might make sense in terms of some sort of machine network control, but not to anyone who has to use the info in the real world.

This is far a field of the minor bit of fiction we are discussing but how I see the deeper issue.
Doyle

I agree that borrowing and extending prior work is a valid and necessary activity. That is an essential feature of another interest of mine: open source software development. However, it is also a basic issue of courtesy to credit one’s sources.

Additionally, read this on NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27pack.html

Which goes into the way books are produced these days as some sort of processed output from a technological machine. These sort of modes deny much deserved attention to better writers and artists who may not have the access that a Harvard bound hotshot might.

The same thing is happening elsewhere. Ever heard of Judith Polgar? She is a chess champion, ranked among the top 10 players in the world (not female players, but all players). Someone who has beaten Kasparov. But she does not fit the sexy profile that promoters want to push for women’s chess. Instead they are pushing a couple of lesser lights.

Bah Humbug. All creativity stands upon the shoulders of those who came before. This is not an enlightened look at creativity by any means. This is junk pop culture.
Doyle

Ravi M.

Secondly, who counts the origins of writers as an impact by numbers? This very small blip trend possibly indicates the U.S. favoring India as an ally sort of like China between the world wars when we had a small string of Chinese peasant novels and horribly racist movies pro China and anti-Japan. But the Japanese movie eventually because of a seriously appealing esthetic made a big impact everywhere.

At any rate the up coming medium of creation to me is not writing for books but creating for the internet. Books I would suggest are stodgy forms of entertainment at best. Not withstanding Harry Potter. What I see are nascent niche’s in the internet where popular forms like net photos, music, and movies have started to develop.

It’s the support from the base for forms that make the forms profound eventually. Or not since some bases can’t financially support an expression. Krunk is likely to disappear because there is no way to develop professionals to a level beyond really good amateurs. Not unlike mathematicians 400 years ago.

Leave the poor woman alone it’s simply creative copying just like all artists do.
Doyle

To me of course because I am a depressed person the cognitive part of disability has a greater impact. And that is far less understood in Disability Rights. Anyway that’s why I have been off on a tangent about language issues so much lately. For disabled people that language like aspect of cognitive disabilties is easily the most profound impact disability could have on the larger world of human society. In essence giving perpsective on language issues that right now I think represents the most basic tool of dividing people from one and the other.

Anyway, Marta I’m afraid is showing off an unexpected bigotry. How sad.
thanks,
Doyle

I am heartened to note that you agree with me, especially in this case, since the post above also sprang from a recent thread on LBO. Marta Russell, as you probably know, also does work on disability rights. Surprisingly she posted a few negative comments about immigrants (illegals and legals, non-english speaking, as she refers to them) overburdening the system and hence cutting benefits for disabled people.

I was saddened to note her analysis. In case you are not on LBO, here are some links to her posts:

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060417/035827.html
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060417/035835.html

(there are more which can be viewed by searching the archives by author)

I am eager to hear your thoughts on her comments.

If one is to get past identity politics one has to better understand cognition that binds. Meaning that people do a certain kind of work, women a great deal more than men to ‘bind’ social relations.
Doyle

apologies for the delayed response, to you too. I haven’t heard of augmented reality displays either… sounds similar to some of the work at MIT’s media lab, including some of the VR (virtual reality) stuff.

I am afraid Synergy is a much more pedestrian (which is not to insult it in any way) tool…

Anyway augmented reality displays seem like for me a good tool for such work? And you?
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

all excellent points!

–ravi

You forgot to mention Zugzwang tactics. This is where you write from another signature various sly knocks upon the mental state of the other woman. Hence you play the moderate voice of reason while the audience appears to be enraged with your female interloculature (inter loculator).

I’ve been accussed of neo-logisms which I think is good tactics as well. Especially in regard to fuzzy logic type discussions. Bring a cat with you to the keyboard.

presentation also wins many points in the arguing professions. I like the use of >>>>>> and of course the opposite >>>>> Joe stupid said…blah blah blah>>>No you quote Joe all wrong, stupid comes after said>>>>>>>Be Hells z bob, can’t you get this without me saying this >>>>>>>>again?

While this is a funny video it illustrates some basic concepts in a movie. A subject has to in whatever crude way be isolated from the landscape or background.

Using someone to hold the actor like this to indicate movement flowing illustrates a fundamental about seeing motion in a movie, we are little conscious of ’seeing’ motion. The motion seeing channel in vision is ‘color blind’, has at least ten times fewer contributions to vision to the brain, and the seeing of motion essentially makes one aware that when you go from point A to point B you are the same person from point A to point B.

In other words seeing motion is seeing ‘wholeness’ in a moving object apart from the landscape.

To finish up the physicist illustrating the black hole said he thought people would end up using video game tools as a key ‘visualization’ method to do physics.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

Thanks for blogging this. I would have liked to but don’t have the time. What is disturbing is that Mexico is a Perfect Dicatorship which is just permitting other parties to share power.

Is anyone actually going to pay the price for these horrific crimes?

The Perfect Dictatorship slowly punishes itself while reinventing itself to retain control.

PEACE
David
http://future-state.blogspot.com/

I was talking to a woman who joined our collective who has epilepsy about this area of disability rights. The jargon term disabled has serious problems with the concept in terms of conceptualizing ability and not ability. But both of us agree this cognitive area is ‘the’ juicy area of social understanding what a left could take on beyond the original socialist view.

Much of math has considerable history of disabled thinkers doing the work. This implies that a model of math as an able bodied activity is off kilter. With Godel, why would he pick this area to do his work. According to historical accounts he was religious person. To me then one might ask questions of math activity, what sort of work roots it has in human cognition and why.
thanks,
Doyle

take a look at:

http://www.helsinki.fi/collegium/eng/Raatikainen/rev-panu.pdf

For a review of Chaitin’s book and general ideas. Chaitin is definitely a lively character, if not as big a revolutionary as he claims to be .

are you perhaps referring Gregory Chaitin’s Omega (the probability of picking a halting Turing machine, IIRC?)? Or are you talking about omega-consistency as defined by Gödel (and the issues of constructive vs existential proofs)? In either case, I would love to hear more!

I agree with you about Dennett and dualism. I find the reviewer’s take on Dennett not as an opposing but a different view. In particular, Dennett’s reasoning cannot underwrite his [leap of] faith in omniscience of reductionism. To some extent his seems nothing more than a psychological pose (machismo, in this case).

The latest Sci Amer has an interesting article where a disciple of Godel gives a mathematical reason why an omega (a special designated number to define an infinite range of numbers which can’t be theorized in math at all).

The writer in the NYT’s article seems to base his criticism of Dennett upon the idea that Dennett is superstitious. Which in my view is not a stable way to get at Dennett’s intellectual problems. It is enough that Dennett claims too much for genetics to see that Dennett has a flawed outlook on how rules work. Which the mathematician cited above addresses in math directly.

Dennett commits an error of Cartesian dualism by making DNA all powerful.
Thanks,
Doyle

Doyle, thanks as always for your comments. I didn’t even know that Lakoff had material on Math which I would indeed like to read more about. Have to think more about your second paragraph…

A weakness of Lakoff’s linguistic position in my view now is his lack of coherent attachment or embodiment to emotion structure in cognition. So that when George talks about framing he acknowledges how framing is affected by emotion but doesn’t have a clear way to attach emotion to language.
thanks,
Doyle saylor

Indeed I found Alan Sokal’s work to be a useful and enjoyable refutation of postmodernist pretensions. True, I don’t agree with everything he said, as he is a mechanical materialist, and I think that modern science illustrates the truth of dialectics. But it is one thing to criticize him for being a mechanical materialist, and another to recoil from the refutation of the fashionable, self-righteous, know-it-all views of modern anti-materialist subjectivism, such as post-modernism.

I include below the introduction to an article on Sokal’s book
that I wrote, and a URL where the entire text can be found. In this
article, I express what I found positive in his work, as well as defend
dialectics against the mechanical views he puts forward. In doing so, I
point to the role of historical materialism, as well as the existence of
contradictions in physical nature and mathematics. In the latter regard, I point to a couple of scientific errors that Sokal himself makes in his book, errors that flow from his disregard of dialectics. For example, he proclaims that infinitesimals have been banished from mathematics, whereas the late Prof. Abraham Robinson rehabilitated infinitesimals in his “nonstandard analysis”.

The article can be found at
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalLong.html

A shorter and more pithy review of Sokal’s book, by Tim Hall,
the editor of “Struggle”, a magazine of proletarian literature,
can be found at
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalShort.html

———————————————-
On Sokal and Bricmont’s book ‘Fashionable Nonsense’
Postmodernism versus materialism

by Joseph Green
(from Communist Voice #20, Mach 28, 1999)

Subheads:
One, two, three, many realities
Ad hominem attacks–the new “rationality”
Postmodernism’s charlatanism
Relativism and science
The “strong program” in the sociology of science
The paradigms of T.S. Kuhn
Overcoming the crisis of the left
The Enlightenment
Historical materialism
The dialectics of nature
Does science teach anything but technical lessons?
Dialectics, motion, and infinitesimals
The Enlightenment and the masses
The rise of Marxism
The current crisis
In defense of materialism

Text:

The left-wing scientist Alan Sokal became the center of controversy
in 1996 when his spoof on postmodernism, an article with the pompous title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was accepted as a serious article by the postmodernist journal Social Text and published in its Spring/Summer 1996 issue on the “science wars”. This article denied, in the name of “science”, the basic materialist view that people live in an external world, whose existence and features are independent of the desires and feelings of human beings. It was full of pseudo-profound assertions about science that were ludicrously wrong. But as it repeated all the postmodernist catchwords and referred in glowing terms to various postmodernist authors, the editors of Social Text couldn’t tell it from an ordinary postmodernist article. Indeed, they were so impressed by the
article that, even after Sokal revealed that it was a hoax, one of the
editors, Bruce Robbins, still felt it was a serious contribution to
postmodernist philosophy.(1)

The next year Sokal, now joined by Jean Bricmont, a theoretical
physicist from Belgium, continued to poke fun at postmodernist ignorance of science. They published in France a book entitled Impostures Intellectuelles which showed the many leading postmo dernist writers, including the famous psychologist Jacques Lacan and the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, were spouting nonsense in the name of “science”. For many postmodernists it is a point of honor to write in an obscure language that is difficult to understand. Sokal and Bricmont showed that the passages about science in various works of these authors were incomprehensible not due to their depth of thought, but because they were mistaken or even meaningless. A good deal of serious postmodernist writi ng is indeed hard to distinguish from Sokal’s spoof of 1996.

Impostures Intellectuelles brought the debate to a new level,
spreading it from the U.S. to France, and the book is currently being
translated into about a dozen languages. Many postmodernists were
outraged that their favorite authors were being judged by the standards of rational thought and objective knowledge whose relevance postmodernism denies. Meanwhile the book finally appeared in English last year in Britain; and at the end of year it was published in the U.S. under the title Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.

The book centers on two subjects. Besides puncturing postmodernist windbaggery about science, it also sets forward some basic materialist views about the nature of science and its relation to the external world. Mind you, Sokal and Bricmont rarely use t he word “materialism”, although it is not clear whether they are simply bowing before the general prejudices of academic circles against such an allegedly crude doctrine as materialism or whether they themselves share these prejudices. They avoid the term “materialism” by instead emphasizing that they are attacking “a potpourri of ideas, often poorly formulated, that go under the generic name of ‘relativism’ ” (p. 51). “Relativism” however is a rather broad term that covers many different concepts. Sokal and Bricmont distinguish between “moral or ethical relativism” about value judgements, “aesthetic relativism” about beauty, and
relativism about the existence of an external world (“cognitive or
epistemic relativism”), which is the only relativism that the y analyze
in this book. They criticize the views on science of such “relativists”
as T.S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Bruno Latour.

Sokal and Bricmont limit their analysis of postmodernism to these two points: pseudo-scientific jargon, and “relativism” about the existence of scientific truth. For example, they don’t discuss or pass judgment on the general psychological theories of L acan, only his mathematical claims, such as “psychoanalytic topology”. But for now, their narrowness serves a useful purpose. Their object is not to assess everything that a postmodernist author may have said or done, and certainly not to oppose every pol itical cause that a postmodernist may have championed, but to focus attention on some basic theoretical issues. They accomplish this with an admirable flair for irritating the high priests of obscurity.

Fashionable Nonsense is certainly not the last word on the “science
wars”. Sokal and Bricmont ignore the question of dialectics; they have
little conception of how to apply materialism outside the sphere of the physical sciences; they don’t know how to deal with the crisis in the left other than to urge rational thought; they don’t deal with how the official scientific establishment bends before the bourgeoisie and does its will; etc. But it is long overdue that two scientists should
demolish the scient ific pretensions of the postmodernist philosophers; indeed, Sokal and Bricmont laughed at them. For myself, I found the book not just useful, but rather enjoyable as well.(2) It will be welcomed by all those who have felt oppressed by the high-flown verbiage and double-talk with which postmodernism has sought to silence criticism. It has also come as a great relief to some people who had made a serious attempt to understand the supposed scientific basis of what the postmodernist authors have been saying.

Notes:
(1) Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross responded on behalf of the editorial board of Social Text to Sokal’s revelation that his article was a hoax in a statement published in the July/August 1996 issue of the journal Lingua Franca. They pointed out that one of the editors “suspected that Sokal’s parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve.” Bruce Robbins, writing in the eptember/October 1996 issue of Tikkun, went still further and approvingly cited someone who wrote that Sokal’s article had “proposed that superstring theory [a speculative new theory in physics--JG] might help liberate science from ‘dependence on the concept of objective truth’.” In reference to this, Robbins claimed that the editors of Social Text had thought that Sokal had a good point in this interpretation, “*and we still do*.” (emphasis added)

(2) Of course, having a basic grounding in mathematics and physics is helpful, or even essential, for understanding a number of the examples that Sokal and Bricmont use; the more background one has, the more ludicrous the examples will appear. Sokal and Bricmont try hard to help the reader by providing, for example, simple explanations of a number of technical terms which are misused by Jacques Lacan and other postmodernist authors. But this is hard to do in a few words. Those readers who can’t verify for themselves various of the technical examples in the book may, however, be interested in the fact that no one has disputed these examples, not at least in the debates that I have seen. Based on my own assessment of these examples, I am not surprised by this in the least.

For the rest of the article, see
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalLong.html

—Joseph Green
mail@communistvoice.org

Autoplectic: Have not heard of Brian Rotman. As always I learn something new from your messages. Will look it up.

I am flattered to know you guys are reading this stuff and spending time to respond!

WRT your first part about mathematical (formal) reasoning vs neural networks (by the latter I presume the actual neural networks in our bodies, not the AI concept): I guess that is Penrose’s point i.e., neural states and actions are not reducible or equivalent to Turing machines.

However a question arises immediately regarding what is [formal] reasoning? In particular what constitutes a proof? If we return to the axiomatic method (or deductive logic) we are bound to accept the computational model (Turing machines, recursive function, etc). Right at the heels of this question comes the question of the importance of consistency.

Feyerabend writes in one of his books (I summarize): Some people require flowery arias to settle an argument while others need no more than a grunt. Are these valid forms of human reasoning?

Regarding your last question: McCollough, I guess, arrives at the conclusion based on our being stumped by the hypothetical he creates.

To say that reasoning is formalized mathematically is quite different from saying reason is performed by a neural network.

McCollough writes:
Instead, it is an intrinsic limitation in our abilities to reason about our own reasoning process.

Doyle,
How does anyone know this?
thanks,
Doyle

Godel and others of that stamp are trying to show by consistency in logic that something can’t be done mathematically. Such investigations have plagued math in terms of infinitely large and infinitely small issues in math. The key issue that Godel rasies is logical consistency which in my view is language related problem than a math related problem.
thanks,
Doyle

I’m not familiar with Sen enough to comment on him in the sense I might of Habermas. Do you know Sen enough to say more?
thanks,
Doyle Saylor

The reasoning is similar to the feminist lament that putting women on a pedestal is also a form of oppression (wrong word?) since glorifying/romanticizing denies them equality as an equally flawed individual (ack, I need to write that better).

I think a better analogy would be the way cultural feminists have, historically, claimed that, because women are not the oppressors, then they have access to the truth in a way that men do not. Marxists see it, sometimes, as the claim that, since non-Western people are outside the circuits of capital, then they haven’t been warped and deformed — entrapped in — capitalism’s ideologies. As a consquence, they are more likely to rebel agaisnt capitalism. In some respects, Spivak is criticizing the post colonial studies group for engaging in such an analysis.

But, she doesn’t want a seesaw, I don’t think. I think she genuinely wanted to advance postcolonial studies.

Other times, it’s just silly stereotypes, and I personally haven’t seen very many positive ones advanced. Although, in the media, it’s often the black man in a buddy flick who gets to be the wise one, the down-to-earth one, the one who is family . E.g., Danny Glover’s character in Lethal Weapon who anchors the guy who runs with his emotions, the one who has flighty ideas, the one who stays single. Mel Gibson’s character gets to be ground, anchored, and have a family — whenever he feels like it. I always thought that was encapusulated nicely in the scene where Gibson does his laundry at Glover’s house, wanders to the kitchen to drink milk out of the carton.

I dont know about the crits against Vandana Shiva. I have read you talking about Arundhati Roy, though, and I always got the impression that you were criticizing her for playing off certain romaniticizing stereotypes of Indians. But, then, ASSuming isn’t always a good thing to do, huh?

The reasoning is similar to the feminist lament that putting women on a pedestal is also a form of oppression (wrong word?) since glorifying/romanticizing denies them equality as an equally flawed individual (ack, I need to write that better).

I see the point: I hate it when well-intentioned Westerners assume I am intelligent simply because I am Indian . And I am only half-joking…

But that said, I hope we are heading towards a synthesis with these revisions (first reviling the natives, then glorifying them, then criticizing the glorification, etc) and not seesawing. The Western left, at least sections of it, now seems to have too intolerant a view on “romanticizing”. I am referring here to the barrage of criticism faced by someone like Vandana Shiva. But perhaps this is grist for another entry?

Well, that last bit, about not wanting to tag another culture, has it’s downsides, too. E.g., sometimes it means that the person is romanticizing other cultures: Western liberal societies suck, are alienating,etc., but dem native peeps, they know where it’s at! That can be pretty condescending, too, as you no doubt know.

I’m trying to remember if it was in critiques of Levi-Strauss’s _Little Glass of Run_ that I read that.

Waiting to check out your new theme (just went over to the Lab — is that valid usage? — and was greeted with the traditional whip n’ leather theme, so I am assuming the new theme is not up yet).

Have you seen the Hemingway theme (@ WordPress.com)? I like it… its a bit buggy though and does not do blogrolls.

I’m busy modifying a theme for the blog — I love this one BTW — so I’ll link back as part of blog maintenance day today.

– m

Of course, the French have always been kind to Tango.
They were the first to make it respectable in the twenties,
and I see they’re still paying their dues.