Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
physics.nyu.edu
Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
1–10 of 76 posts
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#2The Postmodernism Generator link in the article seems to be broken. Here is a working URL:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Information about the generator can be found at the bottom of the generated page.
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#3Obligatory xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/451/
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#4This reminds me of a textbook from college where the author tried to explain the concept of hegemony by writing 20 pages of unintelligible language, and failed to explain anything at all. Wikipedia, on the other hand, manages to explain the concept in about 3 paragraphs.
The professor wasn't much help either because he was too busy telling stories about what it was like when he fought Mussolini's fascists in WW2. It's no surprise I dropped out...
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#5The 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...
I'm having a hard time believing this can be anything other than satire.
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#6The 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... I'm having a hard time believing this can be anything other than satire.
There's an endless supply of this stuff. Or more precisely, a supply limited only by the publication needs of thousands of professors. Just search for the relevant buzzwords on Google Scholar.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=menstrual+poststructural...
It's funny at first, but after a while just kind of draining.
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#7There's a lot of crap in postmodernism, probably more than in other disciplines, because it recognizes every framework of inquiry as contingent, and this can be abused to excuse sloppy inquiry. But the fact is, there's crap in every discipline. Have you seen the CS paper generator[1]? Have you read "Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees"[2]?
Sokal et al. acted in bad faith by cherry-picking the worst instances of postmodernist discourse and setting up postmodernism as a monolithic entity universally opposed to the values of scientific inquiry. I Love To You[3] is an example of a book written by a post-modernist (one of the ones Sokal et al. made fun of, incidentally) without any obvious obfuscation. I also enjoyed the interview with her, "Thinking life as relation,"[4] although it's a bit less accessible.
[1]http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
[2]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/nature0...
[3]http://books.google.com/books?id=-6fSONDCgW4C&printsec=f...
[4]http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff...
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#8There's a lot of crap in postmodernism, probably more than in other disciplines, because it recognizes every framework of inquiry as contingent, and this can be abused to excuse sloppy inquiry. But the fact is, there's crap in every discipline. Have you seen the CS paper generator[1]? Have you read "Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees"[2]? Sokal et al. acted in bad faith by cherry-pickin…
Hmm, can someone point me to the documentation for Hacker News's markup system, please?
Re: Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
#9There's a lot of crap in postmodernism, probably more than in other disciplines, because it recognizes every framework of inquiry as contingent, and this can be abused to excuse sloppy inquiry. But the fact is, there's crap in every discipline. Have you seen the CS paper generator[1]? Have you read "Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees"[2]? Sokal et al. acted in bad faith by cherry-pickin…
Hmm, can someone point me to the documentation for Hacker News's markup system, please?
There isn't much: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc