[extropy-chat] Fw: Deconstruction deconstructed....

[Anders Sandberg]

Damien Broderick said:
>
> From: "Mike Lorrey" <mlorrey at yahoo.com>
> Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 8:55 PM
>
>> the fact that such a paper could make it through
>> peer review and be published demonstrates that what Sokal sought to
>> prove
>
> Lingua Franca was not a peer-reviewed journal.

Just to be a hopeless nitpicker, it was published originally in Social
Text. ST seems to have an editorial board rather than anonymous referees,
but the intention seems similar to normal peer review.

Unlike Harvey I think that hoaxes like Sokal's are not just fun, but also
healthy. There have been many others like him, such as various computer
science papers generated with Markov chains sent to conferences and ending
up in proceedings, and of course the Bogdanoff brothers
(http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2002-10/msg0045263.html) apparently
getting a Ph.D. and publishing peer reviewed papers with nonsense
theoretical physics. This a good thing, because the laughter and derision
afterwards help point out flaws in the peer review system or other forms
of quality control. It is also better with deliberately bad papers, since
inevitably the creator will point them out, unlike "accidentally" bad
papers where the author won't tell anybody that he cheated, made things up
or didn't know what he was talking about. We need the first kind as a kind
of vaccination against the second kind.

While I'm still (unusually :-) disagreeing with Harvey, I think the little
"expose" of the deconstructionists was a good writeup. It had a clear and
important theory about how a field may drift away from reality and it was
an entertaining read. Now, it was also an attack on the deconstructionists
and their way of arguing; the proper response from them would be to try to
explain how the paper was wrong or what areas of deconstruction actually
do something useful. It is just like a science paper cheerfully
demonstrating that theory X implies a set of absurd consequences. Part of
the intention (or at least the usual effect) is to draw out the defenders
of theory X to show that these consequences do happen, or that the paper
reaches the wrong conclusions.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa
http://www.aleph.se/andart/

The sum of human knowledge sounds nice. But I want more.