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

[Anders Sandberg]

Just another paper about hoax papers that I found absolutely delicious:
The Cartesian Conspiracy: How to do Post-Modernism With Marquis de Sade
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~jdouglas/S03finart9.pdf

It is an attempt to explore hoaxing a bit more carefully than just sending
off one hoax that a critic might claim actually is a reasoned paper the
author doesn't dare stand for. In this case the author replaced words in
de Sade with words from postmodern giants (sodomy becomes theory, murderer
becomes descriptive constructivist) and produced a number of nonsense
papers. They were submitted to a number of journals, and four out of ten
were accepted despite peer review. None were rejected for
incomprehensibility.

The really interesting part is the discussion, where the author points out
that from an analytical perspective this is of course a sign of bad
scholarship from the journals, but from the Continental side it might
actually be OK:

"These distinctions between analytic and Continental ideals are crucial to
the interpretation of this experiment, since the Continental position
would possibly regard the nonsensical articles as being no less valuable
than genuinely authored scholarship. For, if the value of scholarship
rests in its ability to communicate meaning to its reader (and this
meaning being unfixed, interactively determined by author and reader),
then nonsensical discourse may be considered valuable so long as its
reader finds it to be sensible."

For people coming to the issue from the hard sciences this makes little
sense, since we are very much based in a realist enlightenment tradition.
But that does not mean the other approach is invalid, it is just invalid
if the message is supposed to bear any relationship with the world. If
that relationship is instead provided by the interpretative process of the
reader's mind it can indeed lead to fruitful ideas and actions in the real
world. However, as the author points out, if we are to accept this as
scholarship then the humanities are seriously threatened:

"In an age where nonsense is identical to scholarship, text-generating
computers such as the Dada Engine are no less useful than postmodern
scholars, and the necessity of the latter becomes difficult to
substantiate."

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

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