Опять Алан Сокал Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
Published in
Social Text #46/47, pp.217-252 (spring/summer 1996).
Не могу удержаться и не процитировать любимый пассаж про аборты и аксиому выбора:
Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and ``pro-choice'', so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice. But this framework is grossly insufficient for a liberatory mathematics, as was proven long ago by Cohen (1966).
А вот Сокал сам цитирует "социолога науки" Брюно Латура. Ученый социолог прочитал научно-популярную книжку Эйнштейна про теорию относительности и сделал свои выводы:
Einstein's solution is to consider three actors: one in the train, one on the embankment and a third one, the author or one of its representants, who tries to superimpose the coded observations sent back by the two others. <...> more frames of reference with less privilege can be accessed, reduced, accumulated and combined, observers can be delegated to a few more places in the infinitely large (the cosmos) and the infinitely small (electrons), and the readings they send will be understandable. His book could well be titled: `New Instructions for Bringing Back Long-Distance Scientific Travellers'.
Что же такое постмодернистская наука? Приводится определение, предложенное в статье, опубликованной в 1990 году в журнале с торжественным названием "Наука и Культура":
A simple criterion for science to qualify as postmodern is that it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth. <...> The other concept which can be taken as being fundamental to postmodern science is that of essentiality. Postmodern scientific theories are constructed from those theoretical elements which are essential for the consistency and utility of the theory.
Хорошо сказал! Но мудрый Сокал объясняет, почему этих качеств недостаточно:
these criteria, admirable as they are, are insufficient for a liberatory postmodern science: they liberate human beings from the tyranny of ``absolute truth'' and ``objective reality'', but not necessarily from the tyranny of other human beings. In Andrew Ross' words, we need a science ``that will be publicly answerable and of some service to progressive interests.''