Shall we now praise the composition and style of a Cochrane Review?
Paul
Paul Robinson
GP and Course Organiser
Scarborough
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Douglas
Badenoch
Sent: 21 September 1999 09:11
To: evidence-based-health
Subject: Postmodernism (fwd)
This message forwarded on behalf of Mike Bennett. Please reply to him
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cheers
Douglas Badenoch
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----------------------------Original message----------------------------
snipŮ
Terry concludes: 'post-modernist thought should not be confused with
piss-poor English'. I think that confusion is inevitable. The Sokal saga
demonstrates that any old rubbish can be sufficiently obscured by tortuous
grammatic construction to convince a couple of journal editors that it must
mean something.
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Many post-modernists certainly write badly. The question remains whether
this bad writing conceals anything of value. Several excellent books have
produced excellent critiques of post-modernism and its "war" with science.
Those who are interested might want to look at:
Gross PR, Levitt N. Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrel
with Science. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Koertge N, ed. A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about
Science. Oxford University Press, 1998.
Sokal A, Bricmont J. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse
of Science. Picador USA, 1998.
I believe all are readily available in the UK and at least in Europe.
Sokal and Bricmont are particularly good at presenting obscure post-modern
writing and showing that it conceals absolute gobbledygook. One of my
favorites is the quote from Lacan (p.27 in Sokal and Bricmont) that
equates the male erectile organ with the square root of negative one.
Further, one of the notions that does recur repeatedly in post-modernist
writings, extreme relativism, is hostile to science and hostile to the
assumptions of EBH. Extreme relativism, boiled down to its essence, is
the notion that there is no such thing as truth. Of course, this quickly
leads to a paradox: What I say is true. There is no such thing as truth.
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