In the nineties, after the infamous Sokal “Social Text” Hoax, it became fashionable to lambaste post-scructuralist/postmodernist academia for its misunderstanding and misappropriation of science and scientific terms -- from “relativity” to “uncertainty principle” to “paradigm shift”. The latter itself is of course a term from the history and philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn's description of the changes wrought by such new ideas as Darwin's Theory of Evolution or Quantum Theory. Despite Sokal's avowedly old-fashioned-leftist politics (New Deal Democrat, as far as I can tell), this stance was especially taken up by the right in the so-called Culture Wars who used...
Posted by Andrew on October 21, 2005 6:32 PM
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