Blinding You With Science

A few years ago, a physicist ran a hoax in an academic journal in which he published gobbley-gook postmodern speak, all of which was total nonsense, then got it published, only to then turn around and publish in a competing journal his letter saying it was total crap, and the joke was on the editors and the audience for buying it. It was basically an indictment of the crap that came out of english lit departments everywhere (and honestly, what ultimately caused me to major in economics, having spent 4 long years frustrated as an english major). Now the scientist has a new book out called Beyond the Hoax, which appears to be a book about both the hoax itself, the response to it, and more generally, the philosophy of science and science itself. Science, he argues, is not merely another way of knowing - while that is of course true. Science is theory-laden, but it's also required to be falsifiable which, to me, turns out to be really important for swatting the stupidity down. It's also why I think you see much less of the "schools of thought" stuff in the sciences than you do in the humanities. I mean, if the theory's not falsifiable and therefore non-empirical, you can't actually prove the other school's wrong. Heck, you can't even prove that your own views are wrong. They're held a priori as faith assumptions, presuppositions, and are basically invulnerable to criticism.

This isn't totally the same thing, but I was telling J last night that I get a little frustrated and impatient with theologians who criticize the market process, while simultaneously putting forth their own extremely naive "scientific" theories how market transactions alter the psychology of a person, somehow tricking them into being more selfish or something. I end up feeling like the spoil sport for pointing out that this is technically a hypothesis, and that it should be tested empirically and rigorously, because on the one hand, they're theologians and aren't trained to do empirical work (the one person I'm thinking of was really content to quote anecdotal conversations as "evidence" for instance) but on the other hand, they're arguing with such anger and intensity. It leaves very little common ground if you don't share their preferences for certain values, or certain social arrangements, if the theories cannot be required to meet empirical tests for validity. But of course, this is nothing compared to the kinds of things that wage in the literature departments - which totally starts to feel like some elaborate linguistic game.

Update: There's a great lukewarm review of the book at Amazon that you should read, that calls into question just how relevant the hoax really was, since there's no detection of the infiltration of deconstructionism within theoretical physics. I never took the hoax as being that, though. I always thought it was an attempt to externally attack certain postmodern literary theories, and not defensive. This is an interesting comment, though.