yeah, I think I was a tad too harsh on you. It propably has something to do with the non-insignificant number of times we’ve had this conversation. It was fairly easy to read the quote (and your reasons for posting it) as “sociology is just masked banality”.

One can build an academic career in sociology even though one hasn’t got anything particularly interesting to say. Ironically, it is miraculously easy to accomplish using statistics and quantitative analysis and nearly impossible by writing meaningles bs. At least in Finland, that is. Anyone SPSS-literate can basically waltz her way trough a PhD-programme, completely independent of whether she has truly found something interesting about the world or not. This has everything to do with funding and science politics. Getting somebody to fund your scribbles about the disappearing postmodern perspective or whatev is a lot harder.

Ok, this holds for sociology and other social sciences. Humanities is a different playing field. And once you get tenure, you can naturally just engage in your favorite masturbation strategy for the rest of your life. That might not be the best incentive to aim for new intellectual hights.

Incestuous Jihad: No one objects to terms like denumerability or existential completeness, but as soon as you write semiosis or performativity, the shit hits the fan.

This is probably Chomsky’s feeling, but not necessarily Feynman’s. After all, the terms used in the quote weren’t technical in the sense of only having a technical, specialist meaning, and probably only “symbolic” (if even that) has a special meaning different from its everyday use. So mostly (1). It could well be that the context would give considerably more meaning to that short passage; the nuances of semiotics were offered earlier as a probable context.

Incestuous Jihad: Feynman’s failure to consider the possible validity of specialist terminologies in sociology, however, indicates a double standard: while it is appropriate or even necessary for mathematicians to employ terminology that leaves their papers accessible only to those with proper training, sociologists are beholden to the non-specialist masses. Why is this? Are sociological phenomena somehow easier to study and explain than mathematical phenomena? Are these phenomena so simple that specializing in their study is illegitimate?

This is probably a fair criticism. Elsewhere Feynman has complained that the non-natural sciences “haven’t found anything”, ie. haven’t gotten any results, and I suppose much of his (and my) reservations stem from this unfair expectation.

Really, this whole debate has rather wonderfully ballooned out of proportion with what I originally has in mind with the quote. It’s nice when the comments are so much better than the post! Maybe I was saying that standards in the humanities (and academic writing in general) should be higher, and Veikko, Tommi and you are saying that they are higher than I think, and my complaints are largely due to misreading and ignorance. Over the course of the discussion I think I’ve ceded some ground to you (ground which I must have ceded to Veikko about twenty times in various conversations), but still hold that in the natural sciences, bunk is very uncommon and outside them it is rather common. But that’s not such a terrible thing! As Sturgeon’s law says, 90% of everything is crap, and it’s only when you keep things as strict and simple as in mathematics or physics that you can avoid it. These problems in the humanities are in my opinion largely indicative of the great difficulty of the problems that those fields deal with – but I just feel like complaining about the remaining part, which is indicative of pompous bores who waste everyone’s time.

That is why I asked whether “visual channell” (or other terms up there) is a constant term in social sciences or is it just an expression of English which they wanted to use. In the former case, it can be called “use of special terminology”, in the latter it cannot, since it has to be understood depending on the context. I am sure there are contexts in which “visual channel” would mean something else, unless it has a fixed meaning in the science.

As to denumerability or existential completeness, they are well defined and do not depend on (mathematical) context.

I attribute this position to Feynman: math and physics papers are hard to read because they have to be; humanities and social science papers are just hard to read. No one objects to terms like denumerability or existential completeness, but as soon as you write semiosis or performativity, the shit hits the fan. There are several common justifications for this position, some of which have come up in this thread: (1) Feynman/Ulysses vacuity: the authors aggrandize the mundane, which would be revealed by a less technical vocabulary. (2) Chomsky/Finnegans Wake vacuity: the authors pass off nonsense as insight. (3) Illusory rigor: the authors use ill-defined or vacuous terms as if they were operationally defined, which creates the semblance of rigor. These categories are not mutually exclusive. Searle’s contention that Derrida happened upon the use-mention distinction and acted as if he’d discovered the key to the universe would put Derrida’s work in both categories (1) and (2), for example, since, as Searle would have it, Derrida disguised the mundane nature of his discovery with a torrent of neologisms and concrete poems.

Academics in the social sciences and especially in the humanities engage in all three categories of mischief, and are much more likely to do so than academics in the natural sciences. This is a major problem with the state of academia today. What I find annoying is Feynman’s implicit assumption that such academics are always and everywhere engaging in these practices. It could well be that this sociologist (third-rate Durkheim?) was committing one or more of these errors. Feynman’s failure to consider the possible validity of specialist terminologies in sociology, however, indicates a double standard: while it is appropriate or even necessary for mathematicians to employ terminology that leaves their papers accessible only to those with proper training, sociologists are beholden to the non-specialist masses. Why is this? Are sociological phenomena somehow easier to study and explain than mathematical phenomena? Are these phenomena so simple that specializing in their study is illegitimate?

To be clear, I’m not sure Feynman was incompetent regarding sociology. Rather, his refusal to consider that the statement was more significant than “people read” shows he didn’t believe in the cognitive or methodological value of a technical vocabulary in sociology, at least not if that vocabulary would preclude accessibility to laypeople. (A possible analogy: I read a set theory paper and, instead of doubting my own competence, assume existential completeness means a set contains everything that exists. Surely it couldn’t be anything else!) This may seem a harsh indictment of Feynman in light of just the anecdote in question, but I believe it is a fair characterization of a common way of thinking.

As for Chomsky, I always suspect he’s being disingenuous when I see remarks like this. I’ve never read Lyotard and have only the slightest familiarity with Kristeva, so I’ll set them aside. Lacan explicitly placed himself in the category of writers who produce difficult texts in order to challenge their readers (in fact, he wanted reading his Écrits to be a mystical experience), so I’ll give him a pass. Chomsky is unfairly harsh to Foucault and Derrida, however, as both were excellent writers. Derrida’s writing skills were often not at the service of clarity, which is indeed problematic, but Foucault never wrote anything especially unclear. Sometimes he would resort to the stylish sentence fragment when an independent clause would have reduced ambiguity, but it’s not as if he went around obfuscating his mundane observations. Rather, he fairly clearly expressed his profound though misguided ideas. Derrida is a special case since he intentionally resisted traditional standards for sense-making. His works are indeed very difficult, though he evidently made them so in good faith, working as he was from the belief that by employing his own standards he was performatively reversing the prevailing ones.

Anyway, there are a number of problems with Chomsky’s position. The first is the existence of Derrida and Foucault industries. Why couldn’t Chomsky get ahold of Introducing Foucault or Derrida for Beginners? These and similar books abound and are accessible to laypeople. The second problem is that Chomsky evidently didn’t try very hard to understand. Some of Derrida’s strategies are even kind of obvious once one has read Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Husserl. But that’s basically the point: in order to understand much of Derrida you must have read Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Husserl, and maybe a bit of Rousseau, Kant, and Lévi-Strauss. If Chomsky had a PhD in continental philosophy he would have had an easier time. In any case, you can tell Chomsky to give me a call so I can explain deconstruction to him. And if I (not a specialist but someone with some slight resemblance to one) am better at understanding Derrida than Chomsky is, then perhaps there’s evidence that he’s not a competent reader of Derrida.