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From: nsmith@eskimo.com (Noel Smith)
Subject: Re: Honesty, the academy, & morals  (was: Scientific Epistomology)
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Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 01:11:17 GMT
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moggin@bessel.nando.net (moggin) wrote:

>Noel Smith <nsmith@eskimo.com> wrote:
[deletions]

>>3. Refusal to summarize for other scholars and interested laymen.

>	I'm sorry you can't devote enough time to do some reading.

Summarize, moggin, _summarize_. These are people who are characterized
by what Stephen Schwartz called "the grandiloquent and/or impenetrable
style." If I ask a physicist what current thinking is on the mass of
the neutrino, s/he doesn't suggest that I start with the _Principia_
and work forward to the _Physical Review Letters_. S/he understands
that the best way to get a quick start on a new field is to ask
someone who knows about it. Perhaps the reason you don't offer to
summarize is that you don't know?

Another reason that a preview might be in order is that, again quoting
Schwartz, the list of authors you've been recommending--recommending
blind, as it were--the list is somewhat suspect:

  Finally, it is important to note that the grandiloquent
  and/or impenetrable style that is usually associated with
  French philosophy is more or less a thing of the past.
  Clarity and lucidity are by and large the watchwords here.
[...]
  In any case, looking at the French philosophers who still
  have any influence in the U.S., one finds that they are
  almost all either dead (Foucault, Deleuze, Levinas, Lacan
  if you insist), dinosaurs (Lyotard, Derrida) or positively
  retrograde (Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Chantal Mouffe [she's
  French, right?] Bruno Latour).

Frankly, if I ever saw some glimmering of a deeper truth peeping
through yours or other a.p. posts, something that suggested genuine
complexities and insights waiting in the postmodernist sources (none
of you seem to quote them very often, for some reason), I couldn't
wait to get at them.

But all we get are unsupported assertions, and demands that we read
people you neither describe nor quote.

> moggin

- Noel

