Elucidating the Tractatus: Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy of Logic and Language Book

This book is about postmodern relativism, pseudoscience, "alternative" medicine (like homeopathy), and religion. As one of my housemates pointed out to me, it's everything I hate, in one book!

Which made me think. Indeed, everything that truly irritates me intellectually is linked, by a blatant, even belligerent, disregard for reality, rationalism, and empiricism. And that's what irritates Sokal, too. And people who say science is a limited white male way of thinking, which cannot properly evaluate the efficacy of homeopathy or the truth claims of Christian doctrine - well, they're wrong, and they don't understand science. At all.

Sokal does a good job of laying out this argument for science, in a careful way that is just as respectful as one should be. That is, name-calling and denigration are not used, but no silly idea is spared skewering, even those claiming the "religion" exemption.

It was interesting for me to learn that one of Sokal's main goals behind the hoax was to help left-wing goals. He wasn't particularly worried about postmodernism in academia - it's silly, and hurts the humanities, but wasn't actually threatening science. But he does think that relativism and denigration of science hurts liberal goals, despite postmodernists generally being liberals themselves. After all, if there is no right way of knowing, and science is just one opinion among many - well, who's to say universal health care would help people? Or that there were ever actually slaves in the US? Or that DDT should be banned?

Everyone in the US - even the Amish - makes at least some use of the fruits of science. The vast majority of the people are perfectly happy to fly in jets and listen to their ipods, as long as they're not forced to face the implications of all that science. They pick and choose where to use science itself, keeping it away from whatever indefensible pet theories they have (be it aliens or gods). This isn't good. And Sokal explains why.