Posts tagged with “social context”

“Sokal’s Hoax”

By Dick Swart on 10 December 2011

One of the unanswerable questions in life is whether philosophy is a science or not. To me it is not. Philosophy is like a fitness center. The activities are absolutely pointless but it looks cool and it might help you doing a proper sport (science). The relation between philosophy and science has not always been the same. In ancient times it was believed that philosophy began where science stopped. But that held no water for science only progresses over time and it would put philosophy in the same perilous position as religion. Useless rearguard fights with the inevitable result of unconditional surrender. It has also been said that philosophy was a mother and her three children were the natural sciences, language sciences and psychology.
The post-modernists claimed that those children had grown up and had become too specialized for mother to understand. As every good mother knows, you should leave their children alone when they are grown up. But post-modernist mommy didn’t do that. In stead she started ‘parroting’ her daughters. She used the vocabulary of her offspring in order to disguise her erratic thoughts and by doing so created a verbal diarrhea that is unparalleled until now. Let me give you an example:

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