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Sokal Affair
The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to ''Social Text'', an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross— ouldpublish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the journal's Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review at the time, so it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sokol Affair
David L. Sokol (born September 1956) is an American business executive. He is a Chairman of Teton Capital LLC, headquartered in Wilson, Wyoming. He served as chairman, president, and CEO of NetJets, as well as a chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, of which Berkshire Hathaway holds a 100% and 89.8% stake respectively. Early life The youngest of five children, David L. Sokol was born in 1956 in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time of his birth, his father managed a grocery store in Omaha and his parents had been married for 25 years. Sokol's eldest sibling is 23 years older than he. Sokol attended a Catholic grade school and public high school. When Sokol was 11, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. To help out with expenses, Sokol worked as a paperboy, a caddie, and a janitor at a hardware store. He also helped local farmers bale hay. In high school, he worked as a maintenance manager for an apartment complex. He also worked for a local grocery store, where he star ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Higher Superstition
''Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science'' is a 1994 book about the philosophy of science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt. Summary Levitt states he is a leftist trying to save the "academic left" from itself by exposing misuses and abuses of science to advance political goals. Topics discussed include: cultural constructivism or social constructivism, the strong programme, the science criticism of Stanley Aronowitz and Bruno Latour, post-modernism and deconstructionism and their influence on American academia, the science criticism of Andrew Ross, feminist science criticism, environmentalist science criticism and "apocalyptic naturism", Jeremy Rifkin's influential "pseudoscientific alarmism", attacks on medical research connected with AIDS activism and animal rights advocacy, and Afrocentrism. The book also questions human activity's relationship with climate change. The authors find it unfortunate that social ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rupert Sheldrake
Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author and parapsychology researcher. He proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience. He has worked as a biochemist at Cambridge University, a Harvard scholar, a researcher at the Royal Society, and a plant physiologist for ICRISAT in India. Other work by Sheldrake encompasses paranormal subjects such as precognition, empirical research into telepathy, and the psychic staring effect. He has been described as a New Age author. Sheldrake's morphic resonance posits that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems ... inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." Sheldrake proposes that it is also responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms." His advocacy of the idea offers idiosyncratic explanations of standard subjects in biology such as development, inheritance, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Progressivism
Progressivism is a Left-right political spectrum, left-leaning political philosophy and Reformism, reform political movement, movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform. Adherents hold that progressivism has universal application and endeavor to spread this idea to human societies everywhere. Progressivism arose during the Age of Enlightenment out of the belief that civility in Europe was improving due to the application of new Empirical evidence, empirical knowledge.Harold Mah''Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750–1914'' Cornell University. (2003). p. 157. In modern political discourse, progressivism is often associated with social liberalism, a left-leaning type of liberalism, and social democracy. Within economic progressivism, there is some ideological variety on the social liberal to social democrat continuum, as well as occasionally some variance on cultural issues; examples of this include some Christian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Deconstruction
In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understand the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences which are valued above appearances. Since the 1980s, these proposals of language's fluidity instead of being ideally static and discernible have inspired a range of studies in the humanities, including the disciplines of law, anthropology, historiography, linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and feminism. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art, music, and literary criticism. Overview Jacques Derrida's 1967 book '' Of Grammatology'' introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction. Derrida published a number of other works directly relevant to the concept of deconstruction, such as '' Diff ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liberal Arts
Liberal arts education () is a traditional academic course in Western higher education. ''Liberal arts'' takes the term ''skill, art'' in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine arts. ''Liberal arts education'' can refer to studies in a liberal arts degree course or to a university education more generally. Such a course of study contrasts with those that are principally vocational, professional, or technical, as well as religiously based courses. The term ''liberal arts'' for an educational curriculum dates back to classical antiquity in the West, but has changed its meaning considerably, mostly expanding it. The seven subjects in the ancient and medieval meaning came to be divided into the trivium of rhetoric, grammar, and logic, and the quadrivium of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music. Since the late 1990s, major universities have gradually dropped the term ''liberal arts'' from their curriculum or created schools for liberal art disciplines ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anti-intellectual
Anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism, commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy and the dismissal of art, literature, history, and science as impractical, politically motivated, and even contemptible human pursuits.''A Handbook to Literature'' (1980), Fourth Edition, C. Hugh Holman, Ed. p. 27 Anti-intellectuals may present themselves and be perceived as champions of common folk— populists against political and academic elitism—and tend to see educated people as a status class that dominates political discourse and higher education while being detached from the concerns of ordinary people. Totalitarian governments have, in the past, manipulated and applied anti-intellectualism to repress political dissent. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the following dictatorship (1939–1975) of Francisco Franco, the reactionary repression of the White Terror (1936–1945) was notably anti-inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Objectivity
In science, objectivity refers to attempts to do higher quality research by eliminating personal biases (or prejudices), irrational emotions and false beliefs, while focusing mainly on proven facts and evidence. It is often linked to observation as part of the scientific method. It is thus related to the aim of testability and reproducibility. To be considered objective, the results of measurement must be communicated from person to person, and then for third parties, as an advance in a collective understanding of the world. Such demonstrable knowledge has ordinarily conferred demonstrable powers of prediction or technology. The problem of philosophical objectivity is contrasted with personal subjectivity, sometimes exacerbated by the overgeneralization of a hypothesis to the whole. For example, Newton's law of universal gravitation appears to be the norm for the attraction between celestial bodies, but it was later refined and extended—and philosophically superseded—by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scientific Realism
Scientific realism is the philosophical view that the universe described by science (including both observable and unobservable aspects) exists independently of our perceptions, and that verified scientific theories are at least approximately true descriptions of what is real. Scientific realists typically assert that science, when successful, uncovers true (or approximately true) knowledge about nature, including aspects of reality that are not directly observable. Within philosophy of science, this view is often an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The discussion on the success of science in this context centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories. Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables, as opposed to instrumentalism. Main features Scientific realism ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Academic Left And Its Quarrels With Science
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee'') ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Public Radio
National Public Radio (NPR) is an American public broadcasting organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It serves as a national Radio syndication, syndicator to a network of more than List of NPR stations, 1,000 public radio stations in the United States. Funding for NPR comes from dues and fees paid by member stations, Underwriting spot, underwriting from corporate sponsors, and annual grants from the publicly funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Most of its member stations are owned by non-profit organizations, including public school districts, colleges, and universities. NPR operates independently of any government or corporation, and has full control of its content. NPR produces and distributes both news and cultural programming. The organization's flagship shows are two drive time, drive-time news broadcasts: ''Morning Edition'' and the afternoon ''All Things Considered'', both carried by most NPR me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
