The Academic Language Poll

[queerbychoice]

This entry is brought to you today by my not-entirely-successful efforts to read the book Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, and by having to look up "hermeneutics" in the dictionary for what must be the 20th time, because it never sticks in my head. There comes a point when I just need to reassure myself that I have company.

[Poll #530723]

Comments

[xkcd.livejournal.com]

I took a class with the head of the physics department, and the first thing he told us about the research papers we were going to write was "We're going to try to discourage some of the habits you may have picked up in your English classes. Here, we try to encourage slightly less . . . flowery language."

I might just be biased, but I think when you talk about concepts that are inherently complicated (example: quantum entanglement), and not artificially complicatred (example: definining the 'horrible', the subject of a liberal arts class my friend took) -- you stop feeling like your paper has just been improved when you add a little twist that will take people a lot longer to decode, or add a word people have to look up.

I always feel proud when I write a sentence that I feel like my not-scientifically-trained mother would understand, and when I get a paper to come in under a page and still explain what it's there to explain.

Have you heaed of >the Social Text affair (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/#papers)? A physicist frustrated with postmodernism and the lack of any sort of critical analysis in modern intellectual movements decided to write a paper that was nothing but intentional flowery-sounding absurdities, and got it published in a major social science journal. They were . . . a bit miffed, I think. Read the paper where he reveals the scam (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html).

So: Have I read an abstract theory paper/book in which I felt like I was only muddling through the sentences and only getting a vague meaning? Yes. For example, J. Cserti, Application of the lattice Green's function for calculating the resistance of an infinite network of resistors, Am. J. Phys. 68 896-906 (2002). Have I decided that when I feel like the author is intentionally cloaking his point in academic language, I should only make a cursory attempt to understand it before putting the book down and turning on some simple, straightforward cartoons? Yes. Are there many poor souls out there who actually have something important to say but, because of how they've learned to talk, are being missed because it takes careful examination to see what the hell they're talking about? I have no doubt.

So it might just be my biased perspective, but screw y'all. Try explaining why you can't send information through faster-than-light quantum effects. You'll real fast stop making up words for every new concept that jumps into your head and maybe use the simpler old ones.

And of course it's a lot harder to spew absolute BS and get it published when you know that the math you're using has no subjective truth to it and will be checked for errors.

Not that I've always been a bastion of clarity. This is just how it looks to me at this exact moment.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem with social theory, though, is that words used to describe social phenomena are inherently less exact than words describing physical ones. While the general public doesn't get confused by the fact that "matter" means something different in a scientific context than a conversational one, and is okay with naming electrons and protons as different phenomena instead of grouping them all under "little things," social theory (and psychology, my main pursuit) by nature deals with issues that are rather often a part of social discourse, which actually makes it a lot harder to use natural language and also makes people more resistant to new terminologies. People are far more entrenched in their own sense of folk psychology than they are in their sense of folk physics. At the same time, the human social behavior and thought is in fact an incredibly complex, and folk psychology often proves to be either insufficient to deal with certain topics, or just plain wrong. So disciplines dealing with social thought have to spend lots of effort fighting against intuition.

With the exception of certain thinkers, like Deleuze and the psychoanalysts (whom I excuse because their project is in part almost artistic), I find social theorists about as clear, once you understand their terms, as psychological scientists. And I find writing psychological science about as clear as any other science I studied in college.