More on Fashionable Nonsense

Its interesting to note that 'debunker' type writers tend to grossly abuse the term 'meaningless'. How does one proceed when one's interlocutor is working with a meaningless definition of 'meaningless'?

For example, according to Sokal, the following definition is 'meaningless'

'a limit is defined as that which is greater than one point and less than another but in no case equal to the point of departure, to sketch it for you quickly.'

This is clearly meaningful, in fact I can hazard to say I know damn well what he means by this.

'Let us call a limit any point such x that if Y (the 'point of departure') is a specified unique set X is not an element of Y and X is not the empty set.' He may wish to say something else (if he is trying to talk about limit points in topology, he must clarify a good deal more. This could be the case, if what he means by 'point of departure' and 'point of arrival' is the boundary of the relevant open set. He would then have imprecisely restated the correct definition, which is here. Greater than one point and less than another but in no case equal to the point of departure or the point of arrival is an awkward way of saying that it is 'in the middle' - a limit point is a point x in a Subset S of topological space X such that - to simplify- if you draw a small circle around x that doesn't contain anything outside of S it will always contain a point of S other than itself ), and his formulation may not be precise, but I maintain that i have come up with an unambiguous and meaningful re-statement of Lacan's text.

Not too tough, is it? I came up with the re-statement in about five seconds, and found all the relevant information about topology on wikipedia within the space of a few minutes. Given the (alluded to) time constraints of this kind of seminar and the fact that Lacan was, if nothing else, a pretty bright MD who forgot more formal training in math than I've ever had , I think its probably better to go with one of the two more charitable readings. The seminar may not be one of the brightest moments in the history of the pedagogy of Mathematics (Lacan was not much of a teacher), but the particular passage is either well-formed but unrelated to topology or poorly formed and correct. In any case, this example of Lacanian prose is clearly not schizophasiac (for example, his terms retain their meaning over time), which is what we usually mean by 'gibberish'. So we now wonder what exactly does Sokal mean when he calls something 'meaningless' or 'gibberish'. We can start by examining a case where he clearly believes that posited terms are meaningful. When Sokal wishes to define his own terms, he guarantees their meaning first by asserting that they are meaningful (and they indeed are), then by pointing out that they rely on a long chain of relations to already clearly and specifically defined terms.

Of course, one COULD be led to wonder how this meaning is ultimately guaranteed (indeed, at first blush this seems to lead to vicious regress), but, like good Saussureans, we know that a universe of discourse is a given. Sokal's S's (sound-images) corresponds to his s's (concepts) relationally - so 'compactness 'is 'meaningful' because it fails to be any other (synchronically or diachronically) substitutable S/s relation. So we may not know what Sokal means by meaning, but we at the very least know how he manages to mean it. As an added bonus, we have also explained (should Alan Sokal read this blog, which is unlikely) what another 'meaningless' Lacanian formula (S/s) means. Remember kids, Lacan helps you read Sokal on Lacan.