One of the most difficult things to do when you do theory is to communicate clearly. And there are many examples: one infamous moment in the science wars (see Google Ngram below) was a little spoof by physicist Alan Sokal, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Indeed, there’s this site called Postmodernism Generator that, as the name implies, produces random unintelligible but brilliant sounding texts.
But these sorts of languages do not exhaust the possibilities of theory. I introduced a notion, in one of our first classes, of theory as a vehicle (here’s a related paper): theories take you places, some more quickly, some across more varied terrain, some more beautifully. It would seem that, just as you may need a very specialized vehicle to get to certain places (say, the moon), you may also need very specialized languages to describe certain theories—languages that could sound off-putting to many. But who can be expected to climb aboard an incomprehensible vehicle? So I urge my students to strive for clarity—certainly for their benefit, but also potentially to invite others to sail their ship of ideas. I hope to share their theories at the end of this semester, and you may judge for yourselves!
Google Books Ngram Viewer, “science wars”
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