https://doi.org/10.60056/Lit.2024.33.154-191
https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1306313
Epistemic Relativism from the Perspective of a Fiction Writer and a Physicist
Juliana Stoyanova
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria
julianastoyanova@yahoo.com
The article examines two parodies of scientific works – written at the begin- ning and at the end of the last century, respectively. The first parody, entitled Notes on a Treatise on Cocotology, is an addendum to Miguel de Unamuno’s novel “Love and Pedagogy” and directed against the dogmatism, scholasti- cism, and narrow-mindedness of positivism. The second parodic work, the arti- cle “Crossing Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics”, authored by the famous physicist and mathematician Alan Sokal, is directed against the so-called epistemic relativism, according to which modern science is nothing more than a “myth,” “narrative,” or “social construction. Despite the differ- ences in the parodic style – fictional in Unamuno and following the apparent rigor of the mathematical sciences in Sokal – the parodies of the two authors aim to assert the freedom of the researchers from the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that created him.
Key words: a parody of a scientific work, Miguel de Unamuno, Alan Sokal, epistemic relativism, Sokal affair, “Notes for a Treatise on Cocotology”
For citation: Stoyanova, Ju. Epistemic Relativism from the Perspective of a Fiction Writer and a Physicist. // The Literature, Year XVIII, 2024, Issue 33. Sofia: Univerisity Press “St. Kliment Ohridski”. (In Bulgarian)
About the author: Juliana Stoyanova (Dr. Habil, professor emeritus) has been teaching at the Faculty of Slavic Philology since 1984. Until 2018, she was the head of the master’s program “Cross-border Bulgarian Studies”, where she taught an author’s course “Theoretical problems in mastering a second/foreign language”. She also participated with author courses (“Text and Context” and “Semiotics of Fear”) in the Master‘s programs “Literature – Creative Writing” and “Interpretive Anthropology”. She is the author of over 200 publications, of which 7 independent and 8 collective monographs, studies and articles in scientific journals and collections at home and abroad, published reviews, forewords, editorials, etc. Her research covers a wide range of problems of psycholinguistics, the modern Bulgarian language, often in comparison with other languages, questions of linguistic pragmatics, analyzes of literary works from the point of view of the psychological perspective expressed in them, psychological interpretations of folklore and author’s texts, second language acquisition and learning, etc. Here are the titles of her latest monographs: “Eros and Agape. Literary transformations” (2018), “Problems of psycholinguistics. Introductory Course in General and Developmental Psycholinguistics” (2021), “A Child Tells (A Child‘s Path to Literary Creativity)” (2023), “The Novels of Dimitar Dimov: Philosophical-Psychological Reading” (co-authored with Svetlana Stoycheva, 2023).
