Specialization and Obscurantism

It's been a little over 20 years since the physicist Alan Sokal spoofed Duke University's journal Social Text with the satirical "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutic of Quantum Gravity," in which he argued in totally meaningless, turgid language for the nonexistence of gravity, and indeed, reality itself. The "Sokal Hoax" is an outlier of editorial misjudgment, but I fear that the Academy was too quick to dismiss it as such and has still not taken the incident's full import to heart. The specialized terminology should provide progressively deeper understanding and clarifying language, and accessibility to an intelligent layperson should be among a good scholar's goals. I'm not sure why the dictum to use the most common word that fits the bill is so resisted by modern scholars, but I cannot help but suspect in many cases it is a cloak for unoriginal and/or weakly-supported ideas. Some of the early Critical Theorists were perhaps attempting to engage in a discourse that could get them fired from their university posts by using equivocal, and therefore plausibly denial language, but I doubt that has ever been the true explanation in most cases.

Here are some principles I think that many contemporary historians need to consider:

1. Historians should write to help their readers understand.
2. Problematizing is valuable to clear away (oversimplified) misunderstandings, but the vacuum should be filled. People rarely abandon an explanation without an alternative to take its place.
3. All knowledge, all people, are unified, so understanding is never complete. A historian can help to understand a part or a few parts of the past--defining what part(s) is a critical step to a good scholarly work. 

I hope all my work passes the muster of these starting principles (moving forward)--it is not my goal to transgress their boundaries.