[.ca] The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy (ISBN 0803279957)

From Amazon.com:
In 1995, a New York University physicist named Alan Sokal, frustrated by what he considered the misuse of science by academic philosophers and literary critics, decided to play a meaningful prank. After studying the arcane jargon of postmodernism, he cooked up a superficially au courant but patently ill-founded paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and submitted it to the journal Social Text, edited by a collective of academic celebrities. Wooed by the article's apparent endorsement of their approach and evidently unschooled in basic science, the editors accepted and published the paper. The Sokal Hoax gathers Sokal's paper; the Social Text editors' arch, wounded reply when it was revealed, in the pages of the academic journal Lingua Franca, that the paper was a transparent scam; and a selection of journalistic accounts, letters to the editor, and accusations and counteraccusations surrounding what came to be called "the Sokal hoax." Some of these documents are thoughtful, addressing ways in which it might be possible to bridge the wide gap between the sciences and the humanities. Many, however, are defensive and polemical, almost embarrassing to read. They compound Sokal's charge that faddishness has overcome common sense in the halls of academe, and that the postmodern emperor has no clothes. In its modest way, the collection is an entertainment, serving as an anthology of ivy-covered silliness. More seriously, it adds depth to Sokal's collaboration with physicist Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, and other books about the hoax and its implications, which continue to excite discussion. --Gregory McNamee

the World Series:
I loved Stanley Fish's baseball analagy. Here is the score R H E Fish: 1 5 0 Sokal: 0 0 1

No Connection to Reality:
If you're in a very specific crowd, the brouhaha covered here is a real riot. I am a current graduate student who went back to school after being out in the "real world" (i.e. business and industry), and have been subjected to the dense theory and nonsensical "culture wars" of the academy. I have found relatively few people in graduate education who have ever been out in the real world, where actual practical work is done. I was astonished to find that there are professors doing large research projects on the field I used to work in, because we rarely (if ever) saw these academic treatises, written by professors who have never worked in the field and assume they can effectively study it from a detached intellectual standpoint. But these guys don't seem to care if their writings never get even remotely close to the populations that they think they're helping, because in the university system it's publish or perish. It's better to have a few other professors tell you that you know what you're talking about, than to have any kind of effect on the lives of real people. This kind of nonsense has been exposed by the Sokal hoax covered here, though in this case it's all within the academy. Sokal's fake paper, submitted to a trendy but gullible "cultural studies" journal, is an absolutely brilliant piece of parody in which he used a heap of big words, obtuse theory, and hip namedropping while saying absolutely nothing. This book presents Sokal's paper and then the defensive and whiny rebuttals of the journal's editors after they learned they were hoodwinked, followed by just about everything that was said in the international academic press about the whole affair. Unfortunately, this book really slows down as the academic commentaries become very repetitive, discussing the same aspects of the hoax again and again, while many of them devolve into the dense theoretical professor-speak that Sokal was trying to criticize in the first place. Also, in presenting never-ending arguments by defensive eggheads in the academy, we merely get a closed argument among people with no connection to the outside world whatsoever. The book fails to truly analyze the true issue behind this whole mess - the fact that real students from the real world are paying for an education made up of nonsensical theorizing about obtuse philosophical concepts that truly matter to nobody but a professor, who is trying to show off to another professor. This disconnection from reality in the modern university system is what has really been exposed by Sokal's hoax and the ensuing academic catfight. \o~doomsdayer520~\c

Document of a challenging debate:
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal confabulated an article on quantum gravity. He invented a fake physics based on genuine -- though mistaken -- statements about physics by such writers as Foucault, Lacan, and Irigaray. He submitted it to the journal Social Text. On the day of publication, Lingua Franca published Sokal's announcement of a hoax on writers and editors whose scientific statements are meaningless or just plain wrong. Some accused him of supporting the cultural agenda of the American right. Others called it a brilliant discourse on the emperor's new clothes. Sokal himself has no interest in the cultural right wing. He is a Marxist who worked in Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas. Sokal argues that politics and social theory are irrelevant to the substantive content of subjects such as physics, chemistry, or mathematics. He makes a case against confusing social theory with natural science, and he asserts that counterfactual claims have no place in the refereed journals of serious research fields. An extensive cross-section of the debate is published in this book. It offers perspective on issues we occasionally face in design research regarding the importance of distinctions between fact and interpretation, between evidence and argument from evidence. Book review published in Design Research News, Volume 6, Number 6, June 2001

Balanced coverage of the entire mess:
Regardless of whether you think Alan Sokal is a hero or a rogue, a brilliant crusader for intellectual standards or a crass fool who made himself and the "science establishment" look stupid with his prank, you should read this book. In this book, the editors of Lingua Franca have assembled all the documents you need to understand what really happened. You can read the hoax paper in its entirety. You can read the article that revealed it as a hoax. You can read the response by the editors of Social Text. You can read what the press had to say, what intellectuals on both sides of the issue have said about the hoax, and what people writing in other countries have made of the whole thing. Lately, the Sokal hoax has been on my mind a lot, and I find that I need to explain it to people who never heard of it, before I can talk about it. This book is the perfect answer to the question "where can I read more about it?" What I like about this book is that it represents all sides of the debate with their own words, and leaves it to the reader to make her own decision where she stands on the issues raised by the prank.

A Defense of Historical Materialism:
Sokal attacked "Social Text" and Post Modernism for being reactionary/ for denying objective reality and the existence of objective reality independent of the observer or participant. Sokal defends Historical Materialism. Conversely, The right wing attack "Social Text" and Post Modernism from a reactionary viewpoint (Social Text isn't reactionary enough for them) in that they themselves believe in Historical idealism, i.e. that objective truth exists but the only truth is the one that reflects their conservative values. The corporate oligarchy funded right wing wish to liberate human beings from the tyranny of ANY 'absolute truth' and 'objective reality' that differs with their opinions by defining truth and reality as their narrow, self-serving outlook alone. The right wing promotes idealism such as superstition "god" (who is always on the side of their profits and power by an incredible coincidence), mindless "patriotism" (for those causes that line the plutocracy's pockets), and "family values" (only those values that agains line the pockets of the wealthy....cetainly not liveable incomes or health care). In summary: Historical Materialism states "It is not the conciousness of men that detemines their existence, but on the contrary their social existence that detemines their consciousness". This reasoning interferes with the right wing outlook because if this is true then the people that live in slums and work below subsistence wages for unearned profits for the wealthy are not fully responsible themselves alone for their squalid condition. Post Modernists deny objective reality and state that each individual creates their own reality and that there is no reality independent of the observer. By this tortured reasoning it is once again the conciousness of man that determines their existence. Reactionaries believe in Historical Idealism: that ideas/ conciousness (superstition, lone nuts independent of economics and social upheaval, patriotism, and religious and family values) determine the social existence of man instead of their social existence (poverty, opression, wage slavery etc).