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Title: The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy by The Editors of Lingua Franca, Lingua Franca ISBN: 0-8032-7995-7 Publisher: University of Nebraska Press Pub. Date: September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.42 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Document of a challenging debate
Comment: 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
Rating: 5
Summary: Somebody got deconstructed here
Comment: The Sokal Hoax is one of those rare bits of mischief with a purpose that turns up the illumination thereby allowing all of us to clearly see that the emperor has no clothes, the emperor in this case being the intellectual left of postmodernist thought as exemplified in the persons of Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, the "victims" of this very clever and meticulously planned sting. That they were hoisted with their own petar, as it were, was particularly pleasing to those of us who cannot abide pseudobabblese and academic gibberish, ingredients that have unfortunately become a staple of New Age and postmodern expression. One hopes that the Sokal affair has opened the eyes of academia to the extent that intellectuals will now appreciate the importance of writing in a clear and communicative manner without fear that others can thereby discern the quality of their ideas.
Here the editors of Lingua Franca have put together the definitive collection of articles on the entire succès de scandale including the text of physicist Alan Sokal's article itself, Sokal's revelation article in Lingua Franca, and the reply of the Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, whose publication of Sokal's parody of social constructionist thought and expression brought about their academic embarrassment. These are followed by selected letters to the editors in response to the affair. I particularly enjoyed the insightful letters by Franco Moretti of Columbia University and Lee Smolin of Penn State. Next are reactions from the press, both domestic and foreign, including stories by Stanley Fish, George Will, Bruce Latour, and seventeen others, including another piece by Alan Sokal from Le Monde (Paris). Then we are treated to some longer essays, some with responses and counter responses, including some excellent work by Steven Weinberg and Barbara Epstein. The final chapter entitled "Colloquies" provides some post bellum reflections by Andrew Ross, Sokal and others. All of this is very entertaining.
In addition to being entertained by this entirely engaging and balanced account I was given a kind of postgraduate course in social constructionist and postmodern thought and its critics. I came away feeling that however one may feel about Sokal's hoax itself, one positive result has been to stimulate thought and discussion on postmodernism and bring those ideas to a wider public than had previously existed. Whether that is good for postmodernism is problematic.
Rating: 4
Summary: No Connection to Reality
Comment: 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. [~doomsdayer520~]
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Title: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science by Alan D. Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Alan Sokal, J. Bricmont ISBN: 0312204078 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science by Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, N. Levitt ISBN: 0801857074 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1997 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science by Noretta Koertge ISBN: 0195117263 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Flight from Science and Reason by Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, Martin W. Lewis, N. Levitt ISBN: 0801856760 Publisher: New York Academy of Sciences Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past by Keith Windschuttle ISBN: 1893554120 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: 07 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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