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But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that Social Text's editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insiste
by briholt 10y ago
But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that Social Text's editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence.
Consider that there may be an intrinsic flaw in your field when the publication of factual claims relies entirely on social pressure. Consider that there is a flaw when claims cannot actually be "debunked," but rather merely receive counter social pressure.
The work of many of late Twentieth Century philosophy by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and many many more deserve serious studied contemplation...They are not randomized strings of insider shibboleths.
Listing authors in your field is literally a shibboleth.
Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation
Your defense of postmodernism is to attack opponents and a list insider authors. Consider that those are classic territorial tactics.
From your defense, postmodernism seems akin medieval theologians debating the nature of the soul. There is a lot of internal self-promotion and politicking, and a lot of attacking outsiders, but nothing of actual use to the real world.
- foldr 10y agoSocial Text was not a major journal, and in fact didn't even review submissions. What could or couldn't get published in it is of very little significance. There have been similar pranks where low-tier computer science conferences have accepted nonsense abstracts. Does that mean that all of computer science is bullshit?
- briholt 10y agoI suspect Sokal-eque hoaxes could get published one-by-one in every single postmodern journal and each would be deemed "not a major journal" in rotation. Postmodernism is some kind of academic alternate reality that exists only in journals, so discrediting one is kind of a big deal. The difference is that computer science is grounded in the real world. Every CS conference could fold, every journal could be disgraced, and yet Google would still answer my search queries. Therefore, I'm pretty sure 01+01=10. This unarguable power of reality is why empiricism won.
- foldr 10y agoI wouldn't lean too hard on empiricism when the main thesis of your comment is an unsupported suspicion. To repeat, Social Text is not peer reviewed, and it's not a prestigious journal, so it's not surprising that a hoax article got published in it. Similar hoaxes can be perpetrated in any field which has unreviewed journal or conferences, computer science included. Even physics is not immune: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-paper-written-by-ios-autocomplete-accepted-for-conference https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...
- ucaetano 10y agoThey did actually review the submissions (not a formal peer review process though), and initially rejected the Sokal paper for multiple issues, eventually accepting it with no changes for their "Science Wars" issue. The irony that they decided to accept it exactly for the Science Wars issue, after initially rejecting it, is amazing. If they had published it in any other issue, the impact wouldn't be as dramatic.
- foldr 10y agoReview means "peer review" in the context of a journal. Even very low-tier academic journals have a formal peer review process. Social Text was really more of a magazine than an academic journal.
- zwischenzug 10y agoI think Baudrillard's concept of simulacra was a pretty useful one.