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Just from reading the summary, it feels like his joke had some strains of truth to it, and his fear of the impact of what it would mean to take that seriously c

Just from reading the summary, it feels like his joke had some strains of truth to it, and his fear of the impact of what it would mean to take that seriously caused him to frame it sarcastically instead. What a shame he chose to not take the idea of rebuilding science in post-truth philosophical world and instead made it a crude joke.

Marazan 10y ago
Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in. Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.
- tsunamifury 10y ago
  Or, again, unsarcastically, up is down from a facing direction. It simply is acknowledging that some facts are verifiable from chosen frames, and others verifiable in different frames of reference.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    There are some pretty fair defense of the general field---if not all of specific extremists---in the article: "NORTON WISE, professor in the history of science, UCLA: I read Sokal’s Social Text article and thought it was pretty funny. It was just nonsense. Of course, Gross, Levitt, and the others were claiming that science-studies people were engaged in what they called radical relativism. You may be able to find such an extreme, but it’s not by any means the basic argument of the social-constructionist perspective. [...] "HELEN LONGINO, professor of philosophy, Stanford University: Certainly there are some deconstructionists who have tried to take on science. But that was, by far, the minority of the work that was being done in science studies. If Sokal had submitted it to a serious science-studies journal, people would have seen through it. Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so. "STANLEY FISH, professor of humanities and law, Florida International University: Thomas Hobbes said it hundreds of years ago: "Where there is no speech, there is no truth or falsehood." Knowledge is made, of course, by men and women in the context of assumptions, presuppositions, available vocabularies, and available methodologies. "WISE: You don’t need to believe in a particular theory of gravity in order to think that there is gravity. Whether you’re Aristotle or Newton, you’re not going to be jumping out windows, because there’s a validity to the view that falling bodies fall, and it doesn’t matter which view of the nature of gravity you hold in order to believe that. "What interests people in science studies is how one view versus another comes to be taken as "true" — here in scare quotes — and arguing that oftentimes that’s a matter of cultural conditions, which is not a very radical position." In a related context, what would quantum mechanics look like today if Louis de Broglie had a better argument in 1927 and pilot wave theory was the current standard model?
  - Marazan 10y ago
    He wasn't mocking the notion of frames of reference.
mcguire 10y ago
You should read the rest of the article; the history involved does a pretty good job of explaining what happened and why: "ALAN SOKAL: In the spring of 1994, I saw a reference to the book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. My first thought was, Oh, no, not another one of those right-wing diatribes that tell how the Marxist deconstructionist professors are taking over the universities and brainwashing our children. There had been a whole spate of such books in the early 1990s — Dinesh D’Souza and others. "My second thought was "academic left and its quarrels with science"? I mean, that’s a little weird. I’m an academic leftist. So I decided to read it. I learned about a corner of the academy where people were employing either deconstructionist literary theory or extreme social constructivist sociology of science to make comments about both the content of science and the philosophy of science, often in gross ignorance of the science. The first thing I wanted to do was go to the library and check out the original works that Gross and Levitt were criticizing to see whether they were being fair. I found that in about 80 percent of the cases, in my judgment, they were." ... "I thought, well, I could write an article to add to the Gross and Levitt critique, and it would probably disappear into a black hole. So I had the idea of writing an article that would be both a parody and an admittedly uncontrolled experiment: I would submit the article to a trendy journal and see whether it would be accepted." ... "BARBARA EPSTEIN, professor emerita, history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz: A friend of mine at UC-Davis said that she wanted to tell me about something if I would promise absolute secrecy. She said there is a physicist at NYU who has written an article that purports to be by a scientist who has converted to poststructuralism, and actually, it’s a hoax. "She said he wants to find a humanist who knows something about poststructuralism, can’t stand it, is a leftist and feminist, to work with. He wanted to write a piece outing himself, and explaining why he had done it. I said, "Absolutely. Sign me up."" ... "EPSTEIN: ...By that time [after the article was published, but before Sokal's second article exposing the hoax], I really was persona non grata. It was very clear that I was a minority in my department, and not only a minority but a target. I had an article in Socialist Review in which I criticized poststructuralism. It had become a crusade and an orthodoxy and a juggernaut, and the more I was part of that culture, the more I disliked it. The emotional atmosphere around this wasn’t that different than the emotional atmosphere around the election right now. People on two sides of the fence were barely talking to each other."

Marazan 10y ago

Yes, truly up is down, black is white, inside is out and outside is in. Down with the tyranny of knowledge and verifiable facts.

tsunamifury 10y ago
Or, again, unsarcastically, up is down from a facing direction. It simply is acknowledging that some facts are verifiable from chosen frames, and others verifiable in different frames of reference.
- mcguire 10y ago
  There are some pretty fair defense of the general field---if not all of specific extremists---in the article: "NORTON WISE, professor in the history of science, UCLA: I read Sokal’s Social Text article and thought it was pretty funny. It was just nonsense. Of course, Gross, Levitt, and the others were claiming that science-studies people were engaged in what they called radical relativism. You may be able to find such an extreme, but it’s not by any means the basic argument of the social-constructionist perspective. [...] "HELEN LONGINO, professor of philosophy, Stanford University: Certainly there are some deconstructionists who have tried to take on science. But that was, by far, the minority of the work that was being done in science studies. If Sokal had submitted it to a serious science-studies journal, people would have seen through it. Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so. "STANLEY FISH, professor of humanities and law, Florida International University: Thomas Hobbes said it hundreds of years ago: "Where there is no speech, there is no truth or falsehood." Knowledge is made, of course, by men and women in the context of assumptions, presuppositions, available vocabularies, and available methodologies. "WISE: You don’t need to believe in a particular theory of gravity in order to think that there is gravity. Whether you’re Aristotle or Newton, you’re not going to be jumping out windows, because there’s a validity to the view that falling bodies fall, and it doesn’t matter which view of the nature of gravity you hold in order to believe that. "What interests people in science studies is how one view versus another comes to be taken as "true" — here in scare quotes — and arguing that oftentimes that’s a matter of cultural conditions, which is not a very radical position." In a related context, what would quantum mechanics look like today if Louis de Broglie had a better argument in 1927 and pilot wave theory was the current standard model?
- Marazan 10y ago
  He wasn't mocking the notion of frames of reference.

mcguire 10y ago

You should read the rest of the article; the history involved does a pretty good job of explaining what happened and why: "ALAN SOKAL: In the spring of 1994, I saw a reference to the book by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. My first thought was, Oh, no, not another one of those right-wing diatribes that tell how the Marxist deconstructionist professors are taking over the universities and brainwashing our children. There had been a whole spate of such books in the early 1990s — Dinesh D’Souza and others. "My second thought was "academic left and its quarrels with science"? I mean, that’s a little weird. I’m an academic leftist. So I decided to read it. I learned about a corner of the academy where people were employing either deconstructionist literary theory or extreme social constructivist sociology of science to make comments about both the content of science and the philosophy of science, often in gross ignorance of the science. The first thing I wanted to do was go to the library and check out the original works that Gross and Levitt were criticizing to see whether they were being fair. I found that in about 80 percent of the cases, in my judgment, they were." ... "I thought, well, I could write an article to add to the Gross and Levitt critique, and it would probably disappear into a black hole. So I had the idea of writing an article that would be both a parody and an admittedly uncontrolled experiment: I would submit the article to a trendy journal and see whether it would be accepted." ... "BARBARA EPSTEIN, professor emerita, history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz: A friend of mine at UC-Davis said that she wanted to tell me about something if I would promise absolute secrecy. She said there is a physicist at NYU who has written an article that purports to be by a scientist who has converted to poststructuralism, and actually, it’s a hoax. "She said he wants to find a humanist who knows something about poststructuralism, can’t stand it, is a leftist and feminist, to work with. He wanted to write a piece outing himself, and explaining why he had done it. I said, "Absolutely. Sign me up."" ... "EPSTEIN: ...By that time [after the article was published, but before Sokal's second article exposing the hoax], I really was persona non grata. It was very clear that I was a minority in my department, and not only a minority but a target. I had an article in Socialist Review in which I criticized poststructuralism. It had become a crusade and an orthodoxy and a juggernaut, and the more I was part of that culture, the more I disliked it. The emotional atmosphere around this wasn’t that different than the emotional atmosphere around the election right now. People on two sides of the fence were barely talking to each other."