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Peer review is supposed to catch cases like Sokal's. As an editor, if you are not qualified to read the paper, then you should try to contact someone who is, or
by hyeonwho4 8y ago
Peer review is supposed to catch cases like Sokal's. As an editor, if you are not qualified to read the paper, then you should try to contact someone who is, or suggest publication in a different journal.
But the problem goes deeper than that. Sokal intentionally included meaningless sentences, self-contradictory sentences, and scientifically false sentences. On none of these was he called out by journal editors or reviewers.
- pasabagi 8y ago>meaningless sentences, self-contradictory sentences, and scientifically false sentences To provide a little explanatory context here, the humanities has always had a great deal more tolerance for bad writing than other fields. Kant introduced the main point of his Critique of Judgment in a footnote. Hegel loved self-contradictory sentences. Somebody like Heraclitus writes a lot of stuff that, if perhaps not meaningless, certainly looks meaningless. I don't know what that says about the entire history of philosophy, but anyway, it does say something about a small group's willingness to publish something that had some shitty prose.