6 ms·

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax)

28 points by panarky 16y ago

hsmyers 16y ago
This is more scary than funny. What is even worse, is that the 'fact-less science' folk are winning a war we didn't even know we were in. This suggests that whatever joke the author felt he was committing, was regrettably on him (and the rest of us)!
- Archaeum 16y ago
  Sokal notes, "While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious," and goes on to describe his anger and sadness. Indeed, he doesn't describe his effort as a hoax, but rather as an experiment. He expresses the intent of exposing intellectual laziness and ideologically-driven reasoning (specifically by the Left, with which he self-associates), so the motivation appears to be more than humor, and I'm confident he would agree with your assessment of "more scary than funny."
primodemus 16y ago
Relevant: Richard Dawkins' review of 'Intellectual Impostures' by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobed http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobe...
kenjackson 16y ago
Does anyone have the reviews from the original Sokal submission? It would be useful to know how the reviewers actually viewed the article.
- ohyes 16y ago
  social text is not a peer reviewed journal.
ohyes 16y ago
Some people find this disturbing and an indemnification of the humanities. (Being, as a whole, an intellectual fraud). I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities. The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. That certain non peer reviewed journals are desperate for content and have low standards for publication isn't exactly shocking. He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal, that no one would have even known about, had he not widely publicized it as a 'hoax'.
- microarchitect 16y ago
  > The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. If wikipedia is to be believed the journal switched to a peer review based process due to the Sokal affair. > He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal, Clearly it's a crappy journal, but unfortunately it's associated with some big names like Duke [1] and Columbia [2]. > I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities. Maybe not Sokal's article, but certainly their books says a lot about the humanities. As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Text http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Text [2] http://www.socialtextjournal.org/about/index.php#contact http://www.socialtextjournal.org/about/index.php#contact
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a. Actually, as often as not, it was Sokal, Bricmont, and Dawkins (and many others) who were talking out of their ass, egregiously and gratuitously misreading (or not reading at all) the "big names in the humanities" they were attacking. For one particularly well documented instance, see: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.197/plotnitsky.197 http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.197/plotnitsky....
- kd0amg 16y ago
  The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. Was it therefore regarded by those in that field at the time as almost a vanity press? Or did they consider it a respectable, reputable journal?
cdavid 16y ago
This indeed made a lot of noise, I still remember quite well the polemic at that time. It should be understood in the context of the "science war" (context which was sometimes missing during the polemic in France, since many French "intelligenstia" are rather ignorant of the American academia). Perhaps ironically, the whole affair has a fundamentally political aspect (one of Sokal's argument was to defend the left against what he feared would become anti-science ideology coming from the universities themselves). The whole idea of publishing a paper without meaningful content may seem clever, but it really isn't: the same has been done in so called hard science. While amusing, I don't think it proves much. Dawkins forgets to precise that the paper in question was not reviewed and that the authors refused to make changes suggested by the journal which published the paper (not to defend the journal's attitude either). As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either.
- microarchitect 16y ago
  > As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either. I'll admit I'm biased here. Latan, Irigaray and co. sound like a bunch of charlatans to me. However, you're suggesting that I should try "understanding where they are coming from". So please explain to me where Irigaray is coming from when she suggests that fluid mechanics is neglected because "the problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."
  - cdavid 16y ago
    First, it is Lacan, not Latan. Incorrectly spelling author names is not well seen in academia :) One thing that must be said is that not all authors attacked by Sokal are at the same level: some deserved it, and even for a given person, there may be a lot of different quality in their work. As for understanding where they are coming from: I cannot speak for Lacan (who certainly said stupid things, but who hasn't), but Bruno Latour has done some fascinating anthropological work on science. Reading "Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts" changed my vision of science. Contrary to what Bricmont claimed in one of his article about the affair (French title: "La vraie signification de l'affaire Sokal"), Latour has never claimed to my knowledge that science was just a social construct, but rather that the scientist activity cannot be thought independently of its social environment. When Bricmont says in the same article that "Comment peut-on soutenir sérieusement qu'il n'y aucune raison empirique de croire que le sang circule, que la Terre tourne..." (my quick and rough translation: could one really claim that there is no empirical ground for blood circulation or Earth rotation), that's disingenuous. But what bothers me the most in the whole affair is that for people who claim defending science and the scientific method, they prefered the polemic, uncontrolled manner rather than an actual experiment to prove their point. That's rather ironic.
boredguy8 16y ago
A few key things to keep in mind: 1) It was not a blind review. The editors knew Sokal was the author and knew he was an important scientist. 2) The editors asked for some revisions, and Sokal refused. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html "Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally to revise the piece. We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philo- sophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed resistant to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost all of his footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the grounds that his peers, in sci- ence, expected extensive documentation of this sort. Judging from his response, it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. At this point, Sokal was designated as a "difficult, uncooperative author," a category well known to journal editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish, not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if pub- lished in the company of related articles." 3) It sat in the offices of the journal until they published a "science wars" edition, and included the article because it was from a scientist. In this sense, the hoax reveals almost nothing about the humanities, but does possibly say interesting things about the role authority plays.
- ignifero 16y ago
  so: 1) In the humanities, what you write doesn't matter. It's all about WHO writes it 2) The editors did not really care if there are errors, if the author insists, he can publish any kind of bs. 3) You are right. It seems in the humanities there is no discourse at all, it's all about who has authority and how social you are C'mon, a little self doubt won't hurt the "social sciences". The article was rife with complete and utter fancy-looking b.s. Even the title is laughable. Nothing can excuse the editors of this journal.
  - icandoitbetter 16y ago
    A software-generated paper has been accepted in a Computer Science conference as well [1]. If anything, this is a problem that characterizes academia in general, not isolated parts of it. I understand that humanities-hating is an entertaining activity, but it's important to be aware that naive generalizations of a whole field have no basis in reality. [1] http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Software-Generated-Paper-Accepted-At-IEEE-Conference http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Sof...
davidmathers 16y ago
This got no votes when I submitted it, but anyone reading this may find it interesting. The Science Wars Redux - Fifteen years after the Sokal Hoax, attacks on “objective knowledge” that were once the province of the left have been taken up by the right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2015703 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2015703
angdis 16y ago
The Sokal hoax was effectively a "bitch-slap" to certain philosophical camps that had devolved into a very deep rut of obscurantism. I think that Sokol was perhaps interested in what was going on in those circles but became repulsed by the incomprehensibility of the texts at the time. You really have to (try to) read Derrida, Foucault or Lacan to truly appreciate how FAR from any notion of clarity these dominant philosophers had come. I take the Sokol hoax as a warning, not just to the humanities, but to any field. At the end of the day if you can't explain the essence of what you're doing to smart 12 year old, you don't understand it yourself and you should be prepared for someone to call "bullshit" like Sokal did.
anon7865 16y ago
FTA: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? He was about 10 years ahead of his time. This is more or less the formula for most blog posts. Even people who should know better throw in some bullshit because they think it will look good. Take the machine learning post that appeared here a bit ago. At the level of precision laid out in the article, model complexity and scalability are at best totally-ordered sets, and there is absolutely no way you can do a regression of any sort. The graphic, however is cute and appears to flatter the reader's intellectual sophistication. http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/machine-learning-in-wonderland/ http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/machine-learning-in-wonderl...
jff 16y ago
Reading the excerpts from his article, I felt an immediate recognition of the kind of BS I had ground out for my 19th Century Philosophy course. Step into a stuffy, punctuation-laden mode, drop lots of names, and above all focus on metaphors and allusions rather than actual straightforward arguments. "It is clear that" is your best friend :)

28 points by panarky 16y ago

This is more scary than funny. What is even worse, is that the 'fact-less science' folk are winning a war we didn't even know we were in. This suggests that whatever joke the author felt he was committing, was regrettably on him (and the rest of us)!

Archaeum 16y ago
Sokal notes, "While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious," and goes on to describe his anger and sadness. Indeed, he doesn't describe his effort as a hoax, but rather as an experiment. He expresses the intent of exposing intellectual laziness and ideologically-driven reasoning (specifically by the Left, with which he self-associates), so the motivation appears to be more than humor, and I'm confident he would agree with your assessment of "more scary than funny."

primodemus 16y ago

Relevant: Richard Dawkins' review of 'Intellectual Impostures' by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobed http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobe...

kenjackson 16y ago

Does anyone have the reviews from the original Sokal submission? It would be useful to know how the reviewers actually viewed the article.

ohyes 16y ago
social text is not a peer reviewed journal.

ohyes 16y ago

Some people find this disturbing and an indemnification of the humanities. (Being, as a whole, an intellectual fraud). I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities. The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. That certain non peer reviewed journals are desperate for content and have low standards for publication isn't exactly shocking. He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal, that no one would have even known about, had he not widely publicized it as a 'hoax'.

microarchitect 16y ago
> The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. If wikipedia is to be believed the journal switched to a peer review based process due to the Sokal affair. > He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal, Clearly it's a crappy journal, but unfortunately it's associated with some big names like Duke [1] and Columbia [2]. > I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities. Maybe not Sokal's article, but certainly their books says a lot about the humanities. As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Text http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Text [2] http://www.socialtextjournal.org/about/index.php#contact http://www.socialtextjournal.org/about/index.php#contact
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a. Actually, as often as not, it was Sokal, Bricmont, and Dawkins (and many others) who were talking out of their ass, egregiously and gratuitously misreading (or not reading at all) the "big names in the humanities" they were attacking. For one particularly well documented instance, see: http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.197/plotnitsky.197 http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.197/plotnitsky....
kd0amg 16y ago
The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. Was it therefore regarded by those in that field at the time as almost a vanity press? Or did they consider it a respectable, reputable journal?

cdavid 16y ago

This indeed made a lot of noise, I still remember quite well the polemic at that time. It should be understood in the context of the "science war" (context which was sometimes missing during the polemic in France, since many French "intelligenstia" are rather ignorant of the American academia). Perhaps ironically, the whole affair has a fundamentally political aspect (one of Sokal's argument was to defend the left against what he feared would become anti-science ideology coming from the universities themselves). The whole idea of publishing a paper without meaningful content may seem clever, but it really isn't: the same has been done in so called hard science. While amusing, I don't think it proves much. Dawkins forgets to precise that the paper in question was not reviewed and that the authors refused to make changes suggested by the journal which published the paper (not to defend the journal's attitude either). As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either.

microarchitect 16y ago
> As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other) blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from either. I'll admit I'm biased here. Latan, Irigaray and co. sound like a bunch of charlatans to me. However, you're suggesting that I should try "understanding where they are coming from". So please explain to me where Irigaray is coming from when she suggests that fluid mechanics is neglected because "the problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders."
- cdavid 16y ago
  First, it is Lacan, not Latan. Incorrectly spelling author names is not well seen in academia :) One thing that must be said is that not all authors attacked by Sokal are at the same level: some deserved it, and even for a given person, there may be a lot of different quality in their work. As for understanding where they are coming from: I cannot speak for Lacan (who certainly said stupid things, but who hasn't), but Bruno Latour has done some fascinating anthropological work on science. Reading "Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts" changed my vision of science. Contrary to what Bricmont claimed in one of his article about the affair (French title: "La vraie signification de l'affaire Sokal"), Latour has never claimed to my knowledge that science was just a social construct, but rather that the scientist activity cannot be thought independently of its social environment. When Bricmont says in the same article that "Comment peut-on soutenir sérieusement qu'il n'y aucune raison empirique de croire que le sang circule, que la Terre tourne..." (my quick and rough translation: could one really claim that there is no empirical ground for blood circulation or Earth rotation), that's disingenuous. But what bothers me the most in the whole affair is that for people who claim defending science and the scientific method, they prefered the polemic, uncontrolled manner rather than an actual experiment to prove their point. That's rather ironic.

boredguy8 16y ago

A few key things to keep in mind: 1) It was not a blind review. The editors knew Sokal was the author and knew he was an important scientist. 2) The editors asked for some revisions, and Sokal refused. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html "Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally to revise the piece. We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philo- sophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed resistant to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost all of his footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the grounds that his peers, in sci- ence, expected extensive documentation of this sort. Judging from his response, it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. At this point, Sokal was designated as a "difficult, uncooperative author," a category well known to journal editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish, not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if pub- lished in the company of related articles." 3) It sat in the offices of the journal until they published a "science wars" edition, and included the article because it was from a scientist. In this sense, the hoax reveals almost nothing about the humanities, but does possibly say interesting things about the role authority plays.

ignifero 16y ago
so: 1) In the humanities, what you write doesn't matter. It's all about WHO writes it 2) The editors did not really care if there are errors, if the author insists, he can publish any kind of bs. 3) You are right. It seems in the humanities there is no discourse at all, it's all about who has authority and how social you are C'mon, a little self doubt won't hurt the "social sciences". The article was rife with complete and utter fancy-looking b.s. Even the title is laughable. Nothing can excuse the editors of this journal.
- icandoitbetter 16y ago
  A software-generated paper has been accepted in a Computer Science conference as well [1]. If anything, this is a problem that characterizes academia in general, not isolated parts of it. I understand that humanities-hating is an entertaining activity, but it's important to be aware that naive generalizations of a whole field have no basis in reality. [1] http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Software-Generated-Paper-Accepted-At-IEEE-Conference http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Sof...

davidmathers 16y ago

This got no votes when I submitted it, but anyone reading this may find it interesting. The Science Wars Redux - Fifteen years after the Sokal Hoax, attacks on “objective knowledge” that were once the province of the left have been taken up by the right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2015703 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2015703

angdis 16y ago

The Sokal hoax was effectively a "bitch-slap" to certain philosophical camps that had devolved into a very deep rut of obscurantism. I think that Sokol was perhaps interested in what was going on in those circles but became repulsed by the incomprehensibility of the texts at the time. You really have to (try to) read Derrida, Foucault or Lacan to truly appreciate how FAR from any notion of clarity these dominant philosophers had come. I take the Sokol hoax as a warning, not just to the humanities, but to any field. At the end of the day if you can't explain the essence of what you're doing to smart 12 year old, you don't understand it yourself and you should be prepared for someone to call "bullshit" like Sokal did.

anon7865 16y ago

FTA: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? He was about 10 years ahead of his time. This is more or less the formula for most blog posts. Even people who should know better throw in some bullshit because they think it will look good. Take the machine learning post that appeared here a bit ago. At the level of precision laid out in the article, model complexity and scalability are at best totally-ordered sets, and there is absolutely no way you can do a regression of any sort. The graphic, however is cute and appears to flatter the reader's intellectual sophistication. http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/machine-learning-in-wonderland/ http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/machine-learning-in-wonderl...

jff 16y ago

Reading the excerpts from his article, I felt an immediate recognition of the kind of BS I had ground out for my 19th Century Philosophy course. Step into a stuffy, punctuation-laden mode, drop lots of names, and above all focus on metaphors and allusions rather than actual straightforward arguments. "It is clear that" is your best friend :)