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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 whic

by 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.
dkarl 16y ago
That the editors even bothered to contact Sokal to suggest revisions is damning. It isn't that Sokal wrote a sensible-sounding paper filled with mathematical BS. He wrote BS in their own language, in the "field" in which the editors were supposedly experts. It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup. If I did that, would you say the VCs were completely competent, and that it was natural I could fool them because I threw some technical terms into my presentation? Or, to turn the tables, suppose a Harvard Business School professor pitched a business idea to Richard Dawkins to make money by producing flu vaccine through a process entirely made up by stringing together impressive-sounding terminology that the business professor pulled out of biology papers. Suppose Richard Dawkins offered to invest money in the business. Would you say, "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. Richard Dawkins is quite competent at biology. He only mistook an incomprehensible stream of jargon for a plausible way of manufacturing flu vaccine because he was confused by the business plan?"
- stcredzero 16y ago
  It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup. No it wouldn't. In the startup case, there would be a personally significant amount of money involved. All of a sudden, people get a whole lot smarter when money is involved.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >"It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup." It might just work. Seriously though if you've established yourself and sold a few startups already with good outcomes for investors then you're already in line for the investment aren't you? You would basically have to convince them not to invest that some how you'd had your day. Given that the journal kept the paper on the back-burner, as they did, it's like an investor coming in to a bit of extra cash and just saying "what the heck, it looks like dkarls's crackers but something might actually work". There could also be the fame angle - even if they realise it's crackpot it can bring in some extra readers or get some citations because of the famous name. If they get refutations of the famous person's position then that could snowball nicely - "The Journal of Stuff That Looks Sound-ish, they were the ones that printed Sokal's paper where he went mental ...".

by cdavid 16y ago

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.

dkarl 16y ago

That the editors even bothered to contact Sokal to suggest revisions is damning. It isn't that Sokal wrote a sensible-sounding paper filled with mathematical BS. He wrote BS in their own language, in the "field" in which the editors were supposedly experts. It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup. If I did that, would you say the VCs were completely competent, and that it was natural I could fool them because I threw some technical terms into my presentation? Or, to turn the tables, suppose a Harvard Business School professor pitched a business idea to Richard Dawkins to make money by producing flu vaccine through a process entirely made up by stringing together impressive-sounding terminology that the business professor pulled out of biology papers. Suppose Richard Dawkins offered to invest money in the business. Would you say, "Oh, that doesn't mean anything. Richard Dawkins is quite competent at biology. He only mistook an incomprehensible stream of jargon for a plausible way of manufacturing flu vaccine because he was confused by the business plan?"

stcredzero 16y ago
It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup. No it wouldn't. In the startup case, there would be a personally significant amount of money involved. All of a sudden, people get a whole lot smarter when money is involved.
pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>"It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a startup." It might just work. Seriously though if you've established yourself and sold a few startups already with good outcomes for investors then you're already in line for the investment aren't you? You would basically have to convince them not to invest that some how you'd had your day. Given that the journal kept the paper on the back-burner, as they did, it's like an investor coming in to a bit of extra cash and just saying "what the heck, it looks like dkarls's crackers but something might actually work". There could also be the fame angle - even if they realise it's crackpot it can bring in some extra readers or get some citations because of the famous name. If they get refutations of the famous person's position then that could snowball nicely - "The Journal of Stuff That Looks Sound-ish, they were the ones that printed Sokal's paper where he went mental ...".