5 ms·

Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair

55 points by Hooke 1y ago

xoz123 1y ago
Blown away by this article, thank you. I hadn't thought of the Sokal affair in ages but I remember when it happened and how gleeful everyone was in making fun of the journal at the time. To think that the author and journal co-editor at the time would wind up working together as early advocates for Palenstinian rights is an incredible plot twist.
- ashanoko 1y ago
  [flagged]
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  Is it that much of a plot twist? It’s possible for more than one thing to be true at once – that postmodernist nonsense deserves to be mocked and belittled, and that Palestinians deserve rights.
  - photonthug 1y ago
    Not OP, but I think the plot twist is, maybe we need to be able to entertain "obviously absurd" ideas to be able to land on a correct position if the culture we're inside of is not ready for those ideas yet. (No idea if the journal was really that early on this particular position though) Crucially, entertaining ideas isn't the same as believing them, it's about giving them some time and space so you can work out whether it's consistent, rich, useful. Even in math this stuff is hard to get right, just look at the resistance and ridicule that Cantor had to go through, or look at the development of non-Euclidean geometry. And that's a space where proof is actually possible. Critical theory is a real thing but is always walking this fine line between being nonsense or being revolutionary.
    - nradov 1y ago
      By its very nature, postmodernism can't be correct or incorrect. The most it can do is provide a perspective or method of analysis. Some people might find it interesting or even useful. (Personally I see it as trite intellectual masturbation, but that's just me.)
      - photonthug 1y ago
        [dead]
      - jancsika 1y ago
        [dead]
    - meowface 1y ago
      It is very, very rare that a fringe or radical ideology that holds fringe views on almost all topics happens to hold a correct and important stance that is also very rare among non-fringe ideologies. Support for Palestinian rights has definitely not been as common as it should have been in the United States, but was still quite common among many non-fringe groups and individuals. You didn't, and don't, need to go to a radical Marxist critical theory publication to be better informed about that topic. I think the author makes an admirable defense of his magazine and shows it was not quite as crazy or worthless as the Sokal affair initially made it out to be, but we don't need to go all the way in the other direction. Despite Alex Jones watchers all citing it as a great reason to watch him, you don't, and didn't, actually need to watch Alex Jones to learn about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. Alex Jones was not the person who broke that story or even popularized it - and even if he were to have been, it wouldn't mean he was factually correct about most of it or about anything else. Sometimes there are brilliant people with fringe, contrarian views or findings that initially get ridiculed and are later found to be correct or valuable. But Cantor was already a respected individual for his past work; he was not some no-name crank mailing theory-of-everything letters to mathematicians. Ramanujan was closer to that, but Ramanujans are so incredibly rare that you really need to be extremely cautious. And math is unlike almost every other field, where fringe claims can generally be objectively and independently confirmed or refuted, so you need to be far more cautious about nearly every other field out there. However, I agree with your point that at the very least all sides should be initially heard out. Just not necessarily heard for very long.
- meowface 1y ago
  I think it's great that they were early advocates for Palestinian rights (I'm a liberal capitalist and dislike Marxism but have always been very sympathetic to the Palestinians and their cause), but, as this article states, this is a Marxist magazine. For a very long time, Marxists have been on this side. Don't see why it would be a twist.
- tomlockwood 1y ago
  Early advocates for Palestinian rights, in 1996? Curious.
  - saghm 1y ago
    Yeah, this is an odd word choice. Even as someone only born in that decade, I've heard at least one case from someone directly about their advocacy from before that year; a history professor I had in college once told an anecdote during a lecture about a time he briefed the elder President Bush, who was apparently considering whether to try to pressure Israel to halt settlements on the West Bank (which the professor told us was an example of how much more attention to detail he perceived in the elder compared to his younger one when he became president). I'm sure there are plenty of people around who can recall things much earlier than this.
- Cheer2171 1y ago
  > early advocates for Palenstinian rights Early? https://enwp.org/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight https://enwp.org/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight
ilamont 1y ago
From the intro to the original paper: But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre... And the reveal, including a brief discussion of the “ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment”: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingu...
- PlunderBunny 1y ago
  From the concluding paragraphs of the latter document: “Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?” Wow, how times have changed.
jfengel 1y ago
Wow, they really showed the editors of Social Text. Somebody remind me of their names? All of the readers of Social Text were really embarrassed. Or at least, I'm sure they were. I never actually met one.
photonthug 1y ago
There's some interesting stuff in here if you can tolerate the meandering and the way-back-when. Like you'd expect from po-mo wonks, everything's gotta be infinitely subtle and infinitely contextualized. So no big mea-culpa and no big defensive denial either. All of that's been hashed and rehashed many times already I guess. You'll find some self-deprecating humor, some spots with surprising self-awareness, some with a surprising lack of it. The main fresh thing is how they'd like to try and compare/contrast/contextualize it in this moment. For example: > Being a gatekeeper by maintaining high intellectual standards is not what public opinion would associate with Social Text, to say the least. Yet that is what the journal practiced, mainly. And it is a practice worth defending, however elitist it might look. All the more so because of how the Trump administration has weaponized both the idea of the hoax and the program of anti-elitism. [..] We know what has befallen intellectual standards. [..] Is this ChatGPT, or is it Orwell’s doublethink? Well ok, there's a conversation to be had about these things! This is not the time to pontificate though, it's the time for sweet revenge. There's never been a better time for po-mo wonks to lean on AI slop and blast physics journals with fake stuff about gravity until someone understaffed falls for the trick. Then you can do a big scandalous reveal about how you can't believe you got away it ;)
- Modified3019 1y ago
  Does “po-mo” mean “post modernism”?
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    yes
- BryantD 1y ago
  Oh, we’ve long since seen that revenge: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s... for many examples, including quite a few in the sciences. I have come to think of the Sokal hoax as an early warning sign of our current information crisis. There was an era when high production values signaled information hygiene. The real Apple original sin wasn’t the walled garden, it was the LaserWriter.
bm3719 1y ago
Sokal was right, of course. He deservedly made fools of a bunch of naked emperors. However, he also influenced a lot of people (myself included) to eschew a whole genre of thinkers for which there was a lot of truly brilliant ideas. For example, Lacan is given a good spanking by Sokal both in his paper Transgressing the Boundaries and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in Intellectual Impostures. Lacan looks like a complete fool if this is your only exposure to his thought. Again, Sokal is not wrong on his criticisms in these excerpts. Lacan definitely uses mathematical terms incorrectly. He was making an attempt to formalize his field (psychoanalysis) by skimming textbooks/papers on topology, knot theory, and other mathematical subfields and, from the perspective of someone who uses those terms for precise things, rather haphazardly putting them together. His "mathemes" go through many updates throughout his career, getting ever more complex. Later, Lacan almost certainly was suffering from senility (as most of us will by age 80), and got rather obsessed with the fake math side of his own work. However, if you actually read Lacan, this is a miniscule and often completely ignored side of his work. No Lacanian psychoanalyst is filling their notebooks with fake math formulas and computing what's wrong with your relationship with the objet petit a. They're metaphors, shorthand, or diagrammatic expressions of what he's really saying in the ~10k pages of his massive corpus. Many of us use compsci terms all the time to express things metaphorically (e.g., being out of bandwidth or disk space when we really mean real world time and mental memory). Think about it this way, and Lacan becomes a source of manifest brilliance, as I discovered only way later in life. All that said, the critical theory and cultural studies space of the 90s was indeed a cesspool, living in the shadow of former intellectual greats. The great flood of mediocre intellects was starting to bear its rotten fruit, but the truly fatal problem was the politicization. Sokal only addressed this some, making surface-level wrongness his focus in some kind of defense of his own field's purity. Politics poisoned critical theory just like it did wherever else a field became subservient to the street-level goals of a political monoculture. Mindless foot soldiers, bleating about race and gender, capable of only bumper-sticker-length thoughts, make poor philosophers, it turns out. That should've been the core of his point, and could've been helpful framing for a countercurrent against it. Leftist intellectuals, or what was left of them, could've cleaned up their own space, and put the people like this article's author in a quiet corner where they belong. (Note how even here, he can't help but get sucked into the immediacy of the left-reactionary political zeitgeist; the spittle being anything but subtextual.) Instead it came to its inevitable, expensive conclusion of having the decolonization of the university from political imperialists done for them by their equally unthinking opponents.
TychoCelchuuu 1y ago
[dead]
ylabidi 1y ago
And on the heels of the Sokal affair, came the Bogdanov Scandal, which at the time, some physicist thought was an elaborate pay-back prank and as it turned out, 2 Phd theses, one in Mathematics and the other in Physics made it through the system even if with the lowest grades (University of Nancy, France), where the content of both theses is utter nonsense, and yet peer pressure, and complascency made it so that something that fails even the lowest standards of consideration for a graduate research (in the context of Sokal's affair it would have been a masterful pay-back) was actually legitimate. Kind of a sobering story in these strange times.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  BobbyBroccoli's videos about the Bogdanoff scandal were informative and entertaining.[1] [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=2O1QA1VoRMM https://youtube.com/watch?v=2O1QA1VoRMM
tkgally 1y ago
One reason Sokal’s article stirred up such a fuss was that, when it was published in 1996, people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing. Although not mainstream media, Social Text was still selective about what it published, and the fact that its editors had chosen to publish Sokal’s hoax was a key point in the controversy. It would be a few more years before raw, self-published writing on the Internet would start to reach as many people as it does now.
- tomlockwood 1y ago
  Except at the time many scholars in psychology and other disciplines were raising alarm bells about replicating tested and published results. So Social Text was in good company.
- idoubtit 1y ago
  That's not how I remember the event. The fact that "people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing" played no role, as far as I know. Newspapers wrote about the Sokal-Bricmont story, not because they were concerned as gatekeepers, but because it was a spectacular hoax. I was in academia at the time, and it was widely discussed. The hoax intended to show two facts: - Philosophy and social studies sometimes have an unsuitable fascination for science, with a tendency to wrongly apply scientific concepts they don't understand. Some impostors had perfect fame in their academic domain, despite writing this pseudo-scientific gibberish. - Scientific journals were supposed to publish provable or reproducible articles, so when a flawed article went through the publishing process, there was hope the errors would be detected and other articles would fix it. And a publication in a top-tier journal would bring intense scrutiny. In philosophy and social science, nonsense could get published, widely accepted, and even studied. BTW, I remember Jean Bricmont telling how much he liked good philosophy, and how he was pained when reading fraudulent philosophy.
  - tkgally 1y ago
    Thank you for your response. Let me explain a bit more what I intended by my comment above. Though I wasn’t in academia at the time, my memory of the event is basically the same as yours. But I wonder if younger people today, used to the current Internet-based media environment, would understand why such a hoax attracted so much attention outside of academia. My recollection is that, before the Internet, there was much more interest in and discussion of what media outlets decided to publish or not and how they slanted stories. While such interest still exists, it might seem a bit odd to someone who mainly consumes social media. The current issues around filtering and algorithms are quite different from the often intense discussions a few decades ago about how, say, the New York Times or CBS News covered particular stories. What would happen today if someone got a similarly ridiculous article accepted by a magazine or website like Social Text? My guess is that it would not attract anything like the widespread attention the Sokal hoax did.
tomlockwood 1y ago
Wild that people think this exposes the Arts as not being rigorous enough when there is an ongoing, widespread replication crisis in psychology, economics, medicine. Increasingly universities are paper mills and the pressure to publish absolute dreck is ever higher. And yet the gleeful "rationalists" seem to ignore this. Why?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
voidhorse 1y ago
In retrospect, the Sokal hoax to me is both incredibly significant in its role as a signal flare of what was to come, and in its total old-fashioned, epistemic failure. It was a signal flare because it is a perfect example of the kind of uninformed criticism the internet would later make rampant; the hoax tried to deflate and entire body of practice, knowledge, and language that it simply didn't understand. It was a category error. It presented a false equivalence between social facts and physical facts. The constructivists of the time are largely talking about social not physical issues. Yes, epistemology touches on the social, so that was apart of the game, as was examining the social components of science, no one, however had seriously argued that the epistemic claims of science, once their fundamental premises were accepted are contestable—Sokal, in bad faith, tried to discredit claims of an entirely different nature by effectively presenting a straw man. Second, it is a epistemic failure because recent events, if anything, have largely proven that constructivism wins. Today, people inhabit multiple realities. Yes, the scientific method is the one that is best with respect to finding truth, but it turns out people don't really care. The constructivist insight that, ultimately, autonomous individuals decide what they want to believe has far greater force in our world today. Science and logic, unfortunately, have no binding power. Fools can and will in fact deny reality as it slaps them in the face. To really understand the present, a constructivist bent is actually more fruitful for establishing a basis for an analysis with explanatory power. In short it's just a classic example of hubris and scholars taking past each other.
casey2 1y ago
>1979 critique of Zionism was early not really, not even close even with the "US-based" qualifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_anti-Zionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_anti-Zionism call me when sociology has any kind of predictive power and testable explanation then people might take your social classes hypothesis seriously. It's not just the foundation problems, the practical applications of social "sciences" have been failure after failure from demography to economics. If modern physics and chemistry concepts that we rely on today were as reproducible as the ANY social science concepts none of us would be here right now. Fundamentally there is nothing stopping social scientists from reducing the scope of their experiments to the reproducible. They haven't, largely so they can feel good about winning cheap political points, that's the privilege colonialism has afforded modern social scientists and they won't give up the drug til they die.

55 points by Hooke 1y ago

Blown away by this article, thank you. I hadn't thought of the Sokal affair in ages but I remember when it happened and how gleeful everyone was in making fun of the journal at the time. To think that the author and journal co-editor at the time would wind up working together as early advocates for Palenstinian rights is an incredible plot twist.

ashanoko 1y ago
[flagged]
appreciatorBus 1y ago
Is it that much of a plot twist? It’s possible for more than one thing to be true at once – that postmodernist nonsense deserves to be mocked and belittled, and that Palestinians deserve rights.
- photonthug 1y ago
  Not OP, but I think the plot twist is, maybe we need to be able to entertain "obviously absurd" ideas to be able to land on a correct position if the culture we're inside of is not ready for those ideas yet. (No idea if the journal was really that early on this particular position though) Crucially, entertaining ideas isn't the same as believing them, it's about giving them some time and space so you can work out whether it's consistent, rich, useful. Even in math this stuff is hard to get right, just look at the resistance and ridicule that Cantor had to go through, or look at the development of non-Euclidean geometry. And that's a space where proof is actually possible. Critical theory is a real thing but is always walking this fine line between being nonsense or being revolutionary.
  - nradov 1y ago
    By its very nature, postmodernism can't be correct or incorrect. The most it can do is provide a perspective or method of analysis. Some people might find it interesting or even useful. (Personally I see it as trite intellectual masturbation, but that's just me.)
    - photonthug 1y ago
      [dead]
    - jancsika 1y ago
      [dead]
  - meowface 1y ago
    It is very, very rare that a fringe or radical ideology that holds fringe views on almost all topics happens to hold a correct and important stance that is also very rare among non-fringe ideologies. Support for Palestinian rights has definitely not been as common as it should have been in the United States, but was still quite common among many non-fringe groups and individuals. You didn't, and don't, need to go to a radical Marxist critical theory publication to be better informed about that topic. I think the author makes an admirable defense of his magazine and shows it was not quite as crazy or worthless as the Sokal affair initially made it out to be, but we don't need to go all the way in the other direction. Despite Alex Jones watchers all citing it as a great reason to watch him, you don't, and didn't, actually need to watch Alex Jones to learn about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. Alex Jones was not the person who broke that story or even popularized it - and even if he were to have been, it wouldn't mean he was factually correct about most of it or about anything else. Sometimes there are brilliant people with fringe, contrarian views or findings that initially get ridiculed and are later found to be correct or valuable. But Cantor was already a respected individual for his past work; he was not some no-name crank mailing theory-of-everything letters to mathematicians. Ramanujan was closer to that, but Ramanujans are so incredibly rare that you really need to be extremely cautious. And math is unlike almost every other field, where fringe claims can generally be objectively and independently confirmed or refuted, so you need to be far more cautious about nearly every other field out there. However, I agree with your point that at the very least all sides should be initially heard out. Just not necessarily heard for very long.
meowface 1y ago
I think it's great that they were early advocates for Palestinian rights (I'm a liberal capitalist and dislike Marxism but have always been very sympathetic to the Palestinians and their cause), but, as this article states, this is a Marxist magazine. For a very long time, Marxists have been on this side. Don't see why it would be a twist.
tomlockwood 1y ago
Early advocates for Palestinian rights, in 1996? Curious.
- saghm 1y ago
  Yeah, this is an odd word choice. Even as someone only born in that decade, I've heard at least one case from someone directly about their advocacy from before that year; a history professor I had in college once told an anecdote during a lecture about a time he briefed the elder President Bush, who was apparently considering whether to try to pressure Israel to halt settlements on the West Bank (which the professor told us was an example of how much more attention to detail he perceived in the elder compared to his younger one when he became president). I'm sure there are plenty of people around who can recall things much earlier than this.
Cheer2171 1y ago
> early advocates for Palenstinian rights Early? https://enwp.org/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight https://enwp.org/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight

ilamont 1y ago

From the intro to the original paper: But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ``objectivity''. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgre... And the reveal, including a brief discussion of the “ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment”: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingu...

PlunderBunny 1y ago
From the concluding paragraphs of the latter document: “Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?” Wow, how times have changed.

jfengel 1y ago

Wow, they really showed the editors of Social Text. Somebody remind me of their names? All of the readers of Social Text were really embarrassed. Or at least, I'm sure they were. I never actually met one.

photonthug 1y ago

There's some interesting stuff in here if you can tolerate the meandering and the way-back-when. Like you'd expect from po-mo wonks, everything's gotta be infinitely subtle and infinitely contextualized. So no big mea-culpa and no big defensive denial either. All of that's been hashed and rehashed many times already I guess. You'll find some self-deprecating humor, some spots with surprising self-awareness, some with a surprising lack of it. The main fresh thing is how they'd like to try and compare/contrast/contextualize it in this moment. For example: > Being a gatekeeper by maintaining high intellectual standards is not what public opinion would associate with Social Text, to say the least. Yet that is what the journal practiced, mainly. And it is a practice worth defending, however elitist it might look. All the more so because of how the Trump administration has weaponized both the idea of the hoax and the program of anti-elitism. [..] We know what has befallen intellectual standards. [..] Is this ChatGPT, or is it Orwell’s doublethink? Well ok, there's a conversation to be had about these things! This is not the time to pontificate though, it's the time for sweet revenge. There's never been a better time for po-mo wonks to lean on AI slop and blast physics journals with fake stuff about gravity until someone understaffed falls for the trick. Then you can do a big scandalous reveal about how you can't believe you got away it ;)

Modified3019 1y ago
Does “po-mo” mean “post modernism”?
- UltraSane 1y ago
  yes
BryantD 1y ago
Oh, we’ve long since seen that revenge: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_s... for many examples, including quite a few in the sciences. I have come to think of the Sokal hoax as an early warning sign of our current information crisis. There was an era when high production values signaled information hygiene. The real Apple original sin wasn’t the walled garden, it was the LaserWriter.

bm3719 1y ago

Sokal was right, of course. He deservedly made fools of a bunch of naked emperors. However, he also influenced a lot of people (myself included) to eschew a whole genre of thinkers for which there was a lot of truly brilliant ideas. For example, Lacan is given a good spanking by Sokal both in his paper Transgressing the Boundaries and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in Intellectual Impostures. Lacan looks like a complete fool if this is your only exposure to his thought. Again, Sokal is not wrong on his criticisms in these excerpts. Lacan definitely uses mathematical terms incorrectly. He was making an attempt to formalize his field (psychoanalysis) by skimming textbooks/papers on topology, knot theory, and other mathematical subfields and, from the perspective of someone who uses those terms for precise things, rather haphazardly putting them together. His "mathemes" go through many updates throughout his career, getting ever more complex. Later, Lacan almost certainly was suffering from senility (as most of us will by age 80), and got rather obsessed with the fake math side of his own work. However, if you actually read Lacan, this is a miniscule and often completely ignored side of his work. No Lacanian psychoanalyst is filling their notebooks with fake math formulas and computing what's wrong with your relationship with the objet petit a. They're metaphors, shorthand, or diagrammatic expressions of what he's really saying in the ~10k pages of his massive corpus. Many of us use compsci terms all the time to express things metaphorically (e.g., being out of bandwidth or disk space when we really mean real world time and mental memory). Think about it this way, and Lacan becomes a source of manifest brilliance, as I discovered only way later in life. All that said, the critical theory and cultural studies space of the 90s was indeed a cesspool, living in the shadow of former intellectual greats. The great flood of mediocre intellects was starting to bear its rotten fruit, but the truly fatal problem was the politicization. Sokal only addressed this some, making surface-level wrongness his focus in some kind of defense of his own field's purity. Politics poisoned critical theory just like it did wherever else a field became subservient to the street-level goals of a political monoculture. Mindless foot soldiers, bleating about race and gender, capable of only bumper-sticker-length thoughts, make poor philosophers, it turns out. That should've been the core of his point, and could've been helpful framing for a countercurrent against it. Leftist intellectuals, or what was left of them, could've cleaned up their own space, and put the people like this article's author in a quiet corner where they belong. (Note how even here, he can't help but get sucked into the immediacy of the left-reactionary political zeitgeist; the spittle being anything but subtextual.) Instead it came to its inevitable, expensive conclusion of having the decolonization of the university from political imperialists done for them by their equally unthinking opponents.

TychoCelchuuu 1y ago

[dead]

ylabidi 1y ago

And on the heels of the Sokal affair, came the Bogdanov Scandal, which at the time, some physicist thought was an elaborate pay-back prank and as it turned out, 2 Phd theses, one in Mathematics and the other in Physics made it through the system even if with the lowest grades (University of Nancy, France), where the content of both theses is utter nonsense, and yet peer pressure, and complascency made it so that something that fails even the lowest standards of consideration for a graduate research (in the context of Sokal's affair it would have been a masterful pay-back) was actually legitimate. Kind of a sobering story in these strange times.

pseudalopex 1y ago
BobbyBroccoli's videos about the Bogdanoff scandal were informative and entertaining.[1] [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=2O1QA1VoRMM https://youtube.com/watch?v=2O1QA1VoRMM

tkgally 1y ago

One reason Sokal’s article stirred up such a fuss was that, when it was published in 1996, people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing. Although not mainstream media, Social Text was still selective about what it published, and the fact that its editors had chosen to publish Sokal’s hoax was a key point in the controversy. It would be a few more years before raw, self-published writing on the Internet would start to reach as many people as it does now.

tomlockwood 1y ago
Except at the time many scholars in psychology and other disciplines were raising alarm bells about replicating tested and published results. So Social Text was in good company.
idoubtit 1y ago
That's not how I remember the event. The fact that "people still largely depended on edited, gatekept outlets for their reading and viewing" played no role, as far as I know. Newspapers wrote about the Sokal-Bricmont story, not because they were concerned as gatekeepers, but because it was a spectacular hoax. I was in academia at the time, and it was widely discussed. The hoax intended to show two facts: - Philosophy and social studies sometimes have an unsuitable fascination for science, with a tendency to wrongly apply scientific concepts they don't understand. Some impostors had perfect fame in their academic domain, despite writing this pseudo-scientific gibberish. - Scientific journals were supposed to publish provable or reproducible articles, so when a flawed article went through the publishing process, there was hope the errors would be detected and other articles would fix it. And a publication in a top-tier journal would bring intense scrutiny. In philosophy and social science, nonsense could get published, widely accepted, and even studied. BTW, I remember Jean Bricmont telling how much he liked good philosophy, and how he was pained when reading fraudulent philosophy.
- tkgally 1y ago
  Thank you for your response. Let me explain a bit more what I intended by my comment above. Though I wasn’t in academia at the time, my memory of the event is basically the same as yours. But I wonder if younger people today, used to the current Internet-based media environment, would understand why such a hoax attracted so much attention outside of academia. My recollection is that, before the Internet, there was much more interest in and discussion of what media outlets decided to publish or not and how they slanted stories. While such interest still exists, it might seem a bit odd to someone who mainly consumes social media. The current issues around filtering and algorithms are quite different from the often intense discussions a few decades ago about how, say, the New York Times or CBS News covered particular stories. What would happen today if someone got a similarly ridiculous article accepted by a magazine or website like Social Text? My guess is that it would not attract anything like the widespread attention the Sokal hoax did.

tomlockwood 1y ago

Wild that people think this exposes the Arts as not being rigorous enough when there is an ongoing, widespread replication crisis in psychology, economics, medicine. Increasingly universities are paper mills and the pressure to publish absolute dreck is ever higher. And yet the gleeful "rationalists" seem to ignore this. Why?

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voidhorse 1y ago

In retrospect, the Sokal hoax to me is both incredibly significant in its role as a signal flare of what was to come, and in its total old-fashioned, epistemic failure. It was a signal flare because it is a perfect example of the kind of uninformed criticism the internet would later make rampant; the hoax tried to deflate and entire body of practice, knowledge, and language that it simply didn't understand. It was a category error. It presented a false equivalence between social facts and physical facts. The constructivists of the time are largely talking about social not physical issues. Yes, epistemology touches on the social, so that was apart of the game, as was examining the social components of science, no one, however had seriously argued that the epistemic claims of science, once their fundamental premises were accepted are contestable—Sokal, in bad faith, tried to discredit claims of an entirely different nature by effectively presenting a straw man. Second, it is a epistemic failure because recent events, if anything, have largely proven that constructivism wins. Today, people inhabit multiple realities. Yes, the scientific method is the one that is best with respect to finding truth, but it turns out people don't really care. The constructivist insight that, ultimately, autonomous individuals decide what they want to believe has far greater force in our world today. Science and logic, unfortunately, have no binding power. Fools can and will in fact deny reality as it slaps them in the face. To really understand the present, a constructivist bent is actually more fruitful for establishing a basis for an analysis with explanatory power. In short it's just a classic example of hubris and scholars taking past each other.

casey2 1y ago

>1979 critique of Zionism was early not really, not even close even with the "US-based" qualifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_anti-Zionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_anti-Zionism call me when sociology has any kind of predictive power and testable explanation then people might take your social classes hypothesis seriously. It's not just the foundation problems, the practical applications of social "sciences" have been failure after failure from demography to economics. If modern physics and chemistry concepts that we rely on today were as reproducible as the ANY social science concepts none of us would be here right now. Fundamentally there is nothing stopping social scientists from reducing the scope of their experiments to the reproducible. They haven't, largely so they can feel good about winning cheap political points, that's the privilege colonialism has afforded modern social scientists and they won't give up the drug til they die.