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Social Text received Sokal's piece, found it amateurish and unreadable, asked him to make changes, he got cranky and insisted it run as is. They sat on the piec

by slurry 13y ago

Social Text received Sokal's piece, found it amateurish and unreadable, asked him to make changes, he got cranky and insisted it run as is. They sat on the piece. Later, they had a special issue on The Science Wars coming up, figured an amateurish and unreadable contribution by a scientist would be better than no contribution by a scientist at all, and ran it as a non-peer reviewed contribution. http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html Retellings by Sokal fans make it seem as if they received it breathlessly as great work and rushed to put it into publication. That is not what happened. The Sokal Affair is less evidence for the fuzzy-headedness of litcrit and more evidence that you can often get what you want just by lying, being a dick, and having some kind of finished product for people to work with. And Sokal's submission wasn't some fluke, it was in the ballpark of a lot of the heady self-referential fluff in that field. Only if you're very insensitive to tone, style, vocabulary and methodology does the Sokal piece resemble any legit article in Social Text. From the descriptions of it you'd think Social Text was full of maniacal gibbering about how nothing is true, everything is permitted, and quantum mechanics is a tool of the phallologocracy. But in fact, the quality of work is far more pedestrian, if a bit wordy. Here's the table of contents for the latest issue (articles behind paywall, abstracts are free): http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/current http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/current Is it self-referential nonsense? Maybe! Does it bear a reasonable surface resemblance to "Transgressing the Boundaries", if we're not being deliberately obtuse? No to me. the terminology of science (like the term "theory") The term theory pre-dates empirical science by a good bit, and the litcrit usage is not really orthogonal to the scientific one anyway.

abalone 13y ago
Your own citation proves you wrong. One of the Social Text editors was so convinced of the legitimacy of the work that even after being told it was a hoax, "suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." That is how disconnected they were from anything resembling a "methodology" that could detect basic falsehoods nestled amidst pretentious language and reverential citations of suitably fashionable authorities. Scientific theories generally yield testable hypotheses. Name one testable hypothesis that's ever come out of "critical theory".
- slurry 13y ago
  Your own citation proves you wrong. One of the Social Text editors was so convinced of the legitimacy of the work that even after being told it was a hoax, "suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." People don't like to admit they've been conned. Anyway, sincerity is a separate issue from quality. The editors believed the paper was sincere, just not very good. That is how disconnected they were from anything resembling a "methodology" that could detect basic falsehoods nestled amidst pretentious language and reverential citations of suitably fashionable authorities. Alternatively, they thought it was "a little hokey" but assumed sincerity, and ran it because they had an opening and were too lazy to find another scientist willing to write for a humanities journal. Scientific theories generally yield testable hypotheses. Name one testable hypothesis that's ever come out of "critical theory". It's not that critical theory is necessarily good. It's that Sokal's prank proves more about the efficacy of social engineering hacks than the badness of critical theory.
  - abalone 13y ago
    If you can't name one testable hypothesis that's come out of "critical theory", then I doubt you can name one scientific journal that accepts submissions based on "sincerity".

by slurry 13y ago

abalone 13y ago

Your own citation proves you wrong. One of the Social Text editors was so convinced of the legitimacy of the work that even after being told it was a hoax, "suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." That is how disconnected they were from anything resembling a "methodology" that could detect basic falsehoods nestled amidst pretentious language and reverential citations of suitably fashionable authorities. Scientific theories generally yield testable hypotheses. Name one testable hypothesis that's ever come out of "critical theory".

slurry 13y ago
Your own citation proves you wrong. One of the Social Text editors was so convinced of the legitimacy of the work that even after being told it was a hoax, "suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." People don't like to admit they've been conned. Anyway, sincerity is a separate issue from quality. The editors believed the paper was sincere, just not very good. That is how disconnected they were from anything resembling a "methodology" that could detect basic falsehoods nestled amidst pretentious language and reverential citations of suitably fashionable authorities. Alternatively, they thought it was "a little hokey" but assumed sincerity, and ran it because they had an opening and were too lazy to find another scientist willing to write for a humanities journal. Scientific theories generally yield testable hypotheses. Name one testable hypothesis that's ever come out of "critical theory". It's not that critical theory is necessarily good. It's that Sokal's prank proves more about the efficacy of social engineering hacks than the badness of critical theory.
- abalone 13y ago
  If you can't name one testable hypothesis that's come out of "critical theory", then I doubt you can name one scientific journal that accepts submissions based on "sincerity".