 Robert Todd Carroll
|
 |
Sokal hoax
In its 1996 Spring/Summer issue (pp. 217-252), Social Text journal published an article by Allan Sokal, Professor of Physics at New York University, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." The article was a hoax submitted, according to Sokal, to see "would a leading journal of cultural studies publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?" It would. Needless to say, the editors of Social Text were not pleased. Sokal claims that the editors, had they been scrupulous and intellectually competent, would have recognized from the first paragraph of his essay that it was a parody. The physicist says he was "troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities." The hoax was his way of calling attention to this decline. In his article, Sokal attacks "the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook" that there is an external world governed by laws of nature which we can understand imperfectly using the scientific method. He also claims that "physical 'reality' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." Furthermore, he says,
Such lax editing might be expected in a New Age magazine, where preposterous and unfounded claims about paranormal "energies" being validated by quantum mechanics are commonplace. But Sokal thinks we should expect more of a prestigious journal edited by distinguished scholars in the humanities. But why did he pick on this particular journal? Sokal hoaxed Social Text for political reasons. Both are "leftist" politically, but Sokal considers the New Left to be guilty of "epistemic relativism." (Is this another hoax?) He seems particularly peeved that the New Left promotes the notion that reality is a social construction. Furthermore, the New Left has created "a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside." So, apparently Sokal wanted to criticize the "epistemic relativism" and "social constructivism" of the New Left in a New Left journal but felt the only way they would let him do so would be if he pretended to share their ideology. Many have pointed out the profound implications of this hoax. At the very least, articles should be reviewed by experts in the field covered by the article. Sources and references named in the article should be checked by the editors. Above all, however, the Sokal hoax demonstrates how willing we are to be deceived about matters we believe strongly in. We are likely to be more critical of articles which attack our position than we are of those which we think supports it (Gilovich). This tendency to confirmation bias affects physicists as well as professors in the social sciences and the humanities. See also See also Aztec UFO hoax, Carlos hoax, communal reinforcement, confirmation bias, Cottingly fairy hoax, Arthur Ford hoax, Mary Toft hoax, Piltdown hoax, Pufedorf hoax, selective thinking, self-deception, Steve Terbot hoax, subjective validation, and the Sokal hoax. further reading
The Sokal Hoax : The Sham That Shook the Academy by The Editors of Lingua Franca |
|
|
©copyright 2007 Robert Todd Carroll |
Last
updated 12/03/07 |
||
Soal-Goldney experiment