The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy

by Lingua Franca

Book Overview

In May 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in the fashionable academic journal Social Text. The essay quoted hip theorists like Jacques Lacan, Donna Haraway, and Gilles Deleuze. The prose was thick with the jargon of poststructuralism. And the point the essay tried to make was counterintuitive: gravity, Sokal argued, was a fiction that society had agreed upon, and science needed to be liberated from its ideological blinders. When Sokal revealed...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803279957
• ISBN13: 9780803279957
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Bison
• Length: 271 Pages
• Weight: 2.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Document of a challenging debate

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal confabulated an article on quantum gravity. He invented a fake physics based on genuine -- though mistaken -- statements about physics by such writers as Foucault, Lacan, and Irigaray. He submitted it to the journal Social Text. On the day of publication, Lingua Franca published Sokal's announcement of a hoax on writers and editors whose scientific statements are meaningless or just plain wrong. Some accused him of supporting the cultural agenda of the American right. Others called it a brilliant discourse on the emperor's new clothes.Sokal himself has no interest in the cultural right wing. He is a Marxist who worked in Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas. Sokal argues that politics and social theory are irrelevant to the substantive content of subjects such as physics, chemistry, or mathematics. He makes a case against confusing social theory with natural science, and he asserts that counterfactual claims have no place in the refereed journals of serious research fields.An extensive cross-section of the debate is published in this book. It offers perspective on issues we occasionally face in design research regarding the importance of distinctions between fact and interpretation, between evidence and argument from evidence.Book review published in Design Research News, Volume 6, Number 6, June 2001

Somebody got deconstructed here

The Sokal Hoax is one of those rare bits of mischief with a purpose that turns up the illumination thereby allowing all of us to clearly see that the emperor has no clothes, the emperor in this case being the intellectual left of postmodernist thought as exemplified in the persons of Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, the "victims" of this very clever and meticulously planned sting. That they were hoisted with their own petar, as it were, was particularly pleasing to those of us who cannot abide pseudobabblese and academic gibberish, ingredients that have unfortunately become a staple of New Age and postmodern expression. One hopes that the Sokal affair has opened the eyes of academia to the extent that intellectuals will now appreciate the importance of writing in a clear and communicative manner without fear that others can thereby discern the quality of their ideas.Here the editors of Lingua Franca have put together the definitive collection of articles on the entire succès de scandale including the text of physicist Alan Sokal's article itself, Sokal's revelation article in Lingua Franca, and the reply of the Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, whose publication of Sokal's parody of social constructionist thought and expression brought about their academic embarrassment. These are followed by selected letters to the editors in response to the affair. I particularly enjoyed the insightful letters by Franco Moretti of Columbia University and Lee Smolin of Penn State. Next are reactions from the press, both domestic and foreign, including stories by Stanley Fish, George Will, Bruce Latour, and seventeen others, including another piece by Alan Sokal from Le Monde (Paris). Then we are treated to some longer essays, some with responses and counter responses, including some excellent work by Steven Weinberg and Barbara Epstein. The final chapter entitled "Colloquies" provides some post bellum reflections by Andrew Ross, Sokal and others. All of this is very entertaining.In addition to being entertained by this entirely engaging and balanced account I was given a kind of postgraduate course in social constructionist and postmodern thought and its critics. I came away feeling that however one may feel about Sokal's hoax itself, one positive result has been to stimulate thought and discussion on postmodernism and bring those ideas to a wider public than had previously existed. Whether that is good for postmodernism is problematic.

very nice

This is highly entertaining stuff. For those of us tired out by the moralistic kulturkritiks on kampus, a little jostling of their heroic 'science studies' vanguard is most welcome and invigorating. What has been most amazing to me is the number of characters who have tried to rescue the editors at Social Text. There are characters here saying that it is dangerous for physicists to pronounce on the nature of science (even on the nature of physics) precisely because they are physicists! They actually print these kinds of fallacies in some places. The editors of Lingua Franca have been most kind to our palates. They have included the old hippies with their hysteria and conspiracism right along with the sarcastic, the wise and the profound. The numerous newspaper stories about the hoax are a little tiresome, but the sheer number of them, from all around the world, gives the reader some sense of the world wide significance of what is at stake in the "science wars." You will not be sorry if you buy this. Barbara Epstein's essay on "Postmodernism and the Left" is worth the price of the book. The other essays are quite helpful as well. I have not seen another book of exchanges between pomos and other thinkers. It is remarkable at times how the pomos just go right on committing their fallacies and using their rhetoric, even after some other person has just pointed out the fallacy or exploded the rhetoric in question. The book reaffirmed my belief that most of us are not pomos at all. Rather, there are very few. In fact, it is difficult to be one, since you have to get used to thinking without evidence, and to arguing with nothing to support you except your strong conviction. Until they have some evidence, the science studies crowd will remain a laughing stock.

Fascinating, well-chosen compendium of essays

I didn't expect a book full of essays about postmodernism and academic politics to keep me up late at night. I was therefore amazed to find myself reading until 2:30 in the morning several nights in a row.The book starts by printing the hoax article and Sokal's revelation. It then captures some of the immediate response, mostly by Social Text supporters. Then you see some newspaper articles from around the world, and finally some longer essays. Since each article originally came from a separate publication, each one starts with two paragraphs or so of synopsis, explaining the background of the hoax. That gets tedious, but if you read beyond the first couple of paragraphs, each article has something interesting to say.Kudos to the editors of Lingua Franca for making such excellent choices.

Tremendously funny, yet serious and instructive

Sokal's parody of postmodern thought is thoroughly witty and enjoyable, and especially so if you are moderately literate in math and science. If you have little tolerance for the fashionable jargon of postmodern criticism, you will delight in the way Sokal has put the screws on the pretensions of this pompous movement.One of Sokal's important contributions is to quote liberally from the postmodern gurus of the French academic establishment. Reading Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattarri, and their colleagues for meaning is virtually impossible (the French, by the way, is no more lucid than the English translations), so the several quotes from their work in Sokal's essay are about as close as any rational reader will get to their work. But what they say is indeed hilarious. Here is Derrida: "The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variablity--it is, finally, the concept of the game." This, of course, means absolutely nothing--even in context. But at least it is not wrong, as is the following from Lacan: "This diagram [the Mobius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject...it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease." Lacan is justly famous--here we see him taking silly to the heights of sublimity.Here is Lacan again: "...human life could be defined as a calculus in which zero was irrational. When I say 'irrational' I'm referring not to some unfathomable emotional state but precisely to what is call ian imaginary number." How incredibly erudite-sounding to define human life as a "calculus" (whatever that is) in which zero is "irrational" and in which "irrational" means "imaginary." This is really rich!There are some excellent essays in this book, besides that of Sokal. These include excellent pieces by Steven Weinberg (the physicist), Paul Boghossian (the philosopher), Meera Nanda (scientist/journalist), and Barbara Epstein. My favorite one-liner is Weinberg's tale of a physicist friend who, on his death bed, confesses to draw some consolation from the fact that at least he won't have to look up the meaning of 'hermeneutic' any more in the dictionary.My favorite humor book is Woody Allen's Without Feathers. But this comes in a close second, and there's lots to learn, too.