From jwalsh@u.washington.edu Tue Jun 4 20:42:51 1996 Date: Tue, 4 Jun 96 20:36:32 -0700 From: Jason Walsh To: jwalsh@u.washington.edu Subject: getdoc.xp?recnum=<430997271.114959698@dt.netgate.co.nz>&server=dnserver.dbapr&CONTEXT=833945212.24809&hitnum=326 [Previous] [Next] [Hitlist] [Get Thread] [Author Profile] [Post] [Reply] _________________________________________________________________ Article 327 of 914 Subject: The Sokal Gravity Hoax From: omcshane@dt.netgate.co.nz (Owen McShane) Date: 1996/05/26 Message-Id: <430997271.114959698@dt.netgate.co.nz> Distribution: world Organization: Deep Thought, Auckland, NZ Reply-To: omcshane@dt.netgate.co.nz Newsgroups: soc.culture.new-Zealand I thought some of you might enjoy this too. It has of course stirred up a hornets nest on all the newsgroups and I have much more on it if you want to read it here. The original article "proved" that gravity was a social construct! Have fun. Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly by JANNY SCOTT NEW YORK -- A New York University physicist, fed up with what he sees as the excesses of the academic left, hoodwinked a well-known journal into publishing a parody thick with gibberish as though it were serious scholarly work. The article, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," appeared this month in Social Text, a journal that helped invent the trendy, sometimes baffling field of cultural studies. Now the physicist, Alan Sokal, is gloating. And the editorial collective that publishes the journal says it sorely regrets its mistake. But the journal's co-founder says Sokal is confused. "He says we're epistemic relativists," complained Stanley Aronowitz, the co-founder and a professor at CUNY. "We're not. He got it wrong. One of the reasons he got it wrong is he's ill-read and half-educated." The dispute over the article -- which was read by several editors at the journal before it was published -- goes to the heart of the public debate over left-wing scholarship, and particularly over the belief that social, cultural and political conditions influence and may even determine knowledge and ideas about what is truth. In this case, Sokal, 41, intended to attack some of the work of social scientists and humanists in the field of cultural studies, the exploration of culture -- and, in recent years, science -- for coded ideological meaning. In a way, this is one more skirmish in the culture wars, the battles over multiculturalism and college curriculums and whether there is a single objective truth or just many differing points of view. Conservatives have argued that there is truth, or at least an approach to truth, and that scholars have a responsibility to pursue it. They have accused the academic left of debasing scholarship for political ends. "While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious," Sokal wrote in a separate article in the current issue of the magazine Lingua Franca, in which he revealed the hoax and detailed his "intellectual and political" motivations. "What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities," he wrote in Lingua Franca. In an interview, Sokal, who describes himself as "a leftist in the old-fashioned sense," said he worried that the trendy disciplines and obscure jargon could end up hurting the leftist cause. "By losing contact with the real world, you undermine the prospect for progressive social critique," he said. Norman Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and an author of a book on science and the academic left that first brought the new critique of science to Sokal's attention, Friday called the hoax "a lot of fun and a source of a certain amount of personal satisfaction." "I don't want to claim that it proves that all social scientists or all English professors are complete idiots, but it does betray a certain arrogance and a certain out-of-touchness on the part of a certain clique inside academic life," he said. Sokal, who describes himself as "a leftist and a feminist" who once spent his summers teaching mathematics in Nicaragua, said he became concerned several years ago about what academics in cultural studies were saying about science. "I didn't know people were using deconstructive literary criticism not only to study Jane Austen but to study quantum mechanics," he said Friday. Then, he said, he read "Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrel With Science" by Levitt and Paul R. Gross. Sokal said the book, which analyzes the critique of science, prompted him to begin reading work by the critics themselves. "I realized it would be boring to write a detailed refutation of these people," he said. So, he said, he decided to parody them. "I structured the article around the silliest quotes about mathematics and physics from the most prominent academics, and I invented an argument praising them and linking them together," he said. "All this was very easy to carry off because my argument wasn't obliged to respect any standards of evidence or logic." To a lay person, the article appears to be an impenetrable hodgepodge of jargon, buzzwords, footnotes and other references to the work of the likes of Jacques Derrida and Aronowitz. Words like hegemony, counterhegemonic and epistemological abound. In it, Sokal wrote: "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." Andrew Ross, a co-editor of Social Text who also happens to be a professor at NYU, said Friday that about a half-dozen editors at the journal dealt with Sokal's unsolicited manuscript. While it appeared "a little hokey," they decided to publish it in a special issue they called Science Wars, he said. "We read it as the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some sort of philosophical justification for his work," said Ross, director of the American studies program at NYU "In other words, it was about the relationship between philosophy and physics." Now Ross says he regrets having published the article. But he said Sokal misunderstood the ideas of the people he was trying to expose. " These are caricatures of complex scholarship," he said. Aronowitz, a sociologist and director of the Center for Cultural Studies at CUNY, said Sokal seems to believe that the people he is parodying deny the existence of the real world. "They never deny the real world,"Aronowitz said. "They are talking about whether meaning can be derived from observation of the real world." Ross said it would be a shame if the hoax obscured the broader issues his journal sought to address, "that scientific knowledge is affected by social and cultural conditions and is not a version of some universal truth that is the same in all times and places."--New York Times, May 18, 1996 ******************************************** [Previous] [Next] [Hitlist] [Get Thread] [Author Profile] [Post] [Reply] _________________________________________________________________ [ Home ] - [ Search ] - [ Contacts ] - [ Help ] _________________________________________________________________