From jwalsh@u.washington.edu Tue Jun  4 20:43:41 1996
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 96 20:39:11 -0700
From: Jason Walsh <jwalsh@u.washington.edu>
To: jwalsh@u.washington.edu
Subject: getdoc.xp?recnum=7517249&server=dnserver.dbapr&CONTEXT=833945910.26067&hitnum=2


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  Article 3 of 914

Subject:      Transgressing the Boundaries
From:         gwsmith@river.biddeford.com (Gene W. Smith)
Date:         1996/06/01
Message-Id:   <4oofn3$4j9@river.biddeford.com>
Organization: Biddeford Internet Corp.
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Newsgroups:   soc.motss



Here are some excerpts from an article in the Wednesday, May 29, Wall
Street Journal. I hope people will not let its evident biases (more
apparent in the full article) obscure the significance of this. It is
also, of course, simply a wonderful thing to have done.


==========================================================================

                A Painful Sting Within the Academic Hive

                        Roger Kimball

...

As more and more literary academics and professors of cultural studies
turned their attention to the "discourse" of science, not even the
canons of scientific truth and accuracy were safe from this new form
of academic barbarism. ("Discourse, by the way, is academic shorthand
for "socially constructed," i.e. determined by politics, not truth.

But scientists have begun to take notice. In 1994, biologist Paul
Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt provided the first serious
expose of this destructive trend with their book "Higher Superstition:
The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science." And now, with one
piece of brilliant satire, a young New York University physicist named
Alan Sokal my finally have punctured the hyperinflated hot-air balloon
of cultural studies.

Mr. Sokal submitted an essay entitled "Transgressing Boundaries:
Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to a trendy
left-wing quarterly called Social Text, which is edited at NYU and
published by Duke University Press. Mr. Sokal's piece is a
jargon-laden thicket of academic gibberish in which he alleges a deep
connection between quantum theory and radical politics.

...

In short, the essay is nonsense from start to finish. But Mr. Sokal
submitted it to Social Text in order to see whether (as he put it in
the journal Lingua Franca) "a leading North American journal of
cultural studies ... would publish an article liberally salted with
nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors'
ideological preconceptions."

The answer was yes. Mr. Sokal's essay appeared a few weeks ago in a
special issue of Social Text devoted to the "Science Wars--that is, to
the war against science being waged by the partisans of cultural
studies.

...



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