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The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, [1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text , an academic journal of cultural studies .
The affair, together with Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's 1994 book Higher Superstition, can be considered to be a part of the so-called science wars. Sokal followed up in 1997 by co-authoring the book Impostures Intellectuelles with physicist and philosopher of science Jean Bricmont (published in English, a year later, as Fashionable Nonsense).
Sokal's obliviousness to this is an early indication of a complacency about his own views, and a lack of imagination about what others might be thinking, that undermines much of what follows. [ 5 ] Mermin states that "I would like to think that we are not only beyond Sokal's hoax, but beyond the science wars themselves.
The Sokal affair: Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London, wrote a paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", [23] which proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct.
The affair echoed Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax in Social Text, a cultural studies journal, which inspired Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose. The trio set out with the intent to expose problems in what they called "grievance studies", referring to academic areas where they claim "a culture has developed in which only certain conclusions are allowed ...
May - Sokal affair: American mathematical physicist Alan Sokal hoaxes the editors into publishing a deliberately nonsensical paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", in a "science wars" issue of the journal Social Text (Duke University Press) [1] as a critique of the intellectual rigor of postmodernism in academic cultural studies.
The journal gained notoriety in 1996 for the Sokal affair, when it published a nonsensical article that physicist Alan Sokal had deliberately written as a hoax. The editorial board, according to Editor Andrew Ross, published the article as a good faith attempt by Sokal, a well-known physicist, to develop a social theory of his field. [3]
Lingua Franca was where the Sokal Affair — a parody of academic practices and post-structuralist language — was first revealed; [8] Lingua Franca editors later produced a book of selected papers on the subject, The Sokal Hoax, published by the University of Nebraska Press.