Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 .
Similar to the subject matter of the book, Sokal is best known for his eponymous 1996 hoaxing affair, whereby he was able to get published a deliberately absurd article that he submitted to Social Text, a critical theory journal. [4] The article itself is included in Fashionable Nonsense as an appendix. [5]
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. This book might be a small ...
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.
Sokal and Dawkins argued that sex is an "objective biological reality" that "is determined at conception and is then observed at birth," rather than assigned by a medical professional. Terming this " social constructionism gone amok," Sokal and Dawkins argued further that "distort[ing] the scientific facts in the service of a social cause ...
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 ...
The matter became known as the "Sokal Affair" and brought greater public attention to the wider conflict. [17] Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of "anti-relativist" criticism in the wake of Sokal's article, responded to the hoax in "Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious", first published in Le Monde.
Sokal's fake article was published in the spring/summer 1996 issue of Social Text, which was dedicated to the science wars about the conceptual validity of scientific objectivity and the nature of scientific theory, among scientific realists and postmodern critics in American universities.