

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies (1996 hoax) - panarky
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html

======
boredguy8
A few key things to keep in mind:

1) It was not a blind review. The editors knew Sokal was the author and knew
he was an important scientist.

2) The editors asked for some revisions, and Sokal refused.
<http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html>

    
    
      "Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally
      to revise the piece. We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philo-
      sophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed
      resistant to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost all of his
      footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the grounds that his peers, in sci-
      ence, expected extensive documentation of this sort. Judging from his response,
      it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. At this point, 
      Sokal was designated as a "difficult, uncooperative author," a category well
      known to journal editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish,
      not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if pub-
      lished in the company of related articles." 
    

3) It sat in the offices of the journal until they published a "science wars"
edition, and included the article because it was from a scientist. In this
sense, the hoax reveals almost nothing about the humanities, but does possibly
say interesting things about the role authority plays.

~~~
ignifero
so: 1) In the humanities, what you write doesn't matter. It's all about WHO
writes it

2) The editors did not really care if there are errors, if the author insists,
he can publish any kind of bs.

3) You are right. It seems in the humanities there is no discourse at all,
it's all about who has authority and how social you are

C'mon, a little self doubt won't hurt the "social sciences". The article was
rife with complete and utter fancy-looking b.s. Even the title is laughable.

Nothing can excuse the editors of this journal.

~~~
icandoitbetter
A software-generated paper has been accepted in a Computer Science conference
as well [1]. If anything, this is a problem that characterizes academia in
general, not isolated parts of it. I understand that humanities-hating is an
entertaining activity, but it's important to be aware that naive
generalizations of a whole field have no basis in reality.

[1]
[http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Sof...](http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/08/12/23/2321242/Software-
Generated-Paper-Accepted-At-IEEE-Conference)

~~~
emmett
Being accepted as a poster in a conference is a very different thing from
being published in a journal, as the comments on the article you posted point
out.

~~~
cdavid
The actual difference depends on the journal, conference and field. In some
fields (large parts of CS), the most prestigious conferences are more
prestigious than most journals. OTOH, in biology, publishing in Cell or Nature
may be career-changing.

------
cdavid
This indeed made a lot of noise, I still remember quite well the polemic at
that time. It should be understood in the context of the "science war"
(context which was sometimes missing during the polemic in France, since many
French "intelligenstia" are rather ignorant of the American academia). Perhaps
ironically, the whole affair has a fundamentally political aspect (one of
Sokal's argument was to defend the left against what he feared would become
anti-science ideology coming from the universities themselves).

The whole idea of publishing a paper without meaningful content may seem
clever, but it really isn't: the same has been done in so called hard science.
While amusing, I don't think it proves much. Dawkins forgets to precise that
the paper in question was not reviewed and that the authors refused to make
changes suggested by the journal which published the paper (not to defend the
journal's attitude either).

As for the meat of the argument, things like judging Deleuze by its adequate
usage of mathematical concepts is rather stupid. It is like judging Erdos on
his peculiar usage of English. I find interesting that Dawkins (and other)
blame those intellectuals for not understanding the concepts they are using
while he himself does not try to understand much of where they are coming from
either.

~~~
dkarl
That the editors even bothered to contact Sokal to suggest revisions is
damning. It isn't that Sokal wrote a sensible-sounding paper filled with
mathematical BS. He wrote BS _in their own language_ , in the "field" in which
the editors were supposedly experts. It would be like me, a programmer,
walking into a meeting with venture capitalists with a business plan I had
specifically designed to make no sense and walking out with funding for a
startup. If I did that, would you say the VCs were completely competent, and
that it was natural I could fool them because I threw some technical terms
into my presentation?

Or, to turn the tables, suppose a Harvard Business School professor pitched a
business idea to Richard Dawkins to make money by producing flu vaccine
through a process entirely made up by stringing together impressive-sounding
terminology that the business professor pulled out of biology papers. Suppose
Richard Dawkins offered to invest money in the business. Would you say, "Oh,
that doesn't mean anything. Richard Dawkins is quite competent at biology. He
only mistook an incomprehensible stream of jargon for a plausible way of
manufacturing flu vaccine because he was confused by the business plan?"

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>" _It would be like me, a programmer, walking into a meeting with venture
capitalists with a business plan I had specifically designed to make no sense
and walking out with funding for a startup._ "

It might just work. Seriously though if you've established yourself and sold a
few startups already with good outcomes for investors then you're already in
line for the investment aren't you? You would basically have to convince them
not to invest that some how you'd had your day.

Given that the journal kept the paper on the back-burner, as they did, it's
like an investor coming in to a bit of extra cash and just saying "what the
heck, it looks like dkarls's crackers but something might actually work".

There could also be the fame angle - even if they realise it's crackpot it can
bring in some extra readers or get some citations because of the famous name.
If they get refutations of the famous person's position then that could
snowball nicely - "The Journal of Stuff That Looks Sound-ish, they were the
ones that printed Sokal's paper where he went mental ...".

------
ohyes
Some people find this disturbing and an indemnification of the humanities.
(Being, as a whole, an intellectual fraud). I do not find this incident
particularly disturbing, and I don't think it says much about the humanities.

The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed. That certain non peer
reviewed journals are desperate for content and have low standards for
publication isn't exactly shocking.

He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal, that no one would have even
known about, had he not widely publicized it as a 'hoax'.

~~~
microarchitect
> The journal in question isn't even peer reviewed.

If wikipedia is to be believed the journal switched to a peer review based
process due to the Sokal affair.

> He wrote a crappy article for a crappy journal,

Clearly it's a crappy journal, but unfortunately it's associated with some big
names like Duke [1] and Columbia [2].

> I do not find this incident particularly disturbing, and I don't think it
> says much about the humanities.

Maybe not Sokal's article, but certainly their books says a lot about the
humanities. As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out
many of these big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a
__.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Text>

[2] <http://www.socialtextjournal.org/about/index.php#contact>

~~~
michael_dorfman
_As Sokal, Bricmont and Dawkins and many others have pointed out many of these
big names in the humanities were simply talking out of their a._

Actually, as often as not, it was Sokal, Bricmont, and Dawkins (and many
others) who were talking out of their ass, egregiously and gratuitously
misreading (or not reading at all) the "big names in the humanities" they were
attacking.

For one particularly well documented instance, see:
[http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-
only/issue.197/plotnitsky....](http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-
only/issue.197/plotnitsky.197)

------
primodemus
Relevant: Richard Dawkins' review of 'Intellectual Impostures' by Alan Sokal
and Jean Bricmont

[http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-
disrobe...](http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobed)

------
hsmyers
This is more scary than funny. What is even worse, is that the 'fact-less
science' folk are winning a war we didn't even know we were in. This suggests
that whatever joke the author felt he was committing, was regrettably on him
(and the rest of us)!

~~~
Archaeum
Sokal notes, "While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly
serious," and goes on to describe his anger and sadness. Indeed, he doesn't
describe his effort as a hoax, but rather as an experiment. He expresses the
intent of exposing intellectual laziness and ideologically-driven reasoning
(specifically by the Left, with which he self-associates), so the motivation
appears to be more than humor, and I'm confident he would agree with your
assessment of "more scary than funny."

------
angdis
The Sokal hoax was effectively a "bitch-slap" to certain philosophical camps
that had devolved into a very deep rut of obscurantism. I think that Sokol was
perhaps interested in what was going on in those circles but became repulsed
by the incomprehensibility of the texts at the time. You really have to (try
to) read Derrida, Foucault or Lacan to truly appreciate how FAR from any
notion of clarity these dominant philosophers had come.

I take the Sokol hoax as a warning, not just to the humanities, but to any
field. At the end of the day if you can't explain the essence of what you're
doing to smart 12 year old, you don't understand it yourself and you should be
prepared for someone to call "bullshit" like Sokal did.

------
davidmathers
This got no votes when I submitted it, but anyone reading this may find it
interesting.

 _The Science Wars Redux - Fifteen years after the Sokal Hoax, attacks on
“objective knowledge” that were once the province of the left have been taken
up by the right_ : <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2015703>

------
anon7865
FTA: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose
editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew
Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded
good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?

He was about 10 years ahead of his time. This is more or less the formula for
most blog posts. Even people who should know better throw in some bullshit
because they think it will look good. Take the machine learning post that
appeared here a bit ago. At the level of precision laid out in the article,
model complexity and scalability are at best totally-ordered sets, and there
is absolutely no way you can do a regression of any sort. The graphic, however
is cute and appears to flatter the reader's intellectual sophistication.

[http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/machine-learning-in-
wonderl...](http://metamarketsgroup.com/blog/machine-learning-in-wonderland/)

------
kenjackson
Does anyone have the reviews from the original Sokal submission? It would be
useful to know how the reviewers actually viewed the article.

~~~
ohyes
social text is not a peer reviewed journal.

------
jff
Reading the excerpts from his article, I felt an immediate recognition of the
kind of BS I had ground out for my 19th Century Philosophy course. Step into a
stuffy, punctuation-laden mode, drop lots of names, and above all focus on
metaphors and allusions rather than actual straightforward arguments. "It is
clear that" is your best friend :)

