It was masterful, and made the deeply passionate intellectual elite very, very angry.
Liberally citing work by feminist epistemologists, philosophers of science, and critical theorists — including two of Social Text’s editors, the NYU American-studies scholar Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at CUNY Graduate Center — Sokal endorsed the notion that scientists had no special claim to scientific knowledge. Just as postmodern theory revealed that so-called facts about the physical world were mere social or political constructs, he wrote, quantum gravity undermined the concept of existence itself, making way for a “liberatory science” and “emancipatory mathematics.”
I know, right? It doesn’t get any deeper than this. Except:
A couple of weeks later, in the magazine Lingua Franca, Sokal revealed that he didn’t believe a word of what he’d written. It was all a big joke, but one motivated by a serious intention: to expose the sloppiness, absurd relativism, and intellectual arrogance of “certain precincts of the academic humanities.” His beef was political, too: He feared that by tossing aside their centuries-old promotion of scientific rationality, progressives were eroding their ability to speak truth to power.
The parody was a year in the making, as Sokal had to bite his tongue until his parody was published in 1996. But surely the brilliant, cutting edge scholars wouldn’t be fooled.
At first, no one noticed. When the left-wing cultural-studies journal Social Text released a special issue on “The Science Wars” in April 1996, the last article stood out only because of its source: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was written by the sole scientist in the bunch, a New York University physicist named Alan Sokal.
Good one, Alan. So we all had a big laugh, admitted that we spent way too much time staring into the abyss, enthralled by big, meaningless words that concealed vapid concepts of utter worthlessness, and went out for a beer, never again to waste precious time pondering such nonsense.
Twenty years later, the incident still resonates. Writing in New York magazine in November about the presidential campaign, Jonathan Chait said he first saw Donald Trump “as a living, breathing Sokal hoax on the Republican Party.” And as academics grapple with the implications of Trump’s victory, the issues at stake in the hoax take on a renewed urgency. Disagreements over how scholars arrive at truth, how academic expertise is viewed by the public, and the potential excesses of skepticism have only grown more prominent.
If you didn’t get whiplash from reading the quoted paragraph, the “take” of Jennifer Ruark at the Chronicle of Higher Education, then Sokal’s Hoax was wasted on you. The issues at stake have taken on a new urgency, but academics and their apologists have gained nothing from it.
All of us were distressed at the deceptive means by which Sokal chose to make his point. This breach of ethics is a serious matter … the openness of intellectual inquiry that Social Text has played its role in fostering will be curtailed.
—from Social Text’s editorial response, signed by Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross
It was called dismissive and disrespectful. Stanley Fish didn’t care for it at all.
The hoax gave people who had never read any postmodernist discourse, and didn’t have the slightest idea of what postmodernists like Derrida or Lyotard or Foucault and others were trying to do, an easy way to dismiss that project. All they thought they had to do was to invoke the Sokal hoax. That would be, in their mind, a totally sufficient put-down.
Yet, here it is, flipped on its head to be used against the enemy du jour. They didn’t get the joke.
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Tangential, but the “breach of ethics” line calls to mind criminal defense tactics in the vein of swapping seats so a cop identifies the wrong person as the defendant. Everyone pretends the attorney’s conduct was outrageous and deceptive while studiously ignoring the point of the exercise.
It’s a of the mechanisms of deflection, just like claiming it’s “dismissive and disrespectful” as an excuse to ignore the substance. If the substance wasn’t so accurate, and the target of derision so utterly full of crap, they wouldn’t have to work so hard to come up with excuses not to deal with it.
If the ID is legit, then gaming it wouldn’t present a problem. Ethics changes nothing. ID the perp or not.
A longer article by Stanley Fish that the NYT published (copy available here if the proprietor will grant me my first infraction of the year) is even more remarkable for what it presages.
First, of course, is the downward spiral of the NYT into faux-worldly navel gazing. “Baseball and science may be both social constructions, but not all social constructions are the same. ”
More interesting may be what Stanley dourly predicted might happen: “[Sokal] carefully packaged his deception so as not to be detected except by someone who began with a deep and corrosive attitude of suspicion that may now be in full flower in the offices of learned journals because of what he has done. ”
If only Stanley had been correct about the attitude of suspicion — if more journals and news sources decided to trust but verify — we might not now be completely awash in fake news.
Stanley is completely correct, of course, that great accomplishments require great trust. But he is likewise completely wrong about Sokal’s ethics and legacy. Lasting trust has always been backed by social sanctions and force. Systems are destroyed not by showing how easily they are gamed, but by subsequent failure to make them more resilient.
Great failures as well. The trick is distinguishing between the two, not blindly trusting every bit of idiocy being spewed out there. But that said, I don’t buy it at all. Why approach any idea with a preconceived “side,” whether trusting or skeptical?
Fish’s claim that the parody (he calls it a deception) could only be detected by someone with a “deep and corrosive attitude of suspicion.” Bullshit. Sokal wrote gibberish, strings of jargon that meant nothing, and none of the intellectuals noticed something was wrong? That’s not trust. Just plain old bullshit.
In the sciences, we call these people “peer reviewers”.
And in chip design we call them “verification engineers.” Some of them get paid pretty good money, because when you spend millions on a mask set, and then have to wait 6 weeks for the chip to come back, unhappiness abounds if it doesn’t work.
In law, we call them “competent attorneys.”
Quoth Jennifer Ruark:
With humblest apologies to Francis Pharcellus Church:
Yes, Jennifer, Trump is quite real.
He exists where free men make a deal.
Let no hoax doubts encumber
Your dreams as you slumber,
Imagine how good you will feel!
When the wokest-er than thou start to seethe
that zombie hoaxes live and breathe,
do not be alarmed;
remember those armed
are among the least likely to believe.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”
— Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Evergreen, yet Ginsberg.