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Topic: Sokal Affair

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	Sokal Affair - ArticleWorld (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Sokal maintained that the journal’s editors had a moral duty towards their readers: to verify all material submitted to them and that the journal had ignored intellectual rigor.
		They charged Sokal with unethical behavior, to which Sokal responded by saying that that was the whole point: the lit-crit today is doing more damage by pandering to scientists who merely flatter the editors agenda, but do not seek to bring real science and sociology of science to the reader.
		While Sokal was criticized by the postmodernists for his lack of, according to them, a basic understanding of their principles, Sokal did make his point to Social Text and similar journals that did away with peer review.
	www.articleworld.org /index.php/Sokal_Affair (550 words)

	The Sokal Affair
		Nonchalantly stating that physical reality is "at bottom a social and linguistic construct", Sokal goes on to perform spectacular leaps of imagination connecting feminism with the axiom of choice and "the pi of Euclid" with the "G of Newton".
		Secondly Sokal was careful to follow a certain law of academic life: it is impossible to excessive in the flattery of one's peers.
		Sokal himself was careful to distance himself from supporters who claimed that the entire facade of relativism, postmodernism and perhaps even the left itself, had been completely demolished.
	www.ocf.berkeley.edu /~abhishek/sokal.html (716 words)

	Mano Singham's Web Journal: Science and trust – 3: The Sokal affair
		Sokal argued that this was the whole point: the journal published articles not on the basis of whether they were correct or made sense, but simply because of who wrote them and how they sounded.
		If Sokal had not exposed his own hoax, what would have most likely happened is that the article would have either been ignored (since it had no content most readers would have been simply baffled by it) or at some time later, a more discerning reader would have exposed it as a fraud.
		Sokal himself is aware ethical issues involved because he says: "Of course, I'm not oblivious to the ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment.
	blog.case.edu /mxs24/2005/08/29/science_and_trust_a_3_the_sokal_affair (950 words)

	The Sokal Affair
		One suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve.
		Whether Sokal's article would have been declared substandard by a physicist peer reviewer is debatable (it is not, after all, a scholarly contribution to the discipline of physics) but not finally relevant to us, at least not according to the criteria we employed.
		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 science, expected extensive documentation of this sort.
	attachment.edu.ar /socialtext.html (2038 words)

	BBC - h2g2 - The Sokal Affair
		Sokal had deliberately taken a patchwork of near-meaningless interpretations and extrapolations and stitched them together with a series of non-sequiturs and howlers that any undergraduate student in mathematics or physics would have been able to detect.
		Sokal came clean in another journal, Lingua Franca, in which he admitted the entire affair was a hoax.
		Sokal indulged in satire, and in doing so, showed that not only did the authors not understand a word of what they were talking about, but neither did their editors
	www.bbc.co.uk /dna/actionnetwork/A2671733 (1539 words)

	postmodernism: Sokal affair
		Sokal's satire was intended essentially to expose sloppy scholarship and the spouting of nonsense.
		Sokal's point is, as he explains it, not to mock humanists who get all addled when they speak of Gödel or Einstein, but rather to 'defend the canons of rationality and intellectual honesty which are (or should be) common to both the exact and the human sciences'.
		Thus science, whether Sokal likes it or not, is not immutable and is not immune from changing paradigms of knowledge and inquiry, which themselves are not immune from influences from outside the scientific community.
	www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk /MUHome/cshtml/general/sokal.html (1257 words)

	Kenan Malik's debate with Steve Fuller on the Sokal hoax
		Sokal himself suggested that if sociologists really believed the laws of gravity to be a social construction, he was happy for them to jump out of his window on the 23rd floor.
		It is all too easy to see the Sokal debate as a clash of the 'two cultures': On the one side natural scientists deriding social scientists for accepting nonsense as good academic coin; on the other humanities scholars accusing scientists of creating myths about science.
		If there are two cultures involved in the Sokal affair they are shoddy scholarship on the one side and an attempt at rational thought on the other.
	www.kenanmalik.com /essays/sokal.html (3063 words)

	No Title
		Sokal himself is sympathetic to the left politically and had taught at the University in Nicaragua during the Sandinista government.
		Sokal clearly distinguishes himself from a powerful critique of post-modernist positions on science by a section of scientists who are politically more to the right.
		The debate around the Sokal affair, confined mainly to U.S. academic circles and the media is of relevance to science everywhere.
	www.imsc.res.in /~jayaram/Sokal/sok1/sok1.html (2108 words)

	The Sokal affair: OpEd
		Aronowitz said in the Times that Sokal was "ill-read and half-educated." These responses fanned the flames, as you'd expect, and the ensuing commentary -- article after article in newspapers and journals of opinion cheering Sokal's hoax -- showed that he'd struck a responsive chord.
		On March 21, the Sokal affair -- as it's come to be called -- arrived in the flesh in our home town.
		The pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point.
	www.psc.edu /~schneide/sokal.html (1422 words)

	The Sokal Affair - Articles (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Sokal Affair: Gary Chapman on the case of the prankster physicist.
		Questions whether Sokal "showed that the cultural study of science was intellectually suspect and ignorant of the science it purports to study".
		Boundaries in the Sokal Affair." "...This affair provides a solid ground for studying the relations between language and cultural categories, along with an opportunity to examine the notions of fraud/transgression, falsehood, and the role of the implicite part of language.
	www.drizzle.com /~jwalsh/sokal/articles/articles.html (1049 words)

	Idiot Savants? - Salon
		One candidate was Sokal's object of scorn Bruno Latour; the other, Norman Wise, has credentials in both science and history and conceives of himself as a Science Wars nonpartisan, but was campaigned against partially on the basis of an exchange over the Sokal affair.
		Sokal and Bricmont's tone in "Fashionable Nonsense" changes from semitolerant to fatigued as they conclude again and again that this is meaningless, that is ill-defined, this other is obfuscatory.
		Sokal's hoax and the challenging, often witty papers he wrote to reveal and then defend it, which are included in the appendix, made the same points better.
	dir.salon.com /story/books/it/1998/11/02/cov_02feature/index.html?pn=2 (1931 words)

	Culture Relativism, Science Studies, and the Sokal Affair
		I show, by reference to Stanly Fish' own account of the case, how the Sokal Affair was a result of a culture relativist practice that suffers from the flaws I outline in section 2.
		[16] In the hoax, Sokal claims that a particular theory within physics known as "quantum gravity" is a "postmodern" theory with a liboratory potential.
		Sokal, who calls himself a "leftist in the old fashioned sense", wrote the paper, according to himself, in order to save the Left from an academic subculture that has developed an intelectually sloppy and arrogant style.
	folk.uio.no /lrisan/Sokal/sokal.html (5134 words)

	Affair
		An affair is a euphemism for a situation where two people are involved in an illicit sexual, romantic and/or passionate attachment, usually for a limited duration.
		The euphemism is also applied to marital infidelity where one partner has an outside sexual relationship: a liaison[?].
		Affairs in the political sense may be any kind of involvement in illicit business by any kind by public representatives, such as in the Watergate affair.
	www.ebroadcast.com.au /lookup/encyclopedia/af/Affair.html (83 words)

	The Sokal Hoax
		In part Sokal's criticism is implicit in the hoax itself -- acceptance of the article is symptomatic of the mindless, shallow, personality-obsessed ideology that exemplifies the type of thought and writing that Sokal sought to expose.
		Sokal (apparently proudly) proclaims his own credentials when he writes "I'm a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua)." Admirable though this may be (the teaching, that is) we have no idea what this has to do with being "leftist".
		The Sokal hoax remains a defining event in late-20th century American academia, and this collection, along with Sokal's Fashionable Nonsense, is part of the essential documentation of this sad and sorry affair.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/sokala/theshoax.htm (2261 words)

	Sokal Affair
		The Sokal Affair refers to an incident in 1996 when Professor Alan Sokal[?], a physicist at New York University, submitted a deliberately pseudoscientific paper for publication in an academic journal of cultural studies.
		This caused an academic scandal, both at Duke University (where Social Text is published) and for Sokal himself, as charges of unethical behaviour were levelled.
		By his use of parody in statements like 'mathematics has "nineteenth-century liberal origins"' and 'the gravitational constant of Newton is mired in "ineluctable historicity"', Sokal claimed to be demonstrating that some academics will gladly trade intellectual rigour for "what sounds good".
	www.ebroadcast.com.au /lookup/encyclopedia/so/Sokal_Affair.html (356 words)

	Sokal's Experiment
		Sokal and his experiment have been widely publicized, gaining stories and editorials in all the major newspapers and even an interview on National Public Radio.
		In addition, volumes of commentary on the Sokal Affair have been written by both supporters and opponents of Sokal, including articles by such luminaries as Stanley Fish, an advocate of political correctness at Duke, and Steve Fuller, who has written a number of books on postmodern thought.
		Sokal's hoax can be looked at in one of two ways, as proof that science studies is rotten to the core with mindless babble, or simply as a vehicle to stimulate further discussion on the subject.
	cti.itc.virginia.edu /~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/sokesay.htm (2894 words)

	Sokal 1
		Similarly, a friend who teaches an Introduction to Pomo course told me that even after hearing that Sokal's article was a parody and then re-reading the piece, she nonetheless still thought that the article was excellent and instructive.
		She sees Sokal's piece as a good example of the genre which was manipulatively constructed by someone playing a bad joke, but which, since it was such a good copy, has a lot of worth anyhow.
		In his own words, via email, Sokal reports that "the content and style [of the article] was intended to be an imitation (in some respects exaggerated, in some respects more modest than the genre) of the sloppy thinking and argument that is prevalent (albeit not universal) in the various communities I was parodying.
	www.zmag.org /ScienceWars/sokal_1.htm (3759 words)

	SALON Daily Clicks: Media Circus
		Sokal wants to reclaim the legacy of the Enlightenment, which the academic Left in its current fuzzy, fake-multicultural, didactic guise has foolishly turned against.
		Sokal will no doubt be smeared as a reactionary for having the effrontery to place a whoopi cushion under the Supreme Throne of Post-Modernist Progressive Rectitude.
		But as Sokal points out, "the blow that can't be brushed off is the one that's self-inflicted." Maybe his little hoax will be the pin that will finally let some hot air out of the counter-phallocentric balloon.
	www.salon.com /media/media960517.html (620 words)

	Stanley Fish
		If you have not been following the "Sokal affair"--Alan Sokal's "experiment" to see if the editors of the journal Social Text could identify nonsense when it was submitted to them (with negative results: they could not identify deliberate nonsense)--you have missed the most delicious academic joke of the decade.
		Sokal is an ignorant jackanapes who should stick to physics and not involve himself in the complex subtleties of the New Epistemology.
		Sokal's hoax was designed to discredit those who are trying to save the environment from total destruction.
	econ161.berkeley.edu /Teaching_Folder/Fish.html (856 words)

	Alan Sokal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Alan David Sokal (born 1955) is a professor of physics and faculty member of the mathematics department at New York University.
		Politically leftist, Sokal is an outspoken critic of the Left's "penchant for subjectivism" in the humanities.
		Sokal A. Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Alan_Sokal (421 words)

	PostMortem: Post vs. Postmodern (The Sokal Affair)
		Moreover, Sokal now erroneously uses the word "subjectivist" to describe the position staked out in the original article, even though this contradicts everything he said there about postmodernism's "decentering" of the subject.
		It seemed that Sokal knew when to `shut up', to echo The Post's elegant expression, which implies that he recognized that there were some standards he had to meet which went beyond flattering the editors and their cronies.
		At the same time, however, it might not be such a bad idea for scientists to master some basics in the history and sociology of science before they attempt to mobilize it in a public forum to legitimate a pet project.
	www.imsc.res.in /~jayaram/Sokal/fuller.html (912 words)

	The Sokal Affair (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University.
		On the day of publication Sokal announced in Lingua Franca that the article had in fact been a hoax.
		Sokal, the reply from the Social Text editors, the response from Stanley Fish and the discussions in the Nation, the Times Higher Education Supplement, Tikkun and recently, the Times Literary Supplement.
	www.drizzle.com /~jwalsh/sokal (242 words)

	What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us
		It appeared in April 1996, in a special double issue of the journal devoted to rebutting the charge that cultural studies critiques of science tend to be riddled with incompetence.
		Sokal's hoax is fast acquiring the status of a classic succes de scandale, with extensive press coverage in the United States and to a growing extent in Europe and Latin America.
		Whatever the correct explanation for the current malaise, Alan Sokal's hoax has served as a flashpoint for what has been a gathering storm of protest against the collapse in standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility that vast sectors of the humanities and social sciences are currently afflicted with.
	www.nyu.edu /gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html (3637 words)

	The Sokal Affair beneath the surface (by L. Proyect)
		I was the first to speak and denounced the conference organizers as excluding the Sokal point of view and running a bunch of postmodernist bullshit down our throats.
		This was astonishing to me. How could Alan Sokal have become regarded as some kind of defender of Marxist rectitude when he had utterly no engagement with the main experts in the field.
		Alan Sokal surfaces as a defender of classical Marxism, when he actually has next to zero familiarity with the basic ideas of Marxism.
	www.columbia.edu /~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/sokal2.htm (2891 words)

	Salon Ivory Tower \| Idiot Savants?
		Of course, in America "the Sokal affair" is reprising a two-year-old controversy that has gripped humanists and social scientists, academics and journalists, leftists and conservatives.
		Sokal and Bricmont do not attempt to assess the validity of their subjects' work, stating that they lack the necessary expertise.
		Sokal and Bricmont's polemics are part of a three-year-old conflict that some have dubbed "The Science Wars," in which cultural theorists and scientists began battling it out over each other's epistemological claims.
	archive.salon.com /it/feature/1998/11/cov_02feature.html (1138 words)

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