Alan Sokal
“”Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)
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| —Alan Sokal |
Alan Sokal is an American physicist and mathematician. He is well known for his criticism of postmodernism, and was an important figure in the so-called "science wars" of the 1990s.
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[edit] The Sokal Affair
Sokal is mainly famous for the Sokal affair of 1996. Sokal wrote an article, Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was riddled with errors and nonsensicalities obvious to everyone with a basic understanding of physics. The article states amongst other things that reality doesn't exist, that an increasing number of natural scientists were converting to postmodernist relativism, and that these developments would lead to a 'liberatory science', which basically meant that the scientific method would be replaced by left-wing propaganda. Sokal tried to get it published in the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text to see if they would accept it, considering that it used postmodernist jargon and flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions.
[edit] Hoax
Shortly after, Sokal published an article in Lingua Franca revealing his article was a hoax. He claimed his main motivation was not so much to defend science against the onslaught of postmodernism, but rather to "defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself." According to Sokal, denying absolute truths exist will undermine any campaign for left wing causes. In the past left wing academics would point out many of society's justifications for social wrongs like racism or sexism were based on assertions that could not stand up to scrutiny, but if the postmodernists get their way there's no reason why an advocate of woman's rights or racial equality would be (factually and morally) better than a racist and sexist troglodyte.
It is worth noting that "Social Text" is not a peer reviewed journal, and that its editorial policy was explicitly to take risks by publishing more controversial research with the knowledge that it could backfire.
Expanding on the theme, Sokal published Fashionable Nonsense (together with Jean Bricmont) in 1998 and Beyond the Hoax in 2008. Sokal argues most of the postmodernist claims regarding science are based on sloppy reasoning, mistaking scientific and everyday definitions of certain terms and simple misunderstanding of the scientific method. Postmodernist critics of Sokal generally argue that he misunderstands the works he criticizes, a charge he largely admits, claiming in turn that he is not critiquing the works at large, merely their misappropriation of science. One particular problem to note when citing Sokal in an argument with a postmodernist is that Sokal denies the possibility that postmodernist use of science could be metaphorical, as he claims that the only purpose of a metaphor or an analogy is to illustrate an unfamiliar concept with a familiar one, and that uses of difficult science would not accomplish this goal. This is not a premise accepted by most mainstream postmodernists.
Sokal also accuses postmodernist 'science studies' of applying double standards: while they claim natural scientists have no right to claim their findings are based on truth, they do not seem to make a big problem out of the doubtful justifications for their own claims.
[edit] Concluding remarks
As with many criticisms of postmodernism, or of nearly any defined movement, it is important to recognize that criticisms leveled at the most extreme and dogmatic representatives of the movement often fail to generalize out to the whole - a large number of (indeed, likely most) postmodernists are in fact perfectly sensible people who acknowledge that empirical reality exists and who recognize that science is actually extremely useful for things like curing diseases and keeping us all from freezing to death.