Talk:Alan Sokal

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Don't be daft, Aneris

Removing a claim because you pretend the largely fundamentalist-driven war on science didn't occur, especially when that phenomenon has an embedded link to our own article on the topic, is tendentious in the extreme.---Mona- (talk) 22:00, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Not unusual around here, but there's nothing "tendentious to the extreme" or daft about it, more amusing. Please inform yourself, and correct the article again once you did, or leave it like that for fun. My edit here: I replaced the Christian “war on science" with the correct "science wars" (which was the "war" Sokal fought in the 1990s) ~ Aneris 22:24, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

My apologies. I'd thought I remembered that Sokal had earlier criticized creationisats but I'm finding material stating he wasn't involved in that. There was, as our article states, a war also coming from Xtian fundamentalists, but Sokal wasn't active on that front. (Creationists and postmodernists had even started saying nice things about each other in a weird solidarity.)---Mona- (talk) 22:37, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

You realize you reverted my correction and the article now remains wrong? Also, even if Sokal were somehow involved with combating creationists, he's really famous for his spat with postmodernists (which you know well, too), which is in addition very much the "science wars" that are associated with the 1990. Nobody is suggesting the "war on science" from Creationists didn't happen, but it's really not the thing around Sokal. You want to keep it wrong? ~ Aneris 23:33, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Right, I changed it to be accurate.---Mona- (talk) 00:50, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Just sticking my head in here to say: Aneris was indeed correct to change my edit; I had mistakenly linked to the "wrong" war on science. Although, in some sense, they're all part of the "same war" on Science, since they're all wrong in the same way in relation to it... But I digest. Point remains - ya both did good, champs! My bad; carry on. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 18:48, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Is there no article about "Losada line: the positivity ratio" on the wiki?

Losada line (or Losada ratio, so-called the positivity ratio, now Critical positivity ratio) was criticized by Alan Sokal and two researchers; It's woo-ish before the criticism. - 211.131.37.92 (talk) 08:48, 4 November 2019 (UTC)

Removed Some Criticism of Sokal's Criticism of Ingaray

I've removed the recent edits by User:Oda86 which defend the Ingaray quote criticized by Sokal and Bricmont on the following grounds:

1. First, the discussed issues/counter-criticisms with the quote were already addressed in the relevant chapter of Fashionable Nonsense. To quote the book "the fact remains that the relationship E=Mc2 between energy (E) and mass (M) is experimentally verified to a high degree of precision, and it would obviously not be valid if the speed of light (c) were replaced by another speed."

2. Regarding it being an "ad-hoc" discussion, Ingaray herself has repeated it and reprinted it in other works (this is also mentioned in Fashionable Nonsense), so she presumably thinks it is a good example, not a poor one she made on the spur of the moment.

3. Bricmont is a native French speaker, lectures at a French-speaking university, and Fashionable Nonsense was originally published in French; the suggestion that the French-speaking authors didn't understand Ingaray's quote because the original was in French doesn't add up.

4. The entire section about Ingaray's quote is out of all proportion to the relevance to the subject of this page, which is Alan Sokal.

My edit was reverted by User:GrammarCommie after one minute. I feel it should stand because of the above reasons. We could add the above into the page but I think the section is already too long, see 4 above. ^{— Unsigned, by: Synapse / talk / contribs}

@Synapse I mainly reverted it because you removed both a section and the reflist, which I original took to be mere vandalism. It was also made durring a vandal spree, so that probably contributed to my decision. If you remove the section again, please leave the reflist. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 17:04, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

@GrammarCommie I was about to make the changes when I saw that a new user "Synapse2" has been created and reverted the page (and your re-re-re-revert). That user is NOT ME. I'll leave everything alone until the vandalism spree quietens down. :( Synapse (talk) 17:22, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

@Synapse It's fine so long as you don't remove the reflist again. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 17:34, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Hot Take Incoming

I'm frankly skeptical that the Sokal affair has had any significant benefit to any intellectual discipline. Has it helped improve physics? Post-modernists weren't exactly invading science. What about sociology or even philosophy? Not as far as I know. The main result of it that I've seen is people dismissing post-modernists and relatively obscure academics. That's great if you think post-modernism is a sham, but it's far too broad a movement to toss out all of it, in my opinion. The people who talk about the Sokal affair, in my experience, are overwhelmingly reactionaries who adopt a naive realist perspective on everything and merely want to dunk on the Left.

To be perfectly clear, the affair in question did invariably expose issues in peer review and publishing within academia. But I don't think the Sokal affair can be said to have had any significant sway on the improvement of those practices, because it continues to be an absolute mess.

I'm also not suggesting any changes here. Nor it is a criticism of Sokal or Bricmont. Just sharing a perspective. Monochroma (talk) 02:29, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

To be absolutely fair, reactionaries today like to talk more about the grievance studies hoax than anything (unsure if just because 4chan dwellers have a built-in recentism bias, or because that was supposed to expose everything and everyone all the way down to sociology). And while I can see why and how they might reclaim the original Sokal hoax too (illiteracy and motivated reasoning are bad beasts), that existed in a completely different context from today. Real academicians were involved (intersectionally to political affiliation), and you can trace genuine annoyance with meaningless obscurantist verbiage all the way back to Schopenhauer's complaints that most of his famous German peers were braggarts that did more negative service than good to philosophy. And Sokal himself was very much restrained in discussing the implications.
This premised, I'm not sure how you think Transgressing the Boundaries could have said anything about academic publishing and peer-review, when Social Text did none in the first place? On top of the fact that I don't think it was really that big of a publication, and that the only reason they hadn't yet rejected the garbage paper was exactly that they really assumed good faith from this newbie physicist.
Nonetheless, even if to the minimum extent, the affair still shows what it aimed to do: even discounting that they took for granted the quantum physics parts, the veiled use of imaginative metaphors referencing minorities or condemning discrimination or systems of power was enough to call it a day. Even assuming you aren't a professional grifter making a living out of sophistry, it underlines a different relationship with epistemology whereas something wrong but with good intentions behind is still better than nothing.
p.s. some argue this actually also helped indirectly to improve physics --Mirh (talk) 14:25, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

It's ironic, really, that all the Sokal affair does is demonstrate that social institutions are subject to social flaws, which is, you know, pretty po-mo according to some losers. It's also a no-brainer. Carthage (talk) 03:10, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Incoherent sentence

This sentence is incoherent:

"Pointing out that that does not make "convey clear meaning.""

^{— Unsigned, by: FairDinkum / talk / contribs}