Talk:Alan Sokal

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Don't be daft, Aneris[edit]

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?[edit]

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[edit]

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[edit]

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)
FWIW, in the early 2000s I found a couple of post-modernism textbooks in a thrift store and decided to buy them to see what the fuss was all about. When I cracked them open I quickly realized that they appeared to be impenetrable. I got that uncomfortable feeling I would get whenever I opened a manual for some complex piece of technology. The feeling that would make me want to put down the manual and just start playing with the tech. But with the post-modernism textbooks, if I put them down, that was it - there was no piece of machinery I could play with to figure it out, doing an end-run around the manual. So I started looking up words, checking the footnotes, etc. Eventually it started making sense, at least in the sense that I started to understand what the author was trying to say. I didn't agree with a lot of it, a lot of it seemed like a reach, but some of it was truly thought provoking. But figuring it out was tedious. And thinking about it now, as well as thinking about what the Social Text editors were up against when they faced Sokal's article, I am reminded of Brandolini's Law. That's the one that says, "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." Putting the hoax in that light, the Social Text editors had little to no chance of unraveling Sokal's BS. They would've had to spend far more time and effort to do so than any sane person would, just to reach the goal of rejecting it. By the same token, if an order of magnitude bigger is required to sort out bullshit, then it would take a similar amount of effort to sort out text so dense that it could be bullshit, but might not be, which is what post-modern philosophy will appear as to those who haven't been introduced to it in small, digestible amounts over periods of time, in other words, in a classroom setting. So really, the Sokalists were not willing to put in the effort that would have been required to find validity in post-modernism just as the Social Text editors were not willing to put in the effort that would have been required to find the invalidity of Sokal's article. The whole affair was just one big Brandolini's Law clusterfuck, from both directions! 2A0D:BBC7:0:0:F816:3EFF:FE83:FA45 (talk) 08:21, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Incoherent sentence[edit]

This sentence is incoherent:

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

— Unsigned, by: FairDinkum / talk / contribs

Misleading[edit]

In 1994, Sokal authored the article Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was riddled with errors and nonsense obvious to everyone with an undergraduate's understanding of physics. Among other revelations, the piece posits 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." He asserted that gravity was a social construct.[3] Sokal submitted the work to Social Text, suspecting it would be published because it was suffused with postmodernist jargon coupled with science-y sounding terms and equations that flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions. As a result of the affair, Social Text was awarded the dubious honor of an Ig Nobel Prize in literature for "eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist."[4]

This narrative of what took place leaves a lot to be desired. The editors of Social Text paint a different picture of what took place, which paints a picture of Alan Sokal acting in bad faith:

From the first, we considered Sokal's unsolicited article to be a little hokey. It is not every day we receive a dense philosophical tract from a professional physicist. Not knowing the author or his work, we engaged in some speculation about his intentions, and concluded that the article was the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field.

...

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 philosophical 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 science, 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 published in the company of related articles.

Instead, they ultimately decided to publish his work in a special issue of their journal focusing on the science wars itself. They still thought Sokal's text was "hokey," but thought it would be of interest to readers interested in a wider variety of perspectives on the debate. Antares (talk) 08:21, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Well done, Antares. You've done yeoman's work here, the kind that only appears on RW a few times a year, at best, but should appear a few times a day. I read the material at the link you provided, and I found it to be a fascinating time capsule of a time and event that seems hopelessly naive in retrospect. Reading it over has given me a much more thorough understanding of the 'hoax', verifying most of what I suspected, but also giving me new insight into its legacy. It does, indeed, seem that Sokal was acting mostly in bad faith and did not represent his 'prank' accurately. However, the editors of Social Text are not entirely undeserving of criticism, though not the criticism generated the various responses to the Lingua Franca article.
When they chose to publish Sokal's article the Social Text editors apppeared to have been hoping that Sokal, as a representitive of 'hard science' might have been reaching out to them as an ally, one that they must've felt they very much benefit from, as post-modern philosophy was under attack from the 'hard science' crowd and if they were guilty of anything it was the wishful thinking that they had found someone prepared to offer an olive branch from that milieu. They were willing to overlook the sloppiness of Sokal's article, wanting so badly to believe that they had found a sympathetic ear in Sokal.
But here's what I find most interesting: what happened to this part of the 'science wars'? What happened to the so-called scourge of post-modernism? That's a rhetorical question; time has revealed the true intentions of the so-called hard-science critics of post-modernism. In the Lingua Franca letters the complaint of the time is made clear: That within post-modern philosophy lies a strain of thought that denies the existence of 'the external world'. Yet only a few radical post-modern scholars even go there. The Sokal-cheerleaders acted as if post-modern philosophy represented a direct attack on science because of an obscure strain of pomo. That criticism seems rather hypocritical now that we know about all sorts of hard-science-credentialed cranks with tenure proclaiming to have validated all sorts of woo. Rather than go after the offenders in their midst, the Sokalists lazily went after the low-hanging fruit in humanities, from across an academic chasm so deep that they were no better at sorting out post-modern philosophy than Social Text was able to see the folly of mathematical and physics constructs Sokal peppered his hoax paper with.
But wait, I haven't made my point yet. So what happened to the scourge of post-modernism? We only have to look at the next debacle, the copycat 'grievance studies' hoax. Finally it all comes into focus in the social wars of the 21st century. The academics who bemoaned the proliferation of post-modernism finally reveal their true intentions: They weren't going after post-modernism to shore up science in the face of the actual Science Wars, between science and christian conservative assaults on evolution. All along they were allies of that group. They conspired with the conservative attackers to attack academia, and in turn, science. Their true target wasn't post-modernism, it was gender studies, it was critical race theory. The Sokal hoax only served to muddy the waters in the interm, until all of the components of the Frankensteined MAGA movement could be pieced together, by thoroughly subverting the technology of the internet. Viewing the Sokal hoax from the lens of 2025, we can clearly see that the Sokalists were the exact opposite of the defenders of hard science and 'external reality' that they pretended to be. They are, perhaps, even more sinister than the christian factions they acted as a Trojan Horse for, because at least the intelligent design crowd promoted their point of view directly. 2A06:1700:0:47:0:0:0:166 (talk) 09:10, 2 October 2025 (UTC)