On appelle « Affaire Sokal » l’ensemble de controverses que suscitèrent la publication en 1996 d’une parodie écrite par un physicien américain, Alan Sokal, puis, en 1997, de l’ouvrage Impostures intellectuelles, qu’il co-signa avec un physicien belge, Jean Bricmont. Dans Retours sur l’Affaire Sokal¸ des historiens des sciences reviennent sur cette affaire. Ils montrent qu’elle recouvre différentes controverses et qu’il faut distinguer ces dernières non seulement selon la nature des écrits qui les ont occasionnées, (...) mais aussi en fonction des questions abordées, et peut-être surtout des manières de concevoir et pratiquer les échanges intellectuels. Les auteurs analysent en particulier ces controverses en France, aux États-Unis et au Royaume-Uni ; ils examinent aussi la façon dont ont été traités la relation entre le domaine scientifique et le domaine littéraire ou l’usage des métaphores en sciences. (shrink)

I did not write this work merely with the aim of setting the exegetical record straight. My larger target is those contemporaries who -- in repeated acts of wish-fulfillment -- have appropriated conclusions from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety of social cum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted. Feminists, religious apologists (including ``creation scientists''), counterculturalists, neoconservatives, and a host of other curious fellow-travelers have claimed to find crucial grist (...) for their mills in, for instance, the avowed incommensurability and underdetermination of scientific theories. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time. (shrink)

En 1996, la publication aux États-Unis du " vrai-faux " article du physicien américain Alan Sokal, visant à dénoncer sur le mode du canular les ravages intellectuels opérés, selon lui, par le " postmodernisme ", puis la parution en France en 1997 du livre rédigé avec Jean Bricmont (Impostures intellectuelles), ont défrayé la chronique. Pour ces auteurs, il était urgent de dénoncer les " extrapolations abusives des sciences exactes aux sciences humaines " d'intellectuels comme Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean (...) Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari et Paul Virilio, et plus encore de critiquer le " relativisme " des chercheurs de la nouvelle école de sociologie des sciences, au premier rang desquels Bruno Latour. Apparemment frappée au coin du bon sens, cette attaque frontale a rencontré un très large écho. Et pourtant, les impostures ne sont pas du côté qu'on croit. Car le positivisme revendiqué par Sokal et Bricmont cache en fait une profonde incompréhension des auteurs qu'ils attaquent et une surprenante ignorance des enjeux politiques et philosophiques majeurs révélés par les travaux sur les " sciences dures " des chercheurs des " sciences douces " Il était donc indispensable de démonter les impostures et les malentendus de l'affaire "Sokal": tel est l'objectif de ce livre, qui réunit des contributions originales de chercheurs de divers horizons - physiciens, philosophes des sciences, anthropologues... Non sans humour, ils entendent faire partager au lecteur leur commune passion pour la science telle qu'elle se fait (beaucoup plus intéressante que la science mythique de certains scientifiques), et plaident pour une réconciliation entre philosophes et physiciens, pour en finir enfin avec la " guerre des sciences ". (shrink)

En este artículo se presentan algunas reflexiones en torno a la ciencia y el uso de lenguaje por parte de ésta tomando el affaire Sokal como pretexto. A través de esta parodia tratamos de destacar la visión que del discurso científico poseen los llamados “neocientíficos” y cómo este enfoque lingüístico se utiliza más que para caracterizar a dicha comunidad para separarla de su supuesta antagonista: la comunidad humanística.

Los límites entre las humanidades y las ciencias se han desplazado y traspasado en innumerables ocasiones en las últimas décadas. El uso de la ciencia en los estudios humanísticos y de la metáfora cultural en los científicos está abundantemente documentado. Fértiles en especial han sido, por ejemplo, las teorías de la termodinámica (entropía), de la topología, de las catástrofes y de los fractales. El físico y matemático Alan Sokal, sin embargo, denunció la instrumentalización abusiva de la ciencia por ciertos (...) teóricos de la literatura, filósofos y psicoanalistas, entre otros. El escándalo provocado por Sokal en 1996 oculta, no obstante, empleos legítimos de las ciencias por las humanidades, como el que Gaston Bachelard ilustró, tras despejar los obstáculos epistemológicos previos, con su creación de una poética de la materia. (shrink)

This affair has brought up an incredible number of issues, and I can't dream of addressing them all in 10 minutes, so let me start by circumscribing my talk. I don't want to belabor Social Text 's failings either before or after the publication of my parody: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. I won't go here into the ethical issues related to the propriety of hoaxing. I won't address the obscurantist prose and (...) the uncritical celebrity-worship that have infected certain trendy sectors of the American academic humanities. I won't enter into technical issues of the philosophy of science. I won't discuss the social role of science and technology. Indeed, I want to emphasize that this affair is in my view not primarily about science -- though that was the excuse that I used in constructing my parody -- nor is it a disciplinary conflict between scientists and humanists, who are in fact represented on all sides of the debate. What I believe this debate. (shrink)

The failure to consider the Sokal affair in light of other, related episodes has contributed to a wholesale misreading of its significance. The episode has often been offered as evidence for the bankruptcy of a broad and diverse collection offields, variously referred to as cultural studies of science, sociology of science, history of science, and science and technology studies. However, when viewed in context, the Sokal affair illustrates pre cisely why social scientific and humanistic studies of science are (...) necessary. To develop this argument, the author explicitly compares Alan Sokal's experiment with a similar experiment, performed by William M. Epstein and published in this very journal. Comparing the research questions, methods, ethics, and reception of these two experi ments not only reveals the limitations of Sokal's critique but also shows that Sokal has unwittingly endorsed one of the central lines of research in science and technology studies. (shrink)

El affaire Sokal muestra tener efectos importantes en las ciencias sociales. Sin embargo, estos mismos efectos pueden ser comprendidos adecuadamente por lo que puede ser inferido y lo que no puede serlo. Entre estos últimos podemos contar el fin de los estudios epistemológicos en las ciencias so..

The Sokal Affair created a huge debate in France in past years, about the social sciences, scientificity, and postmodernism. It was initiated with a “hoax article,” a false postmodern article published by Allan Sokal in the U.S. review Social Text, and a book copublished with Jean Bricmont, where the authors denounce the abusive borrowings of words and concepts from physics or biology by famous intellectuals such as Derrida, Kristeva, Virilio, Debray, and Latour. The debate presented a wide span (...) of positions, from methodological disagreement to approval. Finally, it poses important questions about the structure and the behavior of the scientific field. (shrink)

L’article « D’une Affaire aux autres » de Josquin Debaz et Sophie Roux, montre combien il est difficile de délimiter ce qu’on appelle « l’Affaire Sokal » et analyse, par un recensement aussi systématique que possible des articles de presse, la différence entre l’affaire américaine et l’affaire française.

The following text seeks to identify the origins of what has come to be called the Sokal hoax. It appears that these origins remain problematic insofar as they cannot be thought without engaging into intrinsically duplicitous thinking. Thus, « originally », the gesture of the hoax is indeed « productive and conflictive, and no self-identity, no unity, and no inherent simplicity can possibly precede it », as « he » said, but « he » was disseminating, as we say. (...) But that is precisely the « strength » of the « form » of the Sokal hoax. With the delicate question of origins as its stumbling block—a stumbling block which may also be the question of irony—, the present text takes its cue from an passage from La Barbarie à visage humain and proposes to reveal the constructive consequences of the affair triggered by the hoax, while constantly paying tribute to its performance. Whether my argument will make it possible to distinguish the consequences from the origins remains moot : post hoc ergo propter hoc. One must remember that this is a sophism. (shrink)

Sophie Roux confronte la critique du « sokalisme » qu’on trouve dans La Querelle des imposteurs d’Yves Jeanneret et la manière dont Impostures intellectuelles dessine le partage entre « littéraires » et « scientifiques ».

Neste artigo, relato os aspectos mais salientes do affair Sokal-Bricmont - uma paródia que evoluiu para uma crítica articulada dos excessos de um certo pensamento pós-modernista - e analiso algumas das reações que suscitou em artigos publicados na Folha de S. Paulo. Termino com algumas reflexões sobre a nefasta negligência para com as ciências exatas na educação em geral e, em particular, na formação dos profissionais das áreas de filosofia e ciências humanas.In this paper I summarize some of the (...) most relevant aspects of the so-called Sokal and Bricmont affair - a parody that evolved to a full-fledged criticism of the excesses of post-modernism - and analyze the reactions it elicited in some articles published in Folha de São Paulo. I close with a reflection on the unfortunate neglect of the exact sciences in education in general and, in particular, the education of philosophers and social scientists. (shrink)

La nouvelle sociologie des sciences réunit un ensemble d'études consacrées aux programmes de recherche dits " fort " et " constructiviste ". Ces programmes, véritables orthodoxies en sociologie des sciences, ont en commun de se focaliser sur le processus de la recherche et d'en donner une représentation singulière : " relativiste " pour le premier, " contingentiste " pour le second. Là où les ouvrages existants consacrés à ces programmes prennent essentiellement le parti de la description, il revendique celui de (...) l'analyse critique. Il propose une réflexion d'ensemble sur les limites de ces approches sociologiques et sur la représentation des sciences qui s'y rapportent : limites de la conception générale de l'explication sociologique et de ses applications, du caractère inédit de ses thèses et principes généraux, de la transposition de données et démarches venues de disciplines voisines, etc. L'ouvrage vient à la suite de l'affaire Sokal au cours de laquelle les représentants de la " nouvelle sociologie des sciences " ont été ouvertement pris à parti par une partie de la communauté scientifique. Il n'invite pas à l'abandon de l'analyse sociologique du processus de recherche mais à une redéfinition des modalités de cette analyse. (shrink)

The world around us has been shaped by science and man's relationship to it, and in recent years sociologists have been increasingly preoccupied with the latter. In Science in Society , Massimiano Bucchi provides a brief and approachable introduction to this sociological issue. Without assuming any scientific background, Bucchi provides clear summaries of all the major theoretical positions within the sociology of science, using many fascinating examples to illustrate them. Theories covered include Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific change, the sociology (...) of scientific knowledge, actor-network theory, and the social construction of technology. The second half of the book goes on to look at some recent public controversies over the role of science in the modern world including: · the Sokal affair, otherwise known as the science wars · debates over public understanding of science, such as global warming and genetically modified food · the implications of the human genomeproject. This highly readable text will be essential reading for all students studying the sociology of science. (shrink)

As I understand it, the Sokal affair is about affirmative action for ideas. Should arguments felt to be under-represented in the culture-at-large be admitted into prestigious haunts like Social Text even if they don't meet the standard intellectual tests? Alan Sokal got tired of what he saw as an excess of affirmative action in the ideas purveyed by cultural studies. So he devised a test in the form of a hoax: Could an author who deliberately met no standards (...) whatsoever make it into Social Text merely by parading past the judges their own sympathies, dressed up in a jargon they would recognize and citing these same judges as authoritative? The test came back positive. The issue, then, is what to make of the results. (shrink)

New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published in the postmodern humanities journal Social Text a parody entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity [1]. His point in doing so was to test whether the field of ``cultural studies of science'' was seriously lacking in ``intellectual standards.'' His article is nonsense from start to finish, but was still published. He revealed the hoax in another article in Lingua Franca [2]. The incident, and reactions to it, (...) now being called the Sokal Affair, have received wide coverage in The New York Times [3]. (shrink)

Christopher Herbert, provoked by the Alan Sokal affair and by bullying critiques of “relativism,” has written this study to demonstrate the prominence of relativistic thought in the sciences of the last two centuries. Although he draws back from any claim that relativity and its opposite, philosophical realism, lead of necessity to particular political positions, he associates the former with liberal tolerance and the latter with mandatory worship in a repressive “church of ‘absolute truth’”. Nazi physicists such as Philipp Lenard, (...) he argues, “knew better than to regard relativity as a ‘purely scientific matter,’ seeing it instead as a mode of awareness implacably hostile to their own”, and for him it is no less consequential.Herbert runs the risk, he allows, of incurring Sokal's laughter. “For the benefit of any reader who will be reassured by the admission, I will concede the methodological dangers of proceeding as I do in this book, constructing intellectual history out of a congeries of remote‐seeming texts on the strength of what may seem like freely interpretive reading, unbuttressed by claims of demonstrable direct ‘influence’”. His concession, however, is off the mark. Does anybody now regard “influence” as the only legitimate category of explanation in intellectual history? A serious argument for a common discourse, rooted perhaps in a shared reaction to contemporary events or circumstances, can provide sufficient justification for a wide‐ranging cultural account. But his study is held together by little more than a word, “relativity.” Did it really, as he implies, have the same meaning in the writings of Herbert Spencer as in those of Albert Einstein?Although it seems unpromising, the possibility cannot be excluded in principle. To make it plausible would require a searching investigation of their scientific aims, their philosophical positions, and perhaps also their political purposes. Einstein was a German, a mathematical physicist, whose political views tended to pacifism and socialism. Spencer, who worked at the intersection of biology and social science, sought a unifying principle in a progressive cosmic tendency to advance from homogeneity to heterogeneity and by the 1880s had grown bitterly resentful about the growth of the social state in Britain. It seems at first comical to construe them as allied in advocacy of the doctrine of Protagoras, as Herbert labels it, that man is the measure of all things. Herbert simply ignores considerations of this kind, and there is nothing deeper in the book to alter one's initial reaction. Instead, he reaches more widely, enlisting on the same relativistic team an improbable alliance of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, marginalist economics, Ernst Mach, Karl Pearson, quantum theory, Saussurean linguistics, and, in our own time, Richard Rorty and Jacques Derrida. Few opponents of this Victorian relativity are identified, for almost everyone has said something that can be associated with one or another meaning of “relativity.” In asides and footnotes, Herbert reaches back to the Enlightenment philosophes, and even to Hobbes, as relativistic progenitors. Well may Sokal laugh.Herbert is not a historian, but a literary theorist. He has this in common with the intolerant scientific realists he chastises: that he has composed a work of history—to which he indeed applies the name “intellectual history”—without bothering to canvass the historical scholarship. Would a great university press publish a book on the rise of the novel by an author who had never looked to literary scholarship, or on landscape painting by one who disdained to read art history? Herbert seems a perfectly decent fellow, but his book suggests that the arrogance of theory is fully a match for the arrogance of science. (shrink)

Metaphysics relies on the presupposition of the non-being of the world: since the world has once not existed it is necessary to postulate a cause for its existence, i.e. an extrinsic principle to explain the absolute beginning of the causal series of all things that constitute the world. After the critique of theologizing metaphysics by authors like Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, the notion of an absolute beginning still persists though in a field in which it often goes as such unnoticed, (...) while it factually enjoys wide acceptance, namely in epistemology. It sounds as a truism that knowledge begins: personal inexistence (birth-death cycle) and the phenomenon of unconsciousness (sleep-wake cycle) seem to endorse the obviousness of that statement. Now, to link the beginning of the phenomenal series of subjective acts of knowledge with the existence of an external world that causes the specific content of our temporary cognitive acts relies, however, on two presuppositions, namely on the thesis of a complete non-being or nothingness of knowledge and, intrinsically related to this first presupposition, on the thesis of an absolute beginning of cognitive activity. If knowledge begins from its own nothingness, there must be a cause that is external to the totality of acts of knowledge, a cause that it doesn´t belong to the series of cognitive acts and, therefore, that it is not caused by any of them: this uncaused cause of contentful knowledge is supposed to be the real world external to the knowing subject. In my paper I make explicit the relation between realist-empiricist approachs to epistemology and the double presupposition of the nothingness and absolute beginning of knowledge, I explain the difficulties implied by these two presuppositions and, finally, I propose as a plausible solution to those difficulties some key theoretical claims of absolute idealism. (shrink)

Like many other scientists, I was amused by news of the prank played by the NYU mathematical physicist Alan Sokal. Late in 1994 he submitted a sham article to the cultural studies journal Social Text, in which he reviewed some current topics in physics and mathematics, and with tongue in cheek drew various cultural, philosophical and political morals that he felt would appeal to fashionable academic commentators on science who question the claims of science to objectivity.

When I was a boy, I was friendly with a lad who lived a few doors away. We used to take bicycle rides together and have gunfights on the waste land and light fires and play scratch cricket. Our ways parted as our interests evolved in different directions. There were no hard feelings and, indeed, much residual good will. Roger (this is not his true name, which I shall withhold for the sake of his family) did not share any of (...) my own developing intellectual interests and I felt none of his love for sailing. I was surprised, therefore, when one evening my mother came across an interview with Roger in the Liverpool Echo in which he declared that his real passion was `cybernetics'. I felt that I had misjudged him and wondered whether, after all, we did have more in common than I had thought. The next time I ran into Roger, I asked him about his interest in cybernetics; more particularly, I asked him what `cybernetics' was. My ignorance was genuine, rather than assumed. To our embarrassment, we both discovered that Roger, too, was ignorant about the nature of cybernetics. For him, it was just a word. It had something to do with science and technology and the future and seemed rather glamorous and was much talked-about then. It was clearly just the thing to impress the readers of a provincial newspaper. I didn't pursue the matter and we saw little of each other subsequently. The last I heard of him, he was doing well as an estate agent. Poor Roger could not have expected that his comments about `cybernetics' would have been taken up (`interrogated', `problematised') by a reader of the Liverpool Echo. This was hard luck. Even more unjustly, he was not awarded a tenure-track post in humanities on the strength of his allusion to cybernetics, or a Chair in the Systems of Thought at the University of Paris. (shrink)

The debate over objectivity and relativism, science and postmodernism, which for the past eight months has been rocking American academic circles -- particularly those of the political left -- has apparently now arrived in France. And with what a bang! Following Denis Duclos..

Williams James’s 1903 election to the National Academy of Sciences has long been understood as well-deserved recognition for his scientific achievement and as evidence that other sciences had begun to accept the “new psychology” as a peer discipline. This note offers a detailed review of the complex course of events that led to James’s election – presented within the context of the Academy’s own history – that illustrates just how a variety of extra-scientific factors had a significant impact on this (...) tribute. It closes with a review of James’s own activities as an Academy member. (shrink)

Une des réactions qui m’a le plus surpris suite à la publication, avec Alan Sokal, d’ Impostures intellectuelles (1), c’est l’accusation qui nous a été faite d’être « positivistes ». En effet, nulle part nous ne défendons cette doctrine et, les rares fois où nous en parlons, c’est pour la critiquer. Néanmoins j’ai vite compris qu’il fallait distinguer entre positivisme et « positivisme », c’est-à-dire entre une doctrine philosophique complexe ayant prospéré à une certaine époque et à laquelle plus (...) personne n’adhère, du moins dans son intégralité, et une épithète qui est utilisée pour discréditer l’adversaire (2). Dans cet article, je voudrais brièvement expliquer certains aspects du positivisme tel qu’il a réellement existé, les difficultés que cette doctrine a rencontrées et l’héritage de cette tradition qui me semble défendable (et qui est en général facilement discrédité grâce à l’utilisation du label « positiviste »). Je me limiterai au positivisme « anglo-saxon », c’est-à-dire au Cercle de Vienne et à ses successeurs, qui est à la fois plus récent et plus influent, à l’échelle mondiale, que celui de Comte. De plus, j’isolerai de cet ensemble complexe de doctrines certains aspects.. (shrink)

oes anything exist outside culture? Is there anything that we do that is free of the distortions of our tastes and customs? That isn't irrevocably shaped by the languages we speak or our material interests? Is there anything out there that we can assume to be noncultural or transcultural or even universal?

Lorsque nous avons écrit notre petit livre dénonçant l’usage grossièrement abusif des concepts scientifiques par bon nombre d’intellectuels philosophico-littéraires français de premier plan 1, nous nous sentions comme des étrangers – et cela, à plus d’un titre– pénétrant dans un territoire neuf et parfois étrange, dont les habitants ne se sont pas tous montrés amicaux (c’est le moins qu’on puisse dire). Voilà pourquoi c’est avec grand plaisir que nous lisons aujourd’hui la défense vigoureuse – et le développement – de nos (...) idées, proposés dans Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie par Jacques Bouveresse. En outre, étant régulièrement accusés d’être anti-français et anti-philosophie, il nous est particulièrement agréable de constater que cette défense émane d’un éminent philosophe enseignant au Collège de France. (shrink)

The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London. His main research interests are in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. He is co-author with Roberto Fern´andez and J¨.

On many issues Robbins and I are in agreement. Science and technology are legitimate, indeed crucial, subjects of public critique and democratic debate. The funding of scientific research by private corporations poses grave dangers to scientific objectivity. (But to make this argument, one must first believe in objectivity as a goal; postmodernists and relativists don't.) Finally, cultural questions are as important as economic ones -- sometimes more so.

The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London. His main research interests are in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. He is co-author with Roberto Fern´andez and J¨.

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled: 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging (...) controversy. -/- Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention to a new set of targets - pseudo-science, religion, and misinformation in public life. 'Whether my targets are the postmodernists of the left, the fundamentalists of the right, or the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes, the bottom line is that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence, are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.' The book also includes a hugely illuminating annotated text of the Hoax itself, and a reflection on the furore it provoked. (shrink)

This paper provides a detailed account of the origins of the Psycho logical Review in 1894, of the policies and practices of its editors (James Mark Baldwin and James McKeen Cattell) during its first decade, and of the public and private disagreements that led them to dissolve their collaboration in 1904. In doing so, it sheds light on the significant roles played by specialized scientific journals in the development of specific scientific specialities, and illustrates the value for historical exploration of (...) (what anthropologists call) a 'thick description' of (what historians call) 'the fine texture of the past'. It argues that personal factors such as luck and character and temperament often have a greater impact on the way in which science actually evolves than do intellectual interests and concerns, and concludes with an analysis of the overwhelming signifi cance of this episode on the later careers of both Baldwin and Cattell. (shrink)

When it was published in France, this book shocked the philosophers of the Left Bank with its plain-speaking attack on some of France's greatest minds.

Intellectual Impostures , for example, written together with Jean Bricmont, the authors (hereafter S&B) criticise the way in which French poststructuralist critics, such as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, have abused the scientific terminology to which, Sokal claims, they exhibit slavish adherence. Many authors, such as Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, have taken up the cudgels against S&B. But their replies often miss the mark either by arguing at too abstract a level against S&B's project as a (...) whole or employing strategies and principles drawn from the self same body of texts which S&B criticize. In this article, by contrast, I reply to specific criticisms S&B direct against Lacan's use of topological concepts. By showing that S&B miss a perfectly reasonable, mathematically acceptable way of reading Lacan's appropriation of topology, I intend to raise more general doubts about S&B's erudition in connection with the works they criticise. (shrink)

Social Text , along with an explication of all the relatively minor errors and jokes planted in the article that would have been caught by the cognoscenti in physics. That alone has been sufficient to attract global media attention about the alleged lack of quality control in cultural studies scholarship. However, Sokal and Bricmont are out for bigger game. They want to trace these lapses from professionalism to a relativist philosophical sensibility, which in turn is held responsible for the (...) dissipation of the US academic left. Since I have dealt with the larger aspects of this thesis elsewhere (Fuller, 1999), I shall largely confine myself to the 'intermezzo' chapter four, where relativism is attacked directly on what are alleged to be philosophical grounds. (shrink)

Credit for squelching this peculiar trend goes largely to one man, NYU physicist -- and it should be mentioned, leftist -- Alan Sokal. Three years ago, he submitted a parody of postmodernist thought to the postmodernist journal Social Text , which article purported to mock, in true postmodernist fashion, the silly old "dogma" that "there exists an external world," asserting instead that "physical `reality'" is just "a social and linguistic construct." The..

For the complex or boundary objects in which I am interested . . . dimensions implode . . . they collapse into each other . . . story telling . . . is a fraught practice . . . In no way is story telling opposed to materiality, [sic] But materiality itself is tropic; it makes us swerve, it trips us; it is a knot of the textual, technical, mythic/oneric [sic], organic, political and economic.

That afternoon in May I was sitting in front of the computer, half-working, half-listening to "All Things Considered." The kids were in the living room doing a similar combination of homework and TV. Then, all of a sudden, I heard the words "Social Text," followed by laughter. It was the name of the journal I've worked on for over ten years, the last five of them as coeditor. I was thunderstruck. We were on National Public Radio. "Kids! I yelled. "Social (...) Text!". (shrink)

The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.