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53-479: The journal gained notoriety in 1996 for the Sokal affair , when it published a nonsensical article that physicist Alan Sokal had deliberately written as a hoax. The editorial board, according to Editor Andrew Ross, published the article as a good faith attempt by Sokal, a well-known physicist, to develop a social theory of his field. The editorial board asked Sokal to revise and resubmit his article, but he refused and

106-406: A "liberatory science" and an "emancipatory mathematics", spurning "the elite caste canon of 'high science ' ", needed to be established for a "postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project." Moreover, the article's footnotes conflate academic terms with sociopolitical rhetoric, e.g.: Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with

159-452: A critical summary of postmodernism and criticism of the strong programme of social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge . In 2008, Sokal published a followup book, Beyond the Hoax , which revisited the history of the hoax and discussed its lasting implications. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida , whose 1966 statement about Einstein's theory of relativity

212-511: A good deal of the philosophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes." Still, despite calling Sokal a "difficult, uncooperative author", and noting that such writers were "well known to journal editors", based on Sokal's credentials Social Text published the article in the May 1996 Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue. The editors did not seek peer review of the article by physicists or otherwise; they later defended this decision on

265-442: A minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and " pro-choice ", so liberal (and even some socialist ) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice . Sokal submitted the article to Social Text , whose editors were collecting articles for

318-432: A minor role, as cheerleaders for the texts we criticize." The French-language list, however, included Derrida: " Des penseurs célèbres tels qu'Althusser, Barthes, Derrida et Foucault sont essentiellement absents de notre livre " ("Famous thinkers such as Althusser, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault are essentially absent from our book"). According to Brian Reilly, Derrida may also have been sensitive to another difference between

371-455: A philosophy of science. Realism became the dominant philosophy of science after positivism. Bas van Fraassen in his book The Scientific Image (1980) developed constructive empiricism as an alternative to realism. He argues against scientific realism that scientific theories do not aim for truth about unobservable entities. Responses to van Fraassen have sharpened realist positions and led to some revisions of scientific realism. One of

424-404: A physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax. The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; and academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive

477-539: A result, according to Hilgartner, though competent in terms of method, Epstein's experiment was largely muted by the more socially accepted social work discipline he critiqued, while Sokal's attack on cultural studies , despite lacking experimental rigor, was accepted. Hilgartner also argued that Sokal's hoax reinforced the views of well-known pundits such as George Will and Rush Limbaugh , so that his opinions were amplified by media outlets predisposed to agree with his argument. The Sokal Affair extended from academia to

530-421: A revolutionary break with the concepts of classical physics . Another argument against scientific realism, deriving from the underdetermination problem , is not so historically motivated as these others. It claims that observational data can in principle be explained by multiple theories that are mutually incompatible. Realists might counter by saying that there have been few actual cases of underdetermination in

583-490: A scientific realist would argue that science must derive some ontological support for atoms from the outstanding phenomenological success of all the theories using them. Arguments for scientific realism often appeal to abductive reasoning or "inference to the best explanation" (Lipton, 2004). For instance, one argument commonly used—the "miracle argument" or "no miracles argument"—starts out by observing that scientific theories are highly successful in predicting and explaining

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636-552: A similar method to Sokal's, submitting fictitious articles to real academic journals to measure their response. Though much more systematic than Sokal's work, it received scant media attention. Hilgartner argued that the "asymmetric" effect of the successful Sokal hoax compared with Epstein's experiment cannot be attributed to its quality, but that "[t]hrough a mechanism that resembles confirmatory bias, audiences may apply less stringent standards of evidence and ethics to attacks on targets that they are predisposed to regard unfavorably." As

689-681: A single extemporaneous remark on relativity made in 1966 (before Derrida was "the Derrida" and, in a certain sense, even before "deconstruction") ... is made to stand for nearly all of deconstructive or even postmodernist (not a term easily, if at all, applicable to Derrida) treatments of science. Derrida later responded to the hoax in " Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux " ("Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious"), first published on 20 November 1997 in Le Monde . He called Sokal's action "sad" for having trivialized Sokal's mathematical work and "ruining

742-425: A symptomatic document." Besides criticizing his writing style, Social Text 's editors accused Sokal of behaving unethically in deceiving them. Sokal said the editors' response demonstrated the problem that he sought to identify. Social Text , as an academic journal, published the article not because it was faithful, true, and accurate to its subject, but because an "academic authority" had written it and because of

795-495: A valid theory of quantum gravity. (A morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by Rupert Sheldrake in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre New Age idea.") Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook." After referring skeptically to

848-405: A variety of phenomena, often with great accuracy. Thus, it is argued that the best explanation—the only explanation that renders the success of science to not be what Hilary Putnam calls "a miracle"—is the view that our scientific theories (or at least the best ones) provide true descriptions of the world, or approximately so. Bas van Fraassen replies with an evolutionary analogy: "I claim that

901-426: Is related to much older philosophical positions including rationalism and metaphysical realism . However, it is a thesis about science developed in the twentieth century. Portraying scientific realism in terms of its ancient, medieval, and early modern cousins is at best misleading. Scientific realism is developed largely as a reaction to logical positivism . Logical positivism was the first philosophy of science in

954-539: Is unable to account for the rapid change that occurs in scientific knowledge during periods of scientific revolution . Constructivists may also argue that the success of theories is only a part of the construction. However, these arguments ignore the fact that many scientists are not realists. During the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, the dominant philosophy of science was logical positivism . The alternative realist Bohm interpretation and many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics do not make such

1007-455: Is useless, or even counterproductive. Social Text' s response revealed that none of the editors had suspected Sokal's piece was a parody. Instead, they speculated Sokal's admission "represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." Sokal found further humor in the idea that the article's absurdity was hard to spot: In the second paragraph I declare without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' (note

1060-621: The Sokal hoax , was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal , a physics professor at New York University and University College London . In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text , an academic journal of cultural studies . The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor , specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross —[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered

1113-705: The scare quotes ) [...] is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. 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. In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science ; UK: Intellectual Impostures , 1998). The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals ' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology. It closed with

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1166-478: The " strong programme " of the sociology of science. Stolzenberg replied in the same issue that their critique and allegations of misrepresentation were based on misreadings. He advised readers to slowly and skeptically examine the arguments of each party, bearing in mind that "the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true." In 2009, Cornell sociologist Robb Willer performed an experiment in which undergraduate students read Sokal's paper and were told either that it

1219-537: The "Science Wars" issue. "Transgressing the Boundaries" was notable as an article by a natural scientist; biologist Ruth Hubbard also had an article in the issue. Later, after Sokal revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca , Social Text 's editors wrote that they had requested editorial changes that Sokal refused to make, and had had concerns about the quality of the writing: "We requested him (a) to excise

1272-455: The "so-called scientific method", the article declared that "it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical 'reality ' " is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct." It went on to state that because scientific research is "inherently theory-laden and self-referential", it "cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities", and that therefore

1325-547: The French and English versions of Impostures intellectuelles . In the French, his citation from the original hoax article is said to be an "isolated" instance of abuse, whereas the English text adds a parenthetical remark that Derrida's work contained "no systematic misuse (or indeed attention to) science." Sokal and Bricmont insisted that the difference between the articles was "banal." Nevertheless, Derrida concluded that Sokal

1378-488: The Universe. Within philosophy of science , this view is often an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The discussion on the success of science in this context centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories . Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid claims about unobservables (viz., that they have

1431-640: The appearance of the obscure writing. The editors said they considered it poorly written but published it because they felt Sokal was an academic seeking their intellectual affirmation. Sokal remarked: My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. ... There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science,

1484-513: The article for outside expert review by a physicist. The Sokal article was not retracted by the journal. This article about a journal on cultural studies is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . See tips for writing articles about academic journals . Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page . This article about critical theory is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Sokal affair The Sokal affair , additionally known as

1537-462: The article was published and the hoax revealed, he wrote: The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for

1590-415: The article. Scientific realist Scientific realism is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted. A believer of scientific realism takes the universe as described by science to be true (or approximately true), because of their assertion that science can be used to find the truth (or approximate truth) about both the physical and metaphysical in

1643-450: The basis that Social Text was a journal of open intellectual inquiry and the article was not offered as a contribution to physics. In the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies" in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca , Sokal revealed that "Transgressing the Boundaries" was a hoax and concluded that Social Text "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in

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1696-570: The chance to carefully examine controversies" about scientific objectivity . Derrida then faulted him and Bricmont for what he considered "an act of intellectual bad faith " in their follow-up book, Impostures intellectuelles : they had published two articles almost simultaneously, one in English in The Times Literary Supplement on 17 October 1997 and one in French in Libération on 18–19 October 1997, but while

1749-470: The concept of the luminiferous ether could be dropped because it had contributed nothing to the success of the theories of mechanics and electromagnetism . On the other hand, when theory replacement occurs, a well-supported concept, such as the concept of atoms , is not dropped but is incorporated into the new theory in some form. These replies can lead scientific realists to structural realism . Social constructivists might argue that scientific realism

1802-425: The critique as a "repertoire of rationalizations" for avoiding the study of science. Sokal reasoned that if the presumption of editorial laziness was correct, the nonsensical content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish it. What would matter would be ideological obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers, and sufficient quantities of the appropriate jargon. After

1855-408: The editors decided to publish the paper as a prominent physicist’s best attempt to develop theory. The editors of the journal were awarded the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature by "eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist". The journal did not practice academic peer review , and it did not submit

1908-579: The editors or readers of Social Text ; and whether Social Text had abided by proper scientific ethics. In 2008, Sokal published Beyond the Hoax , which revisited the history of the hoax and discussed its lasting implications. In an interview on the U.S. radio program All Things Considered , Sokal said he was inspired to submit the bogus article after reading Higher Superstition (1994), in which authors Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt claim that some humanities journals will publish anything as long as it has "the proper leftist thought" and quoted (or

1961-498: The editors' ideological preconceptions." The article, " Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity ", was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 " Science Wars " issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review at the time, so it did not submit the article for outside expert review by

2014-516: The effluvium theory of static electricity (a theory of the 16th Century physicist William Gilbert ) is an empirically successful theory whose central unobservable terms have been replaced by later theories. Realists reply that replacement of particular realist theories with better ones is to be expected due to the progressive nature of scientific knowledge, and when such replacements occur only superfluous unobservables are dropped. For example, Albert Einstein 's theory of special relativity showed that

2067-422: The history of science. Usually the requirement of explaining the data is so exacting that scientists are lucky to find even one theory that fulfills it. Furthermore, if we take the underdetermination argument seriously, it implies that we can know about only what we have directly observed . For example, we could not theorize that dinosaurs once lived based on the fossil evidence because other theories (e.g., that

2120-420: The main arguments for scientific realism centers on the notion that scientific knowledge is progressive in nature, and that it is able to predict phenomena successfully. Many scientific realists (e.g., Ernan McMullin , Richard Boyd ) think the operational success of a theory lends credence to the idea that its more unobservable aspects exist, because they were how the theory reasoned its predictions. For example,

2173-424: The no miracles argument commits the base rate fallacy . Pessimistic induction , one of the main arguments against realism, argues that the history of science contains many theories once regarded as empirically successful but which are now believed to be false. Additionally, the history of science contains many empirically successful theories whose unobservable terms are not believed to genuinely refer. For example,

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2226-411: The progress of science in terms of theories being successively more like the ideal theory that scientific realists describe . The following claims are typical of those held by scientific realists. Due to the wide disagreements over the nature of science's success and the role of realism in its success, a scientific realist would agree with some but not all of the following positions. Scientific realism

2279-424: The progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the " morphogenetic field " could be

2332-653: The public press. Anthropologist Bruno Latour , who was criticized in Fashionable Nonsense , described the scandal as a "tempest in a teacup." Retired Northeastern University mathematician -turned social scientist Gabriel Stolzenberg wrote essays criticizing the statements of Sokal and his allies, arguing that they insufficiently grasped the philosophy they criticized, rendering their criticism meaningless. In Social Studies of Science , Bricmont and Sokal responded to Stolzenberg, denouncing his representations of their work and criticizing his commentary about

2385-742: The same ontological status) as observables, as opposed to instrumentalism . Scientific realism involves two basic positions: According to scientific realism, an ideal scientific theory has the following features: Combining the first and the second claim entails that an ideal scientific theory says definite things about genuinely existing entities. The third claim says that we have reasons to believe that many scientific claims about these entities are true, but not all. Scientific realism usually holds that science makes progress, i.e. scientific theories usually get successively better, or, rather, answer more and more questions. For this reason, scientific realists or otherwise, hold that realism should make sense of

2438-399: The subject" because of its ideological proclivities and editorial bias. In their defense, Social Text 's editors said they believed that Sokal's essay "was the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field" and that "its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as

2491-469: The success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive—the ones which in fact latched on to actual regularities in nature." ( The Scientific Image , 1980) Some philosophers (e.g. Colin Howson ) have argued that

2544-425: The twentieth century and the forerunner of scientific realism, holding that a sharp distinction can be drawn between theoretical terms and observational terms , the latter capable of semantic analysis in observational and logical terms. Logical positivism encountered difficulties with: These difficulties for logical positivism suggest, but do not entail, scientific realism, and led to the development of realism as

2597-580: The two articles were almost identical, they differed in how they treated Derrida. The English-language article had a list of French intellectuals who were not included in Sokal's and Bricmont's book: "Such well-known thinkers as Althusser , Barthes , and Foucault —who, as readers of the TLS will be well aware, have always had their supporters and detractors on both sides of the Channel—appear in our book only in

2650-621: Was not serious in his method, but had used the spectacle of a "quick practical joke" to displace the scholarship Derrida believed the public deserved. Sociologist Stephen Hilgartner , chairman of Cornell University 's science and technology studies department, wrote "The Sokal Affair in Context" (1997), comparing Sokal's hoax to "Confirmational Response: Bias Among Social Work Journals" (1990), an article by William M. Epstein published in Science, Technology, & Human Values . Epstein used

2703-512: Was quoted in Sokal's paper, was singled out for criticism, particularly in U.S. newspaper coverage of the hoax. One weekly magazine used two images of him, a photo and a caricature , to illustrate a "dossier" on Sokal's paper. Arkady Plotnitsky commented: Even given Derrida's status as an icon of intellectual controversy on the Anglo-American cultural scene, it is remarkable that out of thousands of pages of Derrida's published works,

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2756-415: Was written by another student or that it was by a famous academic. He found that students who believed the paper's author was a high-status intellectual rated it better in quality and intelligibility. In October 2021, the scholarly journal Higher Education Quarterly published a bogus article "authored" by "Sage Owens" and "Kal Avers-Lynde III". The initials stand for "Sokal III". The Quarterly retracted

2809-444: Was written by) well-known leftist thinkers. Gross and Levitt had been defenders of the philosophy of scientific realism , opposing postmodernist academics who questioned scientific objectivity . They asserted that anti-intellectual sentiment in liberal arts departments (especially English departments) caused the increase of deconstructionist thought, which eventually resulted in a deconstructionist critique of science. They saw

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