In the autumn of 1994, New York University theoretical physicist, Alan Sokal, submitted an essay to Social Text, the leading journal in the field of cultural studies. Entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, it purported to be a scholarly article about the postmodern philosophical and political implications of twentieth century physical theories. However, as the author himself later revealed in the journal Lingua Franca, his essay was merely a farrago of deliberately concocted solecisms, howlers and non-sequiturs, stitched together so as to look good and to flatter the ideological preconceptions of the editors. After review by five members of Social Texts editorial board, Sokals parody was accepted for publication as a serious piece of scholarship. It appeared in April 1996, in a special double issue of the journal devoted to rebutting the charge that cultural studies critiques of science tend to be riddled with incompetence... Commentators have made much of the scientific, mathematical and philosophical illiteracy that an acceptance of Sokals ingeniously contrived gibberish would appear to betray. But talk about illiteracy elides an important distinction between two different explanations of what might have led the editors to decide to publish Sokals piece. One is that, although they understood perfectly well what the various sentences of his article actually mean, they found them plausible, whereas he, along with practically everybody else, doesnt. This might brand them as kooky, but wouldnt impugn their motives. The other hypothesis is that they actually had very little idea what many of the sentences mean, and so were not in a position to evaluate them for plausibility in the first place. The plausibility, or even the intelligibility, of Sokals arguments just didnt enter into their deliberations... By way of explanation, coeditors Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins have said that as a non-refereed journal of political opinion and cultural analysis produced by an editorial collective Social Text has always seen itself in the `little magazine tradition of the independent left as much as in the academic domain. But its hard to see this as an adequate explanation; presumably, even a journal of political opinion should care whether what it publishes is intelligible. What Ross and Co. should have said, it seems to me, is that Social Text is a political magazine in a deeper and more radical sense: under appropriate circumstances, it is prepared to let agreement with its ideological orientation trump every other criterion for publication, including something as basic as sheer intelligibility. The prospect of being able to display in their pages a natural scientist -- a physicist, no less -- throwing the full weight of his authority behind their cause was compelling enough for them to overlook the fact that they didnt have much of a clue exactly what sort of support they were being offered. And this, it seems to me, is whats at the heart of the issue raised by Sokals hoax: not the mere existence of incompetence within the academy, but rather that specific form of it that arises from allowing ideological criteria to displace standards of scholarship so completely that not even considerations of intelligibility are seen as relevant to an arguments acceptability. How, given the recent and sorry history of ideologically motivated conceptions of knowledge -- Lysenkoism in Stalins Soviet Union, for example, or Nazi critiques of `Jewish science -- could it again have become acceptable to behave in this way? Paul A. Boghossian (1996). What the Sokal Hoax Ought to Teach Us: The pernicious consequences and internal contradictions of postmodernist relativism. Times Literary Supplement, Commentary. December 13, 1996, pp.14-15. (nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html)
Posted on: Sun, 11 May 2014 18:49:39 +0000
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