Computers, Society, and Nature

An interesting thing I discovered while trying to gain some more background on relativism, was various accounts of the Sokal affair. The Sokal affair was something of a big deal in the Postmoderist world, wherein Alan Sokal, a physics professor at NYU, wrote a deliberately nonsensical paper in his own words, “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, and submitted it to Social Text, a postmodern journal published by Duke.

The same day his article was published, he revealed in the journal Lingua Franca that in fact his article was meant as a parody. Of course, scandal ensued, with the story being picked up by many newspapers around the world, and various angry articles written about it.

In defense of Social Text, they are not a peer reviewed journal for the reason that they wished to promote more original research, and thus provide less of a guarantee about the accuracy of its articles. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that if someone like Chomsky were to write an incomprehensible treatise on nothing, many journals would be tempted to publish it simply on the weight of his name alone.

There are many sources of knowledge about the hoax, Sokal’s Website and Wikipedia provide a good overview.

Of course, I’m sure many of us have toyed with the idea of doing something similar, in both arts and sciences: whether to insert jargon in order to bewilder whoever happens to be marking it, that they will hopefully be fooled into believing the work is credible, or that they will be too baffled (and too proud to admit it) to comment on it. In high school, I played with this a little bit, where I would use two very uncommon words (correctly) in essays in close proximity, followed by a completely made up word that sounded ok. On one occaison, the first two words were underlined, however the third wasn’t, leading me to believe my teacher looked up the first two in the dictionary, and then seeing that they checked out, gave me the benefit of the doubt. Of course, Sokal took this a step further, by openly rubbing it in the faces of those who had bought his self described parody.

The hoax also serves to highlight the disconnect in academia which exists in many places between the arts and sciences. I can’t say I’ve ever really discussed social construction, relativism, or postmodern thought in university prior to this class (although I’ve only taken three arts classes) and I don’t imagine I’m alone. Likewise, I don’t imagine too many arts students have taken a lot of physics or mathematics courses. I suppose it’s a product of having undergraduate education becoming so focused, I feel like it’s not uncommon for people in the same field to be completely unaware of each others specializations.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 at 3:06 pm and is filed under General, social construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.