Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 16:52:14 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: the rest of the story ....


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: D Shniad <shniad-AT-sfu.ca>
From: Vincent Mosco <vmosco-AT-ccs.carleton.ca>
From: divakar goswami <dgoswam-AT-bgnet.bgsu.edu>

Gibberish or merely obscure?

Scientist hoaxes academic journal

May 17, 1996 Web posted at: 2:30 p.m. EDT

NEW YORK (AP) -- Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, conducted
a little experiment recently. He wrote an article that was close to pure
gibberish and sent it off to a respected social science journal.

Then he sat back and waited to see if it would be published.

It was.

The article, an impenetrable bramble of physics and philosophy that appears
to argue that the physical world does not exist, landed in the pages of the
spring-summer issue of Social Text, a leftist journal of cultural studies
published by the Duke University Press.

Then Sokal, adding insult to injury, wrote a gloating article about his own
hoax for Lingua Franca, a magazine about academia.

"What's going on here?" he wrote in the follow-up article. "Could the
editors really not have realized that my article was written as a parody?"

Well, no, the editors of Social Text concede.

In fact, editor Andrew Ross said Thursday, he thought the Sokal article was
simply a bad attempt at philosophy by a scientist. He included it in the
journal's new issue -- which is devoted to a rift between scientists and
cultural critics of science -- as a "curio" intended to reflect the
scientists' side of the debate.

But why would anyone publish something that appeared to be nonsense?

"Physics is obscure enough as it is, and philosophy is obscure enough as it
is," Ross said, "and when you have physicists who are writing in that
genre, then what they write is obscure. But there's a difference between
obscurity and gibberish, right?"

Well, yes, sometimes. But consider what Sokal wrote.

In the opening paragraph, he lays out his basic theme: There are
scientists, he asserts, who "cling to the dogma imposed by the long
post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which
can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world,
whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed
of humanity as a whole."

In other words, some dumb scientists actually believe that the world exists.

There follow many pages of impossibly dense scientific mumbo- jumbo, all
supported by lengthy footnotes. From time to time, Sokal slips in little
parenthetical zingers.

"Mathematically, Einstein breaks with the tradition dating back to Euclid
(which is inflicted on high-school students even today!)," he writes. It's
not hard to imagine him chuckling over his keyboard.

In his post-mortem in Lingua Franca, Sokal talks about how, at another
point in his article, "I suggest that the `morphogenic field' -- a bizarre
New Age idea proposed by Rupert Sheldrake -- constitutes a cutting-edge
theory of quantum gravity."

Not quite. Morphogenesis is defined as the structural changes occurring
during the development of an organism.

"In sum," he says, "I intentionally wrote the article so that any competent
physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would
realize that it is a spoof."

But not the editors of Social Text.

"I think Andrew (Ross) made a mistake, that's all," said Stanley Aronowitz,
a professor of sociology at the City University of New York's Graduate
Center and a founder of Social Text. Sokal's article, he said, "borders on
gibberish and shouldn't have been published."

Still, Aronowitz and Ross insist that while Sokal may have succeeded in his
prank, he failed in his larger aim of spoofing their work, which attempts
to analyze science from a cultural perspective, much as postmodern critics
have been deconstructing literature for years.

"It was a bad parody," Aronowitz said. "He just doesn't get it."

Sokal was out of town Thursday and couldn't be reached for comment. But he
wrote in Lingua Franca that he decided to write the hoax out of a concern,
heightened by his own left- wing politics, that leftist social scientists
were spreading "nonsense and sloppy thinking" about science.

"Social Text's acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual
arrogance of Theory -- postmodernist literary theory, that is -- carried to
its logical extreme," he wrote.

Ross said Sokal's prank reflects the arrogance of scientists who resent
anyone outside their field attempting to critique it. That, he said, was
the basic point of Social Text's special issue. So in a sense, the Sokal
hoax fit right in.

"I cannot really say I feel snakebit," he said defiantly. And then he paused.

"Well," he conceded, "I suppose I can."






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