Re: [asa] "Fight for the Life Of the Mind" by Alan Sokal

It's interesting that Sokal didn't just make stuff up in his hoax. So he
says, for example, "This assertion is a commonplace (dare I say a cliché) in
radical-social-constructivist writing about science. Like most clichés, it
contains a grain of truth but greatly exaggerates the case." So was it a
complete hoax, or a well written but derivative piece in the constructivist
tradition? I dunno, maybe Sokal is deconstructing himself as well.

On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 4:06 PM, Alexanian, Moorad <alexanian@uncw.edu>
wrote:

> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/ <
> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/> <
> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/ <
> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/> >
>
> Fight for the Life Of the Mind by Alan Sokal
>
> Books | Review of: Beyond the Hoax
>
> By MICHAEL SHERMER
>
> May 21, 2008
>
> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/ <
> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/> <
> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/ <
> http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-the-life-of-the-mind/76744/> >
>
> The beauty and power of a well-executed hoax is that it demonstrates deeper
> truths not only about both the victims of the hoax and the hoaxers
> themselves, but about human nature and the foibles of our belief systems.
>
> Decades of careful and extensive research into cognition and the psychology
> of how beliefs are formed show that none of us simply gather facts and draw
> conclusions from them in an inductive process. Most of us, most of the time,
> arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons that
> have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most
> of our beliefs are shaped by our parents, our siblings, our peer groups, our
> teachers, our mentors, our professional colleagues, and by the culture at
> large. We form and hold those beliefs because they provide emotional
> comfort, because they fit well with our lifestyles or career choices, or
> because they work within the larger context of our family dynamics or social
> network. Then we build back into those beliefs reasons for why we hold them.
> This process is driven by two well-known cognitive biases: the hindsight
> bias, where once an event has happened or a belief is formed it is easy to
> look back and re!
>
> construct not only how it happened or was formed, but also why it had to
> be that way and not some other way; and the confirmation bias, in which we
> seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs
> and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence.
>
> By the 1980s, American academics had become infatuated with an approach to
> intellectual inquiry - reflected in the schools of thought known as
> postmodernism, deconstructionism, and cognitive relativism - as skeptical of
> our ability to know the world as cognitive psychology suggests we should be
> of our ability to know ourselves. Going far beyond psychology, and leaning
> heavily on Marxist notions of cultural and class determinism, those in this
> academic movement came to believe that there is no privileged truth, no
> objective reality to be discovered, not even any belief, idea, hypothesis,
> or theory that is closer to the truth than any other. In time, the movement
> spilled out of lit-crit English departments into the history and philosophy
> of science, as professional philosophers and historians, swept up in a
> paroxysm of postmodern deconstruction, proffered a view of science as a
> relativistic game played by European white males in a reductionistic frenzy
> of hermeneutical hegemon!
>
> y, hell-bent on suppressing the masses beneath the thumb of dialectical
> scientism and technocracy. Yes, some of them actually talk like that, and
> one really did call Newton's "Principia" a "rape manual."
>
> In 1996, the New York University physicist and mathematician Alan Sokal put
> an end to this intellectual masturbation by performing one of the greatest
> hoaxes in academic history. Mr. Sokal penned a nonsensical article entitled
> "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
> Quantum Gravity," chockablock full of postmodern phrases and
> deconstructionist tropes interspersed with scientific jargon, and submitted
> it to the journal Social Text, one of two leading publications frequented by
> fashionably obtuse academics. One sentence from the article, plucked
> randomly from the text, reads as follows:
>
> It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality", no less
> than social "reality", is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that
> scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the
> dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it;
> that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and
> self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific
> community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged
> epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives
> emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.
>
> Mr. Sokal's article was accepted for publication (as "real," whatever that
> means in postmodernism) and, upon release, Mr. Sokal announced it was all a
> hoax - and did so, deliciously, in the chief competitor of Social Text, the
> journal Dissent. Mr. Sokal called it a nonsense parody, but because most of
> what passes for postmodernism is nonsense and indistinguishable from parody,
> the editors of Social Text could not tell the difference. Q.E.D.
>
> Now Mr. Sokal has produced a comprehensive explanation, "Beyond the Hoax"
> (Oxford University Press, 448 pages, $39.95), that provides readers with an
> annotated edition of the original article (explaining how he came up with
> each and every meaningless phrase), the subsequent article in Dissent in
> which he explained himself to the disgruntled readers of Social Text, and a
> number of subsequent articles and essays he wrote in the decade since the
> hoax, in which he elaborated on the problems inherent in postmodern
> philosophy of science. The golden nugget within this longish book - worth
> the price of admission by itself - is the annotated parody. For example,
> explaining the above passage, Sokal writes:
>
> This assertion is a commonplace (dare I say a cliché) in
> radical-social-constructivist writing about science. Like most clichés, it
> contains a grain of truth but greatly exaggerates the case. Above all, it
> fails to make the crucial distinction between actual knowledge (i.e.
> rationally justified true belief) and purported knowledge.
>
> "Beyond the Hoax" is an essential text for anyone interested in the history
> and philosophy of science, or for that matter science itself. Thankfully,
> such intellectual trends and social movements have a tendency to cause their
> own extinction by going too far, and in this case, Mr. Sokal helped along
> the process with his meteor explosion of a hoax.
>
> Why did academics fall for it? The hindsight bias and the confirmation
> bias. Once you believe that science holds no privileged position in the
> search for truth, and that it is just another way of knowing, it is easy to
> pull out of an article like Mr. Sokal's additional evidence that supports
> your belief. It is a very human process, and since science is conducted by
> very real humans, shouldn't it be subject to these same cognitive biases?
> Yes, except for one thing: the built-in defense known as the scientific
> method.
>
> There is progress in science, and some views really are superior to others,
> regardless of the color, gender, or country of origin of the scientist
> holding that view. Despite the fact that scientific data are "theory laden,"
> science is truly different than art, music, religion, and other forms of
> human expression because it has a self-correcting mechanism built into it.
> If you don't catch the flaws in your theory, the slant in your bias, or the
> distortion in your preferences, someone else will, usually with great glee
> and in a public forum - for example, a competing journal! Scientists may be
> biased, but science itself, for all its flaws, is still the best system ever
> devised for understanding how the world works.
>
> Mr. Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for
> Scientific American, and the author of "Why People Believe Weird Things,"
> "The Science of Good and Evil," and "Why Darwin Matters." His latest book is
> "The Mind of the Market."
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
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