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

The paragraph shown in these emails certainly wasn't merely generated by
a random "faddish academic lingo" generator stringing the latest
buzzwords together like another more recent hoaxer succeeded in getting
published. (That would be a *real* hoax).
   
I can sympathize with the journal editors who apparently were supposed
to "see through" this one. Maybe the rest of the article was more
nonsensical.

--Merv

David Opderbeck wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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.
>

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Received on Sat May 31 18:21:38 2008