Alan D. Sokal – Transgressing the Boundaries (1995) | Hacker News Reader

Alan D. Sokal – Transgressing the Boundaries (1995)

physics.nyu.edu

17 pointscm_silva11 comments

This event was mentioned in this video about the Bogdanoff twins who, arguably, did the same thing- but to physics.

Also very funny is "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything": https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

A lot of these things kind of lost their fun in the past 5-20 years when words stopped having coherent meaning.

Moderately amusing the first time you read it, but he's been banging on about it in book after book. Mocking French intellectual poseurs is fair game I guess, but then he started having a go at Feyerabend? Oh dear.

(I like to dabble around the perimeters of philosophy so your comment interested me, and I did some googling)

this links to a book review written by Philosopher Thomas Nagel about Sokal's book

https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/nagel.html

He lays out a pretty clear defense for Sokal's critique of Feyerabend, just ^F Feyerabend and read from there.

your move, Feyerabend

Thanks for the link, I'll have a read later; sadly Feyerabend won't take up your invitation, he died in `94, but if you have a slot in your book schedule, do have a look at Against Method, astonishing (and entertaining).

A brilliant reminder that if you have impostor syndrome, it is occasionally the case that the solution is simply to stop being an impostor.

That's a very badly written paper, to be honest. I mean, even knowing it was a hoax, I really expected that he somehow would have some speculative/creative content on the topic of "Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", whatever that could mean, but it's just a bunch of misplaced quotes and summaries.

Wasn’t that the point though? He was trying to show that complete nonsense could be published.

It was later repeated with even more nonsense papers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

Probably, but a very dull/non-creative point nonetheless

> it's just a bunch of misplaced quotes and summaries.

Believe it or not, that's what the works on Scientific Communism looked like back in the USSR: bunch of quotes from Marx's and Lenin's writings, strewn together into a somewhat coherent narrative. Those quotes served the same roles that "proofs" and "data" serve in non-scholastic fields, you see: how would you know if you were right or wrong otherwise?

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