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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

Interesting issue: the Sokal affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

How to publish a lot of gibberish in one of the "important" philosophical journal.

Not that this means deconstruction is 'stupid'. Only that one has to take it with a grain of salt. At least one.

The Sokal affair is a lot less shocking when you realize Social Text was not peer-reviewed at the time and the article was for a special science issue of the journal.

If you've ever had misfortune of having to review submission for non-major CS conferences you would know that there is an amazing amount of bullshit even in technical fields.

The only thing I've found shocking about the Sokal affair, or this article (and the many others like it) is the obsession with 'proving' the humanities to be bullshit. It is an incredible and intellectually lazy pursuit of the idea that: If I don't know it, it's not worth knowing.

You're downplaying it too much. Social Text was a leading journal in the field. You can't compare it to minor CS conferences. And Sokal's submission wasn't some fluke, it was in the ballpark of a lot of the heady self-referential fluff in that field.

Moreover, Sokal didn't target "the humanities", he targeted postmodernist "critical theorists". As a scientist it pissed him off to see careerist intellectuals appropriate the terminology of science (like the term "theory") in an effort to lend weight and credibility to their work while utterly vacating it of its scientific principles. You give way too much credit to postmodernism in broadening it to all of the humanities.

Social Text received Sokal's piece, found it amateurish and unreadable, asked him to make changes, he got cranky and insisted it run as is. They sat on the piece. Later, they had a special issue on The Science Wars coming up, figured an amateurish and unreadable contribution by a scientist would be better than no contribution by a scientist at all, and ran it as a non-peer reviewed contribution.

http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html

Retellings by Sokal fans make it seem as if they received it breathlessly as great work and rushed to put it into publication. That is not what happened. The Sokal Affair is less evidence for the fuzzy-headedness of litcrit and more evidence that you can often get what you want just by lying, being a dick, and having some kind of finished product for people to work with.

And Sokal's submission wasn't some fluke, it was in the ballpark of a lot of the heady self-referential fluff in that field.

Only if you're very insensitive to tone, style, vocabulary and methodology does the Sokal piece resemble any legit article in Social Text. From the descriptions of it you'd think Social Text was full of maniacal gibbering about how nothing is true, everything is permitted, and quantum mechanics is a tool of the phallologocracy. But in fact, the quality of work is far more pedestrian, if a bit wordy. Here's the table of contents for the latest issue (articles behind paywall, abstracts are free):

http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/current

Is it self-referential nonsense? Maybe! Does it bear a reasonable surface resemblance to "Transgressing the Boundaries", if we're not being deliberately obtuse? No to me.

the terminology of science (like the term "theory")

The term theory pre-dates empirical science by a good bit, and the litcrit usage is not really orthogonal to the scientific one anyway.

Your own citation proves you wrong. One of the Social Text editors was so convinced of the legitimacy of the work that even after being told it was a hoax, "suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve."

That is how disconnected they were from anything resembling a "methodology" that could detect basic falsehoods nestled amidst pretentious language and reverential citations of suitably fashionable authorities.

Scientific theories generally yield testable hypotheses. Name one testable hypothesis that's ever come out of "critical theory".

Your own citation proves you wrong. One of the Social Text editors was so convinced of the legitimacy of the work that even after being told it was a hoax, "suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve."

People don't like to admit they've been conned. Anyway, sincerity is a separate issue from quality. The editors believed the paper was sincere, just not very good.

Alternatively, they thought it was "a little hokey" but assumed sincerity, and ran it because they had an opening and were too lazy to find another scientist willing to write for a humanities journal.

Scientific theories generally yield testable hypotheses. Name one testable hypothesis that's ever come out of "critical theory".

It's not that critical theory is necessarily good. It's that Sokal's prank proves more about the efficacy of social engineering hacks than the badness of critical theory.

If you can't name one testable hypothesis that's come out of "critical theory", then I doubt you can name one scientific journal that accepts submissions based on "sincerity".

I think you're overextending here and replacing the true argument with a strawman. I don't think Sokal wanted to prove all the humanities - from antropology to social work - are bullshit. He attempted to prove one specific stream in one science (understanding science broadly here as field of inquiry) is bullshit - and came pretty close when it turned out many practitioners of it, claiming to be masters of the art, couldn't tell a pile of baloney form legitimate research. That doesn't make whole dozens of fields of inquiry under humanities umbrella invalid wholesale.

Looking at "similar scandals" on the same page, science/engineering does not come out unscratched either.

Also I always found Sokal affair a bit stacked against the offending the journal. The issue was "Science Wars", that is confronting scientific vs. postmodernist view. If they were to edit what were presumably contributions from the side of science, it would defeat the purpose somewhat.

Deconstruction is a critical technique.

Your sentence "Not that this means deconstruction is 'stupid'." could be interpreted:

"One has to take at least one grain of salt when certain critical techniques are used."

Depending on how one reads this entire post, that may or may not be considered a charitable interpretation.

You got it. However, as a mere technique it may be valid. The problem is it is also used as a way to discard metaphysics as a true language.

I was posting about Wittgenstein over there. "Metaphysics as a true language" does not compute.

When Wittgenstein finished deconstructing the entirety of existence in his Tractatus, he reserved the last sentence to tell himself to shut up.

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