Alan Sokal

Alan Sokal is an American physicist and mathematician. He is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, which implies strongly that the proverbial Emperor of Postmodernism may indeed have been naked all along. He came to prominence for the eponymous "Sokal Hoax"; namely, getting a pile of incoherent bilge published in the postmodernist journal Social Text.
==The Sokal Affair==
In 1994, Sokal authored the article Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was riddled with errors and nonsense obvious to everyone with an undergraduate's understanding of physics. Among other revelations, the piece posits that reality doesn't exist, that an increasing number of natural scientists were converting to postmodernist relativism, and that these developments would lead to a "liberatory science." He asserted that gravity was a social construct.The original "Sokal affair" paper Sokal submitted the work to Social Text, suspecting it would be published because it was suffused with postmodernist jargon coupled with science-y sounding terms and equations that flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions. As a result of the affair, Social Text was awarded the dubious honor of an Ig Nobel Prize in literature for "eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist."Winners of the Ig Nobel Prize
===Hoax===
Shortly after Transgressing the Boundaries was published, Sokal published another article in Lingua Franca revealing the first was a hoax. He claimed his main motivation was not so much to defend science against the onslaught of postmodernism, but rather to "defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself." According to Sokal, denying absolute truths exist will undermine any campaign for left wing causes. He further pointed out that left wing academics had historically shown that many of society's justifications for wrongs like racism or sexism were based on assertions that could not stand up to scrutiny; if postmodernism prevailed the basis for determining that an advocate of woman's rights or racial equality was right -- factually and morally -- would be wholly undermined.
Sokal went on to co-author a book titled Fashionable Nonsense with Jean Bricmonthttp://www.monoskop.org/File:Sokal_Alan_Bricmont_Jean_Fashionable_Nonsense.pdf in 1998 and Beyond the Hoax in 2008. In these works, he argues that most postmodernist claims regarding science are based on sloppy reasoning, mistaking scientific and everyday definitions of certain terms and wholesale misunderstanding of the scientific method. This book specifically attacked the use of science and scientific concepts in the works of many leading postmodernists such as Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray.
The book has been controversial, with postmodernists largely claiming that Sokal fails to understand the texts he cites and thus misrepresents them. Sokal counters this argument in the book, noting that if a scientist cannot understand the use of science to explain a concept, there is something wrong with the explanation. Sokal counters that he is not critiquing postmodernist's works at large, but rather their misappropriation of science. He maintains that heavily relying on unfamiliar scientific concepts as supposed metaphors only serves to obfuscate.
===Concluding remarks===
As with many criticisms on nearly any movement, charges against the most extreme and dogmatic representatives often fail against the whole movement - some sensible postmodernists acknowledge that empirical reality exists and recognize that science is extremely useful for things like curing diseases and keeping us from freezing to death.
===Dawkins===
In a review of Sokal and Bricmont's work, Richard Dawkins observes:
==Responses==
In defense, theoreticians who initially used postmodernist approaches to study science have argued that scientific knowledge is 'constructed,' rather than 'socially constructed';Bruno Latour, 2005, Reassembling the Social that interpretations otherwise have failed to appreciate the distinction between these two points. This assertion is, however, not true.
Sokal and Bricmont had already pointed out that it is, of course, trivially true that science is a human endeavor and as such 'constructed' and even 'socially constructed' in a mundane sense. Scientists are, after all, humans who developed their interests in a social setting. The scientific enterprise relies on funding and other factors that are likewise part of a cultural context. The knowledge that is produced is 'constructed' in a trivial sense, too, as humans discover some aspect of reality and have to cast this into a shape intelligible to humans. Sokal and Bricmont argued that postmodernists often rely on at least two different meanings of a word or a passage: one which is trivially true, and one that seems profound but is meaningless. In this instance, postmodernists had confused different notions of “science”, where “scientific knowledge” is but one aspect. The postmodernist response is exactly as expected, as they switched back to the trivially true meaning. Noam Chomsky has commented on this tendency of postmodernism with the remark that “ALL of this can be described literally in monosyllables, and it turns out to be truisms. On the other hand, you don’t get to be a respected intellectual by presenting truisms in monosyllables.”Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”, Open Culture, July 13, 2013 
The whole affair has also been the subject of much reverence as well. In a New York Times piece, cultural critic Edward Rothstein wrote that Sokal is standing up for "the territory of reasoned argument, objective fact and Enlightenment insight, where even debates like these might take place."https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/books/120798sokal-book.html Natural Science put in a review of the Sokal/Bricmont book that the two perform a "thorough exercise in intellectual and moral hygiene."http://naturalscience.com/ns/books/book04.html
===Fink===
Bruce Fink offers a critique, in which he accuses Sokal and Bricmont of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings."Bruce Fink, 2004, 'Lacan to the Letter' Fink asserts that some concepts which Sokal and Bricmont consider arbitrary or meaningless do have roots in the history of linguistics, and that Lacan is explicitly using mathematical concepts in a metaphoric way, not claiming that his concepts are mathematically founded. And to be sure, Sokal and Bricmont take to task one of Lacan's students, Luce Irigaray, whom they quote as follows:
In her defense, the Irigaray quote can be seen as quote mining. It comes from an interview about the separation of science and philosophy which leads to scientists not questioning implicit biases in their research and publications. She said that scientists don't question the choice of the speed of light as the unit measurement in that equation because there is not enough room for philosophy in science to discuss whether a more commonly used unit of measurement might make more sense.For the provenance of the quote, see here. Whether or not the argument makes sense, taking an ad hocand badly translated response during an interview out of context and complaining that it does not "convey clear meaning" betrays a certain confirmation bias. Especially if the quote conveys its meaning much clearer in the original French where, to give but one example, "Faisons l'hypothèse" simply means "Let's assume" rather than the very clumsily translated "Let us make the hypothesis".
===Derrida===
In Jacques Derrida's response, "Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious," first published in Le Monde, Derrida writes that the Sokal hoax is rather "sad [triste]," not only because Alan Sokal's name is now linked primarily to a hoax, not to science, but also because the chance to reflect seriously on this issue has been ruined for a broad public forum that deserves better.Jacques Derrida, 2005, 'Paper Machine'. He writes: 
==Views on gender==
Unfortunately, Sokal seems to have fallen into the 'gender-critical' trap, with this unpublished letter responding to Judith Butler, giving the usual nonsense about "the radical idea that self-declared gender identity should supplant biological sex for all legal and social purposes."https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/letter_to_Guardian_Oct_25_21.html
Sokal seems to have also submitted a document to the UK Government consulting on banning conversion therapy, detailing his 'opposition' to the ban. However, his arguments seem to be based on several flawed assumptions and misrepresentations about gender identity. https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/conversion_therapy_submission.pdf
== External links ==
* The hoax article
* The article in which Sokal reveals the Social Text article was a hoax
==Notes==
==References==
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