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Rating: 
Summary: No Connection to Reality
Review: If you're in a very specific crowd, the brouhaha covered here is a real riot. I am a current graduate student who went back to school after being out in the "real world" (i.e. business and industry), and have been subjected to the dense theory and nonsensical "culture wars" of the academy. I have found relatively few people in graduate education who have ever been out in the real world, where actual practical work is done. I was astonished to find that there are professors doing large research projects on the field I used to work in, because we rarely (if ever) saw these academic treatises, written by professors who have never worked in the field and assume they can effectively study it from a detached intellectual standpoint. But these guys don't seem to care if their writings never get even remotely close to the populations that they think they're helping, because in the university system it's publish or perish. It's better to have a few other professors tell you that you know what you're talking about, than to have any kind of effect on the lives of real people. This kind of nonsense has been exposed by the Sokal hoax covered here, though in this case it's all within the academy. Sokal's fake paper, submitted to a trendy but gullible "cultural studies" journal, is an absolutely brilliant piece of parody in which he used a heap of big words, obtuse theory, and hip namedropping while saying absolutely nothing. This book presents Sokal's paper and then the defensive and whiny rebuttals of the journal's editors after they learned they were hoodwinked, followed by just about everything that was said in the international academic press about the whole affair. Unfortunately, this book really slows down as the academic commentaries become very repetitive, discussing the same aspects of the hoax again and again, while many of them devolve into the dense theoretical professor-speak that Sokal was trying to criticize in the first place. Also, in presenting never-ending arguments by defensive eggheads in the academy, we merely get a closed argument among people with no connection to the outside world whatsoever. The book fails to truly analyze the true issue behind this whole mess - the fact that real students from the real world are paying for an education made up of nonsensical theorizing about obtuse philosophical concepts that truly matter to nobody but a professor, who is trying to show off to another professor. This disconnection from reality in the modern university system is what has really been exposed by Sokal's hoax and the ensuing academic catfight. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rating:
Summary: No Connection to Reality
Review: If you're in a very specific crowd, the brouhaha covered here is a real riot. I am a current graduate student who went back to school after being out in the "real world" (i.e. business and industry), and have been subjected to the dense theory and nonsensical "culture wars" of the academy. I have found relatively few people in graduate education who have ever been out in the real world, where actual practical work is done. I was astonished to find that there are professors doing large research projects on the field I used to work in, because we rarely (if ever) saw these academic treatises, written by professors who have never worked in the field and assume they can effectively study it from a detached intellectual standpoint. But these guys don't seem to care if their writings never get even remotely close to the populations that they think they're helping, because in the university system it's publish or perish. It's better to have a few other professors tell you that you know what you're talking about, than to have any kind of effect on the lives of real people. This kind of nonsense has been exposed by the Sokal hoax covered here, though in this case it's all within the academy. Sokal's fake paper, submitted to a trendy but gullible "cultural studies" journal, is an absolutely brilliant piece of parody in which he used a heap of big words, obtuse theory, and hip namedropping while saying absolutely nothing. This book presents Sokal's paper and then the defensive and whiny rebuttals of the journal's editors after they learned they were hoodwinked, followed by just about everything that was said in the international academic press about the whole affair. Unfortunately, this book really slows down as the academic commentaries become very repetitive, discussing the same aspects of the hoax again and again, while many of them devolve into the dense theoretical professor-speak that Sokal was trying to criticize in the first place. Also, in presenting never-ending arguments by defensive eggheads in the academy, we merely get a closed argument among people with no connection to the outside world whatsoever. The book fails to truly analyze the true issue behind this whole mess - the fact that real students from the real world are paying for an education made up of nonsensical theorizing about obtuse philosophical concepts that truly matter to nobody but a professor, who is trying to show off to another professor. This disconnection from reality in the modern university system is what has really been exposed by Sokal's hoax and the ensuing academic catfight. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rating: 
Summary: Document of a challenging debate
Review: In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal confabulated an article on quantum gravity. He invented a fake physics based on genuine -- though mistaken -- statements about physics by such writers as Foucault, Lacan, and Irigaray. He submitted it to the journal Social Text. On the day of publication, Lingua Franca published Sokal's announcement of a hoax on writers and editors whose scientific statements are meaningless or just plain wrong. Some accused him of supporting the cultural agenda of the American right. Others called it a brilliant discourse on the emperor's new clothes. Sokal himself has no interest in the cultural right wing. He is a Marxist who worked in Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas. Sokal argues that politics and social theory are irrelevant to the substantive content of subjects such as physics, chemistry, or mathematics. He makes a case against confusing social theory with natural science, and he asserts that counterfactual claims have no place in the refereed journals of serious research fields. An extensive cross-section of the debate is published in this book. It offers perspective on issues we occasionally face in design research regarding the importance of distinctions between fact and interpretation, between evidence and argument from evidence. Book review published in Design Research News, Volume 6, Number 6, June 2001
Rating:
Summary: Transgressing the boundaries: hilarious, sad, serious debate
Review: In 1996, the prestigious journal in the field of Cultural Studies Social Text published a double issue dedicated to the "Science Wars", a hot topic at the time. Its editors couldn't expect the long and inflamed debate brought by one of its articles: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", signed by Alan Sokal, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The article came to be a hoax, a parody of the postmodernist stuff written by Sokal with the intention of testing the rigor of Social Test, as a representative of the Cultural Studies field.
This book, The Sokal Hoax, is a compilation of diverse materials published as part of the subsequent debate regarding this issue that took place in general and specialized media. The selected articles seem to be a good representation of such debate, with many different opinions represented. You will find Sokal's original article, his discovering of the hoax in a letter to another journal, the explanatory reply by the cheated editors of Social Text, brief letters and press columns holding diverse positions, and some more extense articles. Some of them are truly interesting, with a strong philosophical, scientific and political load. A few are disappointing. Still others seem to say nothing new within the whole issue.
Hilarious. Transgressing the boundaries (TTB) is one of the most brilliant scientific articles ever written. The only problem is that it is just intentional gibberish, full of scientific incorrectnesses, and crazy (but real) quotations. The stile is completely unclear, full of indecipherable expressions. The best of the article is not in Sokal's funny assertions like that "reality is nothing but a social and linguistic construction", and the necessity of "emancipatory mathematics", free of its "capitalist, patriarchal, and militaristic social contamination". The funniest and craziest words are real quotations that Sokal got after an exhaustive revision of prestigious academics in the field of cultural and science studies, postmodernists, poststructuralists, and other fashionable tendencies: gurus like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Aronowitz, and Iragaray, among many others.
One of my favorite pearls comes from Derrida: "The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of the variability-it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something-or a center starting from which an observer could master the field-but the very concept of the game." Uauhh!, did you cached it? You will find many like this in TTB. The article is brilliant, really hilarious, and a must for people interested in philosophy of science. You can easily find it on the internet.
Sad. I wondered what is so radikal and revolutionary of being an academic in American or European universities discussing about the sex of the Angels. The offended parts, mainly Stanley Fish, respond with clever letters that unfortunately have nothing to do with the issue that was being debated (at least it proves that they can write clearly and with common sense). I was also tired to hear that many times about the maths summer course that Sokal taught for the Sandinistas; it's a nice thing, but nothing especially heroic.
Serious. As a whole, this volume brings to you an interesting debate about the nature of science, and its value, about the validity of a whole field (indeed a set of fields, hard to label), and about the ethics of certain attitudes (from Sokal's hoaxing to the lack of clarity in pomo texts). The debate is more about science than about politics, but both are worthy. Clever authors participate with their articles, and I was often confused among different shades of the story. I particularly disliked Aronowitz and Latour contributions, and enjoyed those of Barbara Epstein, Meera Nanda, and Paul Boghossian, among others. My favorite paragraph of the debate is from a brief letter of Katha Pollit:
"How else explain how pomo leftist can talk constantly about the need to democratize knowledge and write in a way that excludes all but the initiated few? Indeed, the comedy of the Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the postmodernists don't really understand one another's writing and make their way through the text by moving from a familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by a way of lily pads. Lacan... performativity...Judith Butler... scandal... (en)gendering (w)holeness... Lunch!"
Huashuashuas. In my opinion, this paragraph brilliantly summarizes the story.
Rating:
Summary: Balanced coverage of the entire mess
Review: Regardless of whether you think Alan Sokal is a hero or a rogue, a brilliant crusader for intellectual standards or a crass fool who made himself and the "science establishment" look stupid with his prank, you should read this book. In this book, the editors of Lingua Franca have assembled all the documents you need to understand what really happened. You can read the hoax paper in its entirety. You can read the article that revealed it as a hoax. You can read the response by the editors of Social Text. You can read what the press had to say, what intellectuals on both sides of the issue have said about the hoax, and what people writing in other countries have made of the whole thing. Lately, the Sokal hoax has been on my mind a lot, and I find that I need to explain it to people who never heard of it, before I can talk about it. This book is the perfect answer to the question "where can I read more about it?" What I like about this book is that it represents all sides of the debate with their own words, and leaves it to the reader to make her own decision where she stands on the issues raised by the prank.
Rating:
Summary: Balanced coverage of the entire mess
Review: Regardless of whether you think Alan Sokal is a hero or a rogue, a brilliant crusader for intellectual standards or a crass fool who made himself and the "science establishment" look stupid with his prank, you should read this book. In this book, the editors of Lingua Franca have assembled all the documents you need to understand what really happened. You can read the hoax paper in its entirety. You can read the article that revealed it as a hoax. You can read the response by the editors of Social Text. You can read what the press had to say, what intellectuals on both sides of the issue have said about the hoax, and what people writing in other countries have made of the whole thing. Lately, the Sokal hoax has been on my mind a lot, and I find that I need to explain it to people who never heard of it, before I can talk about it. This book is the perfect answer to the question "where can I read more about it?" What I like about this book is that it represents all sides of the debate with their own words, and leaves it to the reader to make her own decision where she stands on the issues raised by the prank.
Rating:
Summary: Somebody got deconstructed here
Review: The Sokal Hoax is one of those rare bits of mischief with a purpose that turns up the illumination thereby allowing all of us to clearly see that the emperor has no clothes, the emperor in this case being the intellectual left of postmodernist thought as exemplified in the persons of Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, the "victims" of this very clever and meticulously planned sting. That they were hoisted with their own petar, as it were, was particularly pleasing to those of us who cannot abide pseudobabblese and academic gibberish, ingredients that have unfortunately become a staple of New Age and postmodern expression. One hopes that the Sokal affair has opened the eyes of academia to the extent that intellectuals will now appreciate the importance of writing in a clear and communicative manner without fear that others can thereby discern the quality of their ideas. Here the editors of Lingua Franca have put together the definitive collection of articles on the entire succès de scandale including the text of physicist Alan Sokal's article itself, Sokal's revelation article in Lingua Franca, and the reply of the Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, whose publication of Sokal's parody of social constructionist thought and expression brought about their academic embarrassment. These are followed by selected letters to the editors in response to the affair. I particularly enjoyed the insightful letters by Franco Moretti of Columbia University and Lee Smolin of Penn State. Next are reactions from the press, both domestic and foreign, including stories by Stanley Fish, George Will, Bruce Latour, and seventeen others, including another piece by Alan Sokal from Le Monde (Paris). Then we are treated to some longer essays, some with responses and counter responses, including some excellent work by Steven Weinberg and Barbara Epstein. The final chapter entitled "Colloquies" provides some post bellum reflections by Andrew Ross, Sokal and others. All of this is very entertaining. In addition to being entertained by this entirely engaging and balanced account I was given a kind of postgraduate course in social constructionist and postmodern thought and its critics. I came away feeling that however one may feel about Sokal's hoax itself, one positive result has been to stimulate thought and discussion on postmodernism and bring those ideas to a wider public than had previously existed. Whether that is good for postmodernism is problematic.
Rating:
Summary: very nice
Review: This is highly entertaining stuff. For those of us tired out by the moralistic kulturkritiks on kampus, a little jostling of their heroic 'science studies' vanguard is most welcome and invigorating. What has been most amazing to me is the number of characters who have tried to rescue the editors at Social Text. There are characters here saying that it is dangerous for physicists to pronounce on the nature of science (even on the nature of physics) precisely because they are physicists! They actually print these kinds of fallacies in some places. The editors of Lingua Franca have been most kind to our palates. They have included the old hippies with their hysteria and conspiracism right along with the sarcastic, the wise and the profound. The numerous newspaper stories about the hoax are a little tiresome, but the sheer number of them, from all around the world, gives the reader some sense of the world wide significance of what is at stake in the "science wars." You will not be sorry if you buy this. Barbara Epstein's essay on "Postmodernism and the Left" is worth the price of the book. The other essays are quite helpful as well. I have not seen another book of exchanges between pomos and other thinkers. It is remarkable at times how the pomos just go right on committing their fallacies and using their rhetoric, even after some other person has just pointed out the fallacy or exploded the rhetoric in question. The book reaffirmed my belief that most of us are not pomos at all. Rather, there are very few. In fact, it is difficult to be one, since you have to get used to thinking without evidence, and to arguing with nothing to support you except your strong conviction. Until they have some evidence, the science studies crowd will remain a laughing stock.
Rating:
Summary: The Pomo Emperor Has No Clothes
Review: This isn't just a book about a brilliant hoax...it's an introductory course on pomo (AKA postmodernism, poststructuralism, postconstructionism), a collection of heated newspaper and magazine editorials about ethics, philosophy, science, and college curriculum, and an expose of how the Emperor reacts when he/she/it is found to have no clothes.
Early in 1994, Alan Sokal, a physicist from NYU, read a book called "Higher Superstitions." This book by Gross & Levitt brought to a head Sokal's irritation at a certain postmodern faction within the academic community which he saw as challenging standards of logic, truth and intellectual inquiry. Could he possibly write an article bad enough to be obvious nonsense to any undergraduate physics student, yet good enough to get published in a leading pomo periodical? Unfortunately for the members of the screening committee for "Social Text," the answer is "yes."
The article itself, presented in all its splendor and glory in chapter I, caters to agendas of pomo authorities rather then relying on logic, drips with unreadable prose, and has mistaken claims about scientific theories. It includes an illogical train of thought, but offers lots of apple-polishing to the gurus it parodies. Sokal says, "The fundamental silliness in my article lies in the dubiousness of its central thesis and in the 'reasoning' adduced to support it. Basically, I claim that quantum gravity has profound political implications." When Sokal realized his article was going to be published, he began writing his expose of the hoax, and they were published in different magazines on the same day.
Ideally, perhaps "Social Text" would have admitted their error, issued a congratulatory statement to Sokal, and notified the public that they were immediately tightening up their article evaluation process. Instead, they whined about being sabotaged, and called Sokal "poorly educated, too male, too nerdy, and naughty." It's hard to polish a turd, but they did the best they could.
After the publication of the "hoax of the decade," the press had a field day. The book continues with editorials from over 40 United States contributors and 9 from Europe and Brazil. The very first respondent was Alan Sokal, followed by Robbins and Ross, representing "Social Text." In the process of reading the reviews, I got an education on postmodernism and cultural studies, many of whose advocates roasted Sokal. The Scientist community, by and large, roasted "Social Text" and postmodernists. Physicist Steven Weinberg wrote a great essay where he discussed in detail each item of erroneous physics served up in Sokal's article.
For a nice read and a chance to see both sides presented on an important issue, I can highly recommend this excellent book.
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