Sokal Affair

[Siggie]

Re: Sokal Affair

Wish this would work on dissertations...

[KanadaHye]

Re: Sokal Affair

After reading that for about 2 minutes, I started to get a headache..

[ADandelion]

Re: Sokal Affair

In the US, a great strategy to get a full score on the SAT's essay section is to literally make up quotes and attribute them to famous people. No one will ever check up after you, and citations will practically guarantee you at least an 80% on a 5-paragraph paper that pertains to the topic in any way whatsoever.

[ArmSurvival]

Re: Sokal Affair

Thats so funny. Its also a great idea. An Armenian scholar should write a pro-Turkish genocide paper, have it be published widely in Turkey, and then announce that all the sources are made up.

On a side note, I know someone who won a national essay contest by doing pretty much the same thing... writing utter nonsense and saying things to stroke the judges' egos.

[ADandelion]

Re: Sokal Affair

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/critstudies/transgress_v2_noafterword.pdf

The full text. Each and every word complete and utter bullsh*t.

[ADandelion]

The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the publication's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether such a journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

The article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. On its date of publication (May 1996), Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics".

The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit, or lack thereof, of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was right or wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised the appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article.



^ More of this needs to happen.