A Mathematician Reads
نویسنده
چکیده
New York University mathematical physicist Alan Sokal published in the postmodern humanities journal Social Text a parody entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” [1]. His point in doing so was to test whether the field of “cultural studies of science” was seriously lacking in “intellectual standards”. His article is nonsense from start to finish but was still published. He revealed the hoax in another article in Lingua Franca [2]. The incident and reactions to it, now being called the Sokal Affair, have received wide coverage in The New York Times [3]. Of course, Sokal’s experiment does not settle the issue but rather points to the need for further study. Did he merely pull a fast one on the editors of Social Text, or is the field known as the social or cultural studies of science itself truly bunk? In an attempt to answer this question I have read the other articles in the issue of Social Text in which Sokal’s article appeared. It was a special issue devoted to what the editor calls “Science Wars”, (capital S, capital W). The call for a special issue on this topic was motivated as a response to the book Higher Superstition; The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994 [see the article by Evans M. Harrell, this issue, pp. 1132]). What follows are a few observations on some of the other articles in the Science Wars issue of Social Text.
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