The Sokal Affair

Following up on my previous post "Postmodern writings", I thought I would write a few words about the Sokal affair. Everyone who knows me well enough must be very tired of my endless references to the Sokal affair, but I think it is a big deal, and in my opinion it has dire implications for those who respect postmodernism.

So what is it all about? In 1996 Alan Sokal, a physicist then working at New York University who was skeptical towards the incomprehensible and to him seemingly meaningless postmodern literature, decided to test his hypothesis that these people will publish anything as long as it sound right… How did he test this? Sokal wrote an article called Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, an article which anyone with some knowledge on physics would see was rubbish. Even I, with a rather limited education in physics, would get suspicious when I see someone suggesting that quantum gravity has progressive political implications (a matter which I think I will write more about shortly). Alan Sokal submitted his article to the prestigious, though not peer-reviewed journal Social Text and asked them to publish it. He was careful to use all the postmodern fashion words such as hermeneutics (I still cannot spell that damn word), and apparently the editors of Social text fell for it. Amazingly they published the paper in the belief that it was a significant contribution to the field. To be fair, they did ask Sokal to change a few things, but when Sokal refused they went ahead and published it.

On the day of publication, Sokal published another paper in a different journal in which he revealed his scam. In this article he wrote about his own paper that it was "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics made by humanities academics". Predictably, the editors of Social Text were not very happy about the whole affair and they claimed that they only published it because Sokal would not make the changes they asked for. I wish that the editors of the journals which my papers have been sent to would also publish anything if you just refuse to make any changes, but unfortunately (or fortunately) that is not the case.

It is obvious that the editors must have assumed, without consulting any knowledgeable person, that because of the way the article sounded it must have been a good article. I mean, if you can write a paper which is about physics and social issues at the same time, and then simultaneously throw in a bunch of fancy words, then the article has to be pretty great, right? In my opinion the Sokal affair provides strong evidence suggesting that postmodernists are really just playing around with fancy words without any real meaning.

For those of you who are want to know more about the Sokal Affair I recommend the book: "The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy"

Or, if you are more interested in a general criticism of postmodernism see the excellent book: "Intellectual Impostures"

Postmodern Writings

When I was in high school I was not always the best student. However, I have always been a pretty good writer and using this skill I have managed to pass more or less every exam. It seems to me that people have some type of mechanism, learned or innate, that says "if something sounds real smart and intelligent then it probably is, and if you don't understand it then it is probably because the person who wrote it is really really smart". Throughout high school and even to some extent at University I have, consciously or unconsciously, taken advantage of this mechanism to cover up gaps in my knowledge. Whenever I have had nothing intelligent to say I have just written something that sounds good but doesn't really mean anything.

However, over time I have developed a growing distaste for writings which conceal whatever ideas the text is meant to inform us about. Perhaps because of my background I get really suspicious about texts which seem unnecessarily complex. Is this just nonsense that sounds intelligent?, Is the author of this text just trying to trick me into believing that he or she knows something just like I used to? Now days, when I write I always do my best to be as clear as possible. Unfortunately not everyone is as mature as me…

Actually, it seems to me that there are quite a few very talented writers who have managed to get top notch academic positions by fooling everyone into believing that they actually know something. Most of these people belong to the postmodernists, two prime examples being Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler (see below). So difficult are the writings of Lacan that many generations of subsequent scholars have devoted entire careers to interpreting the writings of Lacan. To my knowledge they have not succeeded (and no one ever will). To me this is very alarming. I can think of much better things to throw money at than pseudo academics who writes poetry but refer to it as scientific texts.

Now some people will object and say "well what about the texts that biologists produce, are they not are equally incomprehensible. To take an example, here is a random sentence from my book Molecular Neuropharmacology, A foundation for clinical neuroscience. "After phosphorylation, the Trk complex interacts with additional linker proteins and through an unknown mechanism, acticates Ras, a small-molecular-weight G-protein. Such activation in turn activates a cascade of protein-serine-threonine kinases…" Had I read this sentence before taking any biology or neuroscience I would, I admit, not have understood anything. However, after having taken courses and learned about the different molecules mentioned in the sentence above it is really not that difficult to comprehend. A lot of post modernist writing on the other hand is incomprehensible even after a long education. I have a degree in psychology but I still do not understand what Lacan (also a psychologist) mean when he writes that "the erectile organ is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier".

For those of you who are still not convinced, read the book Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Bricmont (see picture) or the chapter called Postmodernism disrobed in A Devil's chaplain by Richard Dawkins. Or try out the puzzle which my supervisor, Germund Hesslow, sent to me some time ago.

Below are two scientific abstracts (an abstract is a summary of a science article). One abstract is written by Judith Butler (picture), Tina Rosenberg's supervisor, and the other is a text created by Alan Sokal's automatic post modernist text generator.

1. The premise of the precapitalist paradigm of reality implies that truth serves to entrench hierarchy. "Sexuality is part of the rubicon of consciousness," says Lacan. But Debord uses the term 'socialist realism' to denote the role of the artist as poet. Several narratives concerning the precapitalist paradigm of reality may be discovered. A predominant concept is the concept of patriarchialist art. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a socialist realism that includes consciousness as a totality. An abundance of desemanticisms concerning the bridge between class and sexual identity exist.

2. The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Those of you who are already familiar with Sokal's text generator have probably realized that the first abstract is a construction and that the second paragraph therefore must be genuine. It is amazing though how completely incomprehensible the second sentence, which is remember from a real published paper, is. It should be of no surprise that Judith Butler has been honored with first prize in a bad writing contest in the journal diacritics…