Alan D. Sokal – Transgressing the Boundaries (1995)

https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

by cm_silva • 4 years ago

17 11 4 years ago

physics.nyu.edu

qsort• 4 years ago

A brilliant reminder that if you have impostor syndrome, it is occasionally the case that the solution is simply to stop being an impostor.

jjgreen2• 4 years ago

Moderately amusing the first time you read it, but he's been banging on about it in book after book. Mocking French intellectual poseurs is fair game I guess, but then he started having a go at Feyerabend? Oh dear.

fsckboy• 4 years ago

(I like to dabble around the perimeters of philosophy so your comment interested me, and I did some googling)

this links to a book review written by Philosopher Thomas Nagel about Sokal's book

https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/nagel.html

He lays out a pretty clear defense for Sokal's critique of Feyerabend, just ^F Feyerabend and read from there.

your move, Feyerabend

jjgreen2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the link, I'll have a read later; sadly Feyerabend won't take up your invitation, he died in `94, but if you have a slot in your book schedule, do have a look at Against Method, astonishing (and entertaining).

gexaha2• 4 years ago

That's a very badly written paper, to be honest. I mean, even knowing it was a hoax, I really expected that he somehow would have some speculative/creative content on the topic of "Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", whatever that could mean, but it's just a bunch of misplaced quotes and summaries.

Gimpei• 4 years ago

Wasn’t that the point though? He was trying to show that complete nonsense could be published.

Natsu• 4 years ago

It was later repeated with even more nonsense papers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

gexaha2• 4 years ago

Probably, but a very dull/non-creative point nonetheless

Joker_vD• 4 years ago

it's just a bunch of misplaced quotes and summaries.

Believe it or not, that's what the works on Scientific Communism looked like back in the USSR: bunch of quotes from Marx's and Lenin's writings, strewn together into a somewhat coherent narrative. Those quotes served the same roles that "proofs" and "data" serve in non-scholastic fields, you see: how would you know if you were right or wrong otherwise?

mherdeg• 4 years ago

Also very funny is "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything": https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

A lot of these things kind of lost their fun in the past 5-20 years when words stopped having coherent meaning.

fritztastic• 4 years ago

This event was mentioned in this video about the Bogdanoff twins who, arguably, did the same thing- but to physics.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2O1QA1VoRMM

Alan D. Sokal – Transgressing the Boundaries (1995)

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