“Sokal’s Hoax”

By Dick Swart on 10 December 2011

One of the unanswerable questions in life is whether philosophy is a science or not. To me it is not. Philosophy is like a fitness center. The activities are absolutely pointless but it looks cool and it might help you doing a proper sport (science). The relation between philosophy and science has not always been the same. In ancient times it was believed that philosophy began where science stopped. But that held no water for science only progresses over time and it would put philosophy in the same perilous position as religion. Useless rearguard fights with the inevitable result of unconditional surrender.  It has also been said that philosophy was a mother and her three children were the natural sciences, language sciences and psychology.
The post-modernists claimed that those children had grown up and had become too specialized for mother to understand. As every good mother knows, you should leave their children alone when they are grown up. But post-modernist mommy didn’t do that. In stead she started ‘parroting’ her daughters. She used the vocabulary of her offspring in order to disguise her erratic thoughts and by doing so created a verbal diarrhea that is unparalleled until now. Let me give you an example:

Literary semiotics should depart from a poetic logic in which the concept of cardinality of the continuum encloses the interval 0 to 2, a continuum in which the 0 marks and the 1 is implicitly overdrawn.

Someone who claims to understand this kind of gibberish and believes that it contains any truth or has any merit is either a charlatan or is delusional beyond salvation. Nevertheless post-modernism managed to flourish in large parts of the academic world having devastating effects on the humaniora. Thank God the natural sciences are less susceptible to nonsense. And its from this corner of the academic world that a devastating blow was given to post-modernism.

Alan Sokal was a physics professor. In 1996, he submitted an article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to post modern academic journal called Social text. The article was complete post-modern gibberish. All it did was looking good and it flattered the editors enormously for finally there was this ‘real physician’ that talked their language. In an other magazine Sokal explained 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 Post-modernists were furious. Foul play etc. Some even said that the article had merit anyway and that is was not for Sokal to determine whether his writing was nonsense. Cognitive dissonance at its best. From that moment on Post modernism was on retreat and hopefully soon nothing more than a footnote in history. Unfortunately there are still pockets of fierce resistance in the art-world as I have discovered last year. If you want to have fun, surf to the post-modern essay generator http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ just refresh the page and every time a new essay is made that has all the markings of a real post modern essay. 

You might say: ‘`Okay, it’s funny but what has this to do with us?” Well, I think it is time for a Sokal Hoax in the world of New Media considering the enormous amount of gibberish that is uttered by an infinite amount of guru’s nowadays.

Anyone a nice idea?

tagged with: social context, sokal, post modernism, philosophy

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