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Posted: |
Jan 14, 2017 - 1:57 PM
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By: |
OnyaBirri
(Member)
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"At first, no one noticed. When the left-wing cultural-studies journal Social Text released a special issue on 'The Science Wars' in April 1996, the last article stood out only because of its source: 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' was written by the sole scientist in the bunch, a New York University physicist named Alan Sokal.
"Liberally citing work by feminist epistemologists, philosophers of science, and critical theorists — including two of Social Text’s editors, the NYU American-studies scholar Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at CUNY Graduate Center — Sokal endorsed the notion that scientists had no special claim to scientific knowledge. Just as postmodern theory revealed that so-called facts about the physical world were mere social or political constructs, he wrote, quantum gravity undermined the concept of existence itself, making way for a 'liberatory science' and 'emancipatory mathematics.'
"A couple of weeks later, in the magazine Lingua Franca, Sokal revealed that he didn’t believe a word of what he’d written. It was all a big joke, but one motivated by a serious intention: to expose the sloppiness, absurd relativism, and intellectual arrogance of 'certain precincts of the academic humanities.'"
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Anatomy-of-a-Hoax/238728?key=bB4GOexLsAk2KfnFOkgPCI0O5azbXR52m3YJxfcw-igptJkoKi_rn3RCDgSQfq6pc3g5NWVSMTIzSXBPNlRyc3YyVnBuczlCYV82MUNMWXdMY2gxYnNKdEN4NA
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Oh boy, is this an understatement!
The bizarre sophistry of some of these concocted papers knows no bounds. It's often a case of some pet penchant sellotaped onto an existing jargon from another discipline to provide spurious legitimacy. There are people who play the system very well.
In the UK, Private Eye mag has a feature called 'Pseuds Corner' that highlights quotes from these.
Too many students, not enough PhD ideas to go round.
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One you need to look out for is triple alliteration.
It goes like,
'Cues, cornets and climaxes: a postmodern analysis of orchestral brass in dramatic film-scoring.'
or,
'Flow, Flush and Flash in the Pan: Towards a phenomenology of modern bathroom etiquette.' - W. Wipewater & A. Shanks, 2017.
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That so many otherwise perceptive and learned people can be hoodwinked (e.g. the computerized double-talk paper generator) demonstrates how often interpretations are confused with facts.
That's just it though. It tends to be academics who confuse real phenomena and 'truths' with descriptions and definitions and interpretations. That's basically professional narcissism, because they control those things. 'Because I deal in laws that are always changing, then I'm so authoritative in everything I say that the actual laws of nature themselves must be changing too'. It's a claim to absolute authority.
In this case it's a funny irony, since that's exactly what they think they're fighting.
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