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Alan David Sokal (/ ˈsoʊkəl / SOH-kəl; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works with statistical mechanics and combinatorics. Sokal is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately ...
The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax, [1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies.
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (UK: Intellectual Impostures), first published in French in 1997 as Impostures intellectuelles, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. [1]
- Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, N. David Mermin
- 1997
The essay explores the meaning and implications of Alan Sokal’s hoax on the editors of Social Text. It examines the role that relativist/postmodernist views about knowledge may have played in that episode, and briefly explores the cogency of such conceptions.
The scandal of the Sokal hoax was marked, then, by a confusion between the discursive bloc of postmodernism and the field of science 5. The academic Left was already under attack by a sector of the science professoriate, notably represented by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt in their tract, Higher Superstition: The
Jun 3, 2011 · Sokal brings forth the usual suspects, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and one unusual suspect, Karl Popper. As Sokal admits, Popper can hardly be called a relativist, but Sokal argues that the criticisms of Popper’s views do give aid and comfort to the relativist position.
The squabbles ignited by Higher Superstition alerted Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, to the controversy. Further research nullified his initial suspicions that the book might merely be yet another "culture wars" diatribe from the right.
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