Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: confederatecarpetbag

“prank academia”
Seriously?…low hanging fruit. Folks have been doing this for ages. Some thinking they’re serious.


3 posted on 10/17/2018 8:34:22 PM PDT by Ouchthatonehurt
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]


To: Ouchthatonehurt

The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy

In May 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in the fashionable academic journal Social Text. The essay quoted hip theorists...the prose was thick with the jargon of poststructuralism. And the point the essay tried to make was counterintuitive: gravity, Sokal argued, was a fiction that society had agreed upon, and science needed to be liberated from its ideological blinders.

When Sokal revealed in the pages of Lingua Franca that he had written the article as a parody, the story hit the front page of the New York Times. It set off a national debate still raging today: Are scholars in the humanities trapped in a jargon-ridden Wonderland? Are scientists deluded in thinking their work is objective? Are literature professors suffering from science envy? Was Sokal’s joke funny? Was the Enlightenment such a bad thing after all? And isn’t it a little bit true that the meaning of gravity is contingent upon your cultural perspective?

Collected here for the first time are Sokal’s original essay on “quantum gravity,” his essay revealing the hoax, the newspaper articles that broke the story, and the angry op-eds, letters, and e-mail exchanges sparked by the hoax from intellectuals across the country, including Stanley Fish, George F. Will, Michael Bérubé, and Katha Pollitt. Also included are extended essays in which a wide range of scholars ponder the long-term lessons of the hoax.


10 posted on 10/18/2018 5:22:57 AM PDT by Scarpetta (The election of Donald Trump is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson