|
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax,〔Derrida (1997)〕 was a publishing hoax perpetrated 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 postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – () publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The article, "(Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity )", was published in the ''Social Text'' spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.〔. Reply by Alan Sokal.〕 On the day of its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in ''Lingua Franca'' 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 (postmodernist academics ) he could find about mathematics and physics."〔 The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of ''Social Text''; and whether ''Social Text'' had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor. ==Background== In an interview on the NPR program ''All Things Considered'', Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading ''Higher Superstition'' (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. In their book, Gross and Levitt said that an anti-intellectual trend had swept university liberal arts departments (especially English departments), causing them to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of postmodernist deconstructionism. ''Higher Superstition'' argued that in the 1990s, a group of academics whom the authors referred to collectively as "the Academic Left" was dominated by professors who concentrated on racism, sexism, and other perceived prejudices, and that science was eventually included among their targets—later provoking the "science wars", which questioned the validity of scientific objectivity. Academic journals in the humanities were publishing articles by writers who, scientists argued, demonstrated little or no knowledge of science. Per the introduction: "A curious fact about the recent left-critique of science is the degree to which its instigators have overcome their former timidity, or indifference towards the subject, not by studying it in detail, but rather by creating a repertoire of rationalizations for avoiding such study."〔''Higher Supersitition'', pg. 6.〕 After analyzing essays from "the academic Left", scientists argued that some of these critical writers were ignorant of the original scientific documents they were criticizing and, therefore, were making a series of nonsensical statements about the nature and intent of science. Gross and Levitt found it especially troubling that academic journals were judging the scholarship not through peer review but merely according to their political tilt. ''Higher Superstition'' argued that for an article to be published in some academic journals, especially those associated with the humanities, it needed only to display "the proper leftist thought" and be written by, or include quotations from, well-known leftist authors. ''Higher Superstition'' was thus an attempt to challenge purportedly uncritical subjectivist thought, the validity of which otherwise went largely uncriticized. The book also argued that the Science Wars were fought primarily by non-scientists making contentious statements about the dubiousness of scientific objectivity. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Sokal affair」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|