The Editors of Lingua Franca

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, cobbled together what he considered to be some of the most egregious quotes by postmodernists on the relation between science and society, tied them together with strident left-wing commentary and extreme anti-realist statements, and sent it off to the left-wing cultural journal Social Text under the title: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". His article was accepted for publication, and about the same time it appeared Sokal revealed (in the magazine Lingua Franca) that his article was a hoax. Despite Sokal's own leftist political views, he was sick and tired of what he saw as the dishonest way that academic leftists were abusing science and common sense in furthering their political goals, and he saw this as a way of protesting their actions.

In The Sokal Hoax, the editors of _Lingua Franca_ have brought together in one volume Sokal's original article along with a lot of the things that were written (by both critics and supporters of Sokal) in response. I found this book to be very entertaining. For those who know some set theory, footnote 54 of Sokal's article contains some delicious puns which, by themselves, would have tipped off the editors of _Social Text_ that Sokal was pulling their leg if they had really been competent to referee his paper. Like some postmodernists, I guess, I sometimes think scientists get too big for their britches, but I think the theories many postmodernists have concocted to cut science down to size are many times worse.… (altro)