The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy by Lingua Franca

Author:Lingua Franca [Franca, Lingua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-21T01:46:00+00:00

Michael Berube replies

Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 01:12:39 -0500

From: Michael Berube

To: Alan Sokal

Subject: Re: response to your questions about the Social Text affair

Dear Prof. Sokal, Many thanks for the alacrity-and, more important, the substance-of your reply. I get overloaded when I have more than 5 e-mails waiting for me, so I do appreciate what it means that you responded to my e-missive so quickly and thoughtfully.

Point granted. Really, my only caveat with regard to your method (that is, in submitting a parody rather than a "serious" questioning of the sociology of science) is that it brought up a host of red-herring issues-just the kind that are likely to be garbled up in translation to the papers. E.g., I share your disappointment with the Janny Scott article in the Times, partly because I'm familiar with her work and know full well she can do better than to feign alarm that bizarre words like "epistemology" appeared in your essay. (BTW, the miscue about "evidence in the humanities" was actually the work of the otherwise-solid Chronicle of Higher Ed, in which you appear in the "Hot Type" section as the scourge of evidence-less humanists.)

Exactly my point (and I read your essay, notes and all, even though I did so armed with the knowledge that it was a joke-thanks to Norman Levitt, who sent me advance notice). I realize that you tried to bring up this issue in your LFessay. But this is precisely the kind of thing that gets buried when the hoax becomes national news. No one at the Washington Post cares about the citations you puncture by citing them approvingly; that's a great parodic tactic, no doubt, but it just doesn't play in Peoria-or at the Post. What they care about is that you "demonstrated" that we incomprehensible intellectuals are charlatans and mountebanks. But by the Janny Scott "epistemology" standard of intelligibility, I could send Kenneth Ribet's and Brian Hayes' wonderful spring 1994 American Scientist essay, explaining Wiles and Fermat to interested laypersons, to the Post or the Times, and then let them have a field day with that, too.

Part of the moral of this, for me, is how much we're willing to overlook when we come across something that seems to prove us right. That's true not only of ST's reading of your essay but of Levitt's reading of your hoax: for Levitt, the episode bears out everything he says in Higher Superstition-but only if you allow for logical missteps like false inference, guilt by association, and the genetic fallacy. Your conclusion is that the hoax shows that something's wrong with ST's editorial procedure; perhaps even some ST editors might agree. Levitt's conclusion is that the hoax shows that the humanities are run by charlatans and mountebanks, and that involved false inference, guilt by association, and-you get the idea. But Levitt's willing to overlook a few logical missteps because your hoax seems so dramatically to prove him right, just as the STeditors were willing to overlook a whole mess of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.