On 3 Jan 2003 at 15:51, Christopher BJ Smith wrote: > >On 3 Jan 2003 at 13:53, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > >> Go here for one of the most famous hoaxes in academic history: > >> This Physics professor at NYU wrote a Pomo-style article full of > >>nonsense cliches > >> strung together. It was "peer-reviewed," accepted, and published by one of > >> the leading Pomo journals. > >> > >> http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ > > > >The criticism there was that the journal accepted an article it > >didn't understand. Well, physics journals do the same thing: > > > >Investigation Finds that One Lucent Physicist Engaged in Scientific > >Misconduct > >http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-55/iss-11/p15.html > > > >Jon Hendrik Schön published numerous cutting-edge articles in quite a > >few peer-reviewed journals, and all of them included fraudulent data, > >which no one detected. > > How does one detect fraudulent data in an article? You can't, unless > you were looking over the scientist's shoulder when he conducted the > experiment. In your example, the fraud would have gone completely > undetected if he hadn't cooked his data so obviously. However, > outlandish assertions, leaps of logic, connecting unrelated > conclusions with no argument or support, these can be detected by any > undergraduate, and this is what was perpetrated by Sokol in his > parody. Read Sokol's explanation, and why it should have been > detected immediately, at: > > http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html
I read Sokal's apologia for his personal dishonesty back when it all originally happened. Sorry, but it doesn't wash as an excuse for committing a fraud. Peer-reviewed scientific journals accepted cooked data. A non-peer-reviewed journal in the humanities charitably accepted an article from a physicist in good faith (despite misgivings that the article had problems). Sokal committed a fraud. Fraud can be perpetrate on a scientific journal, too -- false and falsified "science" goes undetected in scientific journals, too, as is proven by the Schön affair. The lesson here is that fraud is not always detected, whether in the humanities or in the sciences. Sokal's accusation of incompetence in the humanities could just as easily be levelled at the editors of the journals that repeatedly accepted articles from Schön, despite the fact that he kept printing the same graph (i.e., data) over and over again, purportedly proving different things each time. Those who accept Sokal's incredibly dishonest campaign as proof of something wrong with the humanities are prejudiced against the humanities in the first place. Sokal's campaign is the phrenology of the 20th century. -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
