At 4:12 PM -0500 1/03/03, David W. Fenton wrote:
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.
Excuse me. Satire. Not fraud. Sokal had every intention of revealing the true nature of his article, as opposed to Schon.
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.
Well, my point really is that to uncover cooked data is ever so much more difficult than to uncover illogical, unbased, or unsupported assertions that the the editors of Social Text were more incompetent (assuming that they they were innocent, and not intentionally overlooking problems with the article (as Sokal suggested) because it agreed with their own agendas) than the editors of the defrauded science journals that published Schon's work.
Sorry I can't take time to improve the construction of that last sentence.
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.
Oh, I don't accept Sokal's campaign as proof of something wrong with the HUMANITIES, only as evidence that the editors of Social Text have to be a bit more critical when they read articles for publication. I also think you are a bit rough on Sokal when you compare him to phrenology. He was only pointing out, with savage accuracy, a percieved weakness where he saw it, and the proof that the weakness was true was that his article was published. Fuzzy thinking is rampant through every dicipline, even among followers of the so-called pure sciences (have you been following the Raelites and their cloning claims?) so don't think that I have it in for the humanities in particular, not by any means.
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