Template:M intro philosophy transgressing hermeneutical boundaries

L’affair Sokal

In nineteen ninety-six physicist Alan Sokal submitted the paper Transgressing The Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity to Social Text, a respected academic journal in the field of cultural studies. It argued:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

Social Text published it. Rather than this representing some major concession on the part of traditional hard science Sokal turned out to be joking. He revealed in another — no doubt the irony was not lost on him that it was called Lingua Franca — that the whole paper was a hoax. He had deliberately inserted nonsensical arguments and absurd claims connecting theoretical physics to post structuralism and related ideologies in social sciences which he in fact believed to be ridiculous.