Exercise 3.0: Do you think Sokal was right to publish the article? Give reasons in a short paragraph.

When you first read the passage did it seem suspicious?

Has anything else you have read so far in this course book seemed suspicious? Briefly say what and why?

UVC Part III

Sokal explained his hoax action as (Ben Godacre, 2003): ‘My goal isn’t to defend science from barbarian hordes of critics (we’ll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself ….There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of Science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy sciences, is useless or even counterproductive.’

In his interview with Robert Siegal (May 1996, All Things Considered), Sokal mentioned that ‘it was intellectual and political context’ of his article. Thus he was defending his philosophical and political views, which were overlapping. He claimed himself to be a ‘proud feminist’ and a ‘leftist of the old fashioned sense’. He believed that academic social scientist (leftists) must ‘uncover some of the facts how the economic and political system really operates and discuss them publicly to see what can be done and propose constructive changes’. Sokal also said ‘Unfortunately, a certain segment of the academic left has gone off into very strange philosophy like french imports, deconstruction, post structure realism, they have lost contact with the real world’. 

It should be said here that Sokal, along with the authors of ‘Higher Superstition’ (1994), Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt have been defenders of the so-called ‘scientific realism’ and opposed postmodern academical philosophy, which questioned the principle of scientific objectivity. They found it an anti-intellectual approach to science in liberal arts and heavily criticised the Deconstruction theory founded by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. At this point, it is essential to understand what is Deconstruction* and Realism as a Philosophy of Science. Below the exercise, I put some notes for myself about that. Interestingly, Derrida was also criticised by John Searle, who said (‘Construction of Social Reality’, page 198): “Several ‘postmodernist’ literary theorists have argued that because all knowledge is socially constructed and subject to all the arbitrariness and will to power of any social contraction, that therefore Realism is somehow threatened” and “Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument” to George Levine’s:” Antirealism, even literary Realism, depends on a sense of the impossibility of unmediated knowledge’. 

As an answer to the first question in the exercise whether Sokal was right to publish the article and the reasons to do so, I can say he was right to do so. The main reason for Sokal to write and publish the article, as I understood, after doing my research for this exercise, was the following: Sokal was worried that two major factors have been influencing the purity and objectivity of science and scientific methods: 1) many social scientists tend to become highly politically liberal and leftists; 2) Deconstruction and Anti Realism/ Idealism as a general approach to science, which insist that all the properties are mental denying Metaphysical Realism, what Socal described as “have lost contact with a real-world”;

Both factors influenced the scientific process, making scientists less critical in their scientific methods, ending up with claims which can not be adequately supported in a methodological sense. Sokal could not agree with Derrida’s assumptions that, as John Searle well explained it (Construction of Social Reality, page 198): “There is nothing outside the text…everything exists in some context or other!”. As it is mentioned in the article of William Reville (2015): ‘Embedding ideological values in measures is dangerous to science’. Probably, Sokal shared this point of view. As a result of it, many serious ‘biased assumptions’ arise what in their turn lead to wrong policy-making decisions in the sensitive social agenda of society.

When I first read the article, I must confess that it was difficult to understand, and it took some time to detangle the words, digging out the meaning and sense. That was hard and exactly this – time for detangling and linking the arguments with the statements -made me feel suspicious. I believe that even the most complex concepts can be explained with simple terms. While reading, I was getting lost in the text, which also made me wonder whether the author was bringing an intellectually clear concept to the pages of his essay. 

What made the suspicious, it was, actually, the following citation of Sokal, allocated on page 67 of the coursebook: ‘The content and methodology of postmodern science thus provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project, understood in its broadest sense: the transgressing boundaries, the breaking down barriers, the radical democratisation of all aspects of social, economic, political and cultural life. Conversely, one part of this project just involves constructing a new and truly progressive science that can serve the needs of such democratised society -to-be’. When I read this passage, its overall tone reminded me of those slogans from Soviet Propaganda I read and heard when I was a child. This passage doesn’t contain any scientific arguments but only very persuasive linguistics forcefully and energetically imposing the idea that science should serve political projects=somebody’s political ambitions – what is total nonsense! It sounds propagandistic, and that is what was Sokal exactly worried about: scientists with political agendas bury the real science making it just as a servant for their political, in that case, extremist leftist views. He put his worries into a parody for those politically biased social scientists.

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Some notes for myself about new concepts in this chapter: 

Derrida’s Deconstruction Theory*, first of all, is a philosophical approach to understand the relationship between text and meaning. It is essential to know that the Deconstruction theory is not about deconstructing arguments to find logical flaws. In the Derridian sense, it is about deconstructing the text looking for binaries, and exploring the tensions and contradictions in the existing hierarchy within those binaries ( like writing vs speaking, men vs women, nature vs culture), which influences the meaning of the text. As it is explained in an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Deconstruction, 1998-2020): “…the point of deconstructive analysis is not to show that the terms of the speech/writing opposition should be inverted – that writing is really prior to speech-nor is it to show that there is no difference between speech and writing. Rather, it is to displace the opposition to show neither term is primary’. To understand this concept better, I give an example as it is further explained in the Encyclopedia Britannica: ‘…The ‘privileging’ of speech over writing is based on what Derrida considers a distorted (though very pervasive) picture of meaning in natural language, one that identifies the meanings of words with certain ideas or intentions in the mind of the speaker or author’. Those oppositions in binaries are the heritage of the Western intellectual tradition of ‘logocentrism’. According to Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the concepts=meanings we associate with linguistic signs-words are only arbitrarily related to reality and do not objectively reflect existing categories of the real world, but reflect just variable part from language to language; thus, the emanating of a word is not something that is fully present to us, because it is endlessly deferred and varied in an endless chain of meanings.’ So, as John Searle explains it in (Construction of the Social Reality, page 198): ‘There is nothing outside the text”. 

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Bibliography: 1) Alan D. Sokal, 28.11.1994, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, [online] on http://www.physics.nyu.edu, [accessed on April 26, 2021];

2) Alan Sokal, (May 15, 1996). Parody. All Things Considered (Interview). Interviewed by Robert Siegel. national Public Radio.Archived from the original on July 2018. Retrieved on April 27, 2021;

3) Ben Goldacre, 05.06.2003, The Sokal Affair, [online] on http://www.theguardian.com, [accessed on April 26, 2021];

4) Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1998-2020, Deconstruction, [online] on http://www.britannica.com, [accessed on 28.04.2021]; 5) John Searle, Construction of Social Reality, [online] on http://www.scribd.com [accessed on April 27, 2021];

5) Joshua Kates, Deconstruction, 26.07.2017, Oxford Bibliographies, [online] on http://www.oxfordbibliograhies.com, [accessed on 28/04/2021];

6) Sheha Tripathi, Structuralism and Deconstruction, a research article for Grand Academy Portal Book Project XI, language, Literature and Beyond, April, 2018, [online] on http://www.reserachgate.net [accessed on 28.04.2021];

7) William Reville, Why are so many social scientists are left -liberal ?, Feb.5, 2015, [online] on http://www.irishtimes.com, [accessed on 28.04.2021];