Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture

The Sokal Hoax in the nineties happened when Alan Sokal, a physicist, had a paper published using trendy terms from postmodern discourse and a ton of citations from well known post-modern philosophers it was a paper purposely put together to be profound sounding gibberish and it fooled the editors of social text. The right got a few talking points back then from it in the news and it has largely been forgotten since.
Sokal was not a conservative. he was a person of the left. He published to paper because he worried about postmodern philosophers putting forth a form of relativism and science is just one way of "knowing". This was meant to give formerly oppressed peoples a voice and have their ways of "knowing" given respect. As an academic fad postmodernism seems like frippery from happier times.
The problem is that the corrosive relativism and alternate ways of "knowing" is given way to "Alternative Facts" of Trump and co. Postmodernism as movement will be forgotten but it corrosive philosophy became the perfect ammo for its political enemies. I don't think postmodernists were hoping to give voice to Brietbart or Fox but the tools of moral relativism and alternative facts was going to be used by the people with the biggest megaphone and in America it is the well funded right. It was not a result intended by the postmodernists but in the sleep of reason arise demons.
It appears the BBC was thinking the same thing I was. I found this video about ten minutes ago. I wrote the review before I found this video 3/19/2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5ydF...

Alan Sokal is best known in the academic world for his overly-clever hoax. In 1996 he published an essay in Social Text, a postmodern journal, full of ridiculous "postmodernist" statements about quantum physics. His goal was to make fun of literary and cultural critics who had been taking on the scientific establishment by questioning its methods of seeking truth. The postmodernist perspective (actually, to be fair, one perspective), in a crude nutshell, is that truth and knowledge are relative and vary depending on culture and social structure. In any event, Sokal created a firestorm with his hoax.
In the ensuing 12 years, Sokal offered reflections on this episode and has added a number of essays critical of the critics of science. This book consists of several of these essays, as well as a laborious annotated version of the original piece that made him famous (or infamous, depending on one's perspective).
Although the book is worth reading for Sokal's interesting critiques of what he calls Science Studies, there are numerous problems that result in a less than stellar product (especially given the prestigious publisher, Oxford U Press). First and most obvious, this is perhaps the worst edited book I've ever read. The number of redundancies across chapters is astounding and very annoying. Was Oxford in a rush to put this out for some reason? Did Sokal refuse to work with an editor?
Second, whereas Sokal is on solid ground when offering critiques of science studies from his perspective as a physicist, and though he seems to have mastered well the epistemological literature that is relevant to these studies, he goes well off track in later chapters when he attempts to tackle what he calls "superstition" (read "religion"). Here he simply rehashes arguments that have been made much more convincingly by Dawkins and other proud atheists. It seems that Sokal felt at pains to be even handed by attacking postmodernists as well as what he considers conservatives (which seemed to encompass all believers, irrespective of his use of the term "liberal Christian").
Perhaps most annoying, though, is that Sokal, even if he has done an admirable job cutting the legs out of postmodern science studies, offers no sense of what the scientific method offers. He assumes that the reader is on his side and perhaps understands the method, so he didn't feel the need to offer a positive evaluation or argument favoring this approach to knowledge generation. This may have been his thinking, but I thought it came off as arrogant. In the end, even though I was amused by the "Sokal hoax" and its aftermath, the book disappoints on many levels.

'Şakanın Ardından' Sokal vakasındaki tartışmaları toplayan bir kitaptır. Kitabın ilk bölümünde Social Text'te yayınlanan makalenin tam metni ve açıklamaları sağlı-sollu yer almaktadır. Diğer bölümleri ise bilim ve bilim felsefesi tartışmalarına ayrılmıştır. Kendisini 'Sol görüşlü' olarak niteleyen Sokal en çok sol çevrelerdeki bilim düşmanlığının tehlikelerine dikkati çekmektedir. Kitapta, Sokal Vakası tartışmaların yanısıra, Bilim Felsefesinin kadim sorunları da ele alınmaktadır: Popper'cı bilim felsefesinin eleştirisinden, Kuhn'un “bilimsel devrimlerine”, Feyereband' ın “yönteme karşı” sına kadar, son dönem bilim felsefesi tartışmalarına değinen Sokal, bu tartışmalar karşısında bilim insanının konumunu irdeler.
''Burada amaçlarımdan biri de Sol içinde beşeri bilimlerle uğraşanlar ve doğa bilimcileri arasında doğacak bir diyaloğa küçük bir katkıda bulunmaktır; çoğu ilk gruptan gelen bazı iyimser beyanlara rağmen, “iki kültür” zihniyeti arasındaki fark belki de son elli yılda olduğundan daha fazla açılmıştır....Doğa bilimcilerin postmodern aptallıktan korkması için pek neden yoktur (en azından kısa süreliğine); söz oyunları, toplumsal gerçeklerin titizlikle incelenmesinin yerini alınca bundan en çok mağdur olanlar tarih, sosyal bilimler ve sol siyasettir...''
Türkçe Baskıya Önsöz
Alan Sokal, Türk okurların yabancı olmadığı bir isim. Jean Bricmont ile birlikte yazdıkları kitap 2002 'de Türkçede 'Son Moda Saçmalar Postmodern Aydınların Bilimi Kötüye Kullanmaları' başlığıyla yayımlandı. New York Üniversitesinde Teorik fizik profesörü olan Alan Sokal, 1996'da Social Text isimli bir postmodern dergiye saçma bir makale gönderir. Fizik kuramlarını bilerek çarpıttığı ve saçma bir şekilde sunduğu bu makalesini Social Text basar ve ardından Sokal bunun bir şaka olduğunu, postmodern dergilerin her türlü saçma makaleyi bastıklarını ispatlamak için bu yola başvurduğunu açıklar. Sonrasında büyük bir tartışma başlar, postmodern felsefeciler ile bilim adamları arasında. ''Bilim savaşlarında''nda yeni bir sayfa açılmış olur ve Derrida gibi ünlü postmodernistler ile Weinberg gibi Nobel ödüllü fizikçilerinin de dahil olduğu sert tartışmalar yaşanır. Düşün tarihine 'Sokal vakası' olarak geçen bu olayın devamı 'Şakanın Ardından'ın ilk kısmını oluşturuyor. Kitabın ikinci bölümü ise detaylı bir bilim felsefesi tartışması içeriyor. Son olarak üçüncü bölümde Sokal, bütün bu tartışmaların akademik düzeyde kalmadığını, aslında bunun politik bir mesele olduğunu, günlük hayattan örneklerle anlatıyor. Bu son kısım kitabın en politik kısmı.
Alan Sokal, bir teorik fizikçiden beklenmeyecek ölçüde politik birisi. Farklı makalelerinden derlediği bu kitabında da, sık sık ''kendi alanı olmayan'' bu konulara politik nedenlerle girdiğini vurguluyor. Toplumsal olaylar, topluma ilişkin olgular, kısaca her tür politik söylemin beşeri bilimcilerin tekelinde olduğu günümüzde, Sokal gibi pozitif bilimcilerin bu çıkışları bize göre çok önemlidir. Sokal'ın en çok vurguladığı ''bilim düşmanlığı'' ve ''bilimlerin postmodern yazarlar tarafından kötüye kullanımı'', son tahlilde akademik bir mesele değil, politik sonuçları olan ciddi bir toplumsal olgudur. Bu olguyu görmek için çok uzaklara gitmeye gerek yok, Internetten Türkçeye çevrilmiş kitapları taradığımızda hemen karşımıza çıkıyor. Ülkemizde postmodern yazarları Türkçeye kazandırma konusunda geniş bir ittifak göze çarpmakta: Liberalliğe terfi etmiş eski tüfek solculardan anarşistlere, prestijli üniversitelerin Sosyoloji bölümlerinden dini kitaplar basan yayınevlerine kadar hemen herkes postmodern yazarları (özellikle Fransız olanları) bağrına basmış durumda. Örneğin Baudrillard'ın neredeyse tüm kitapları Türkçeye çevrilmiş, Feyerabend birçok farklı yayınevi tarafından defalarca yayımlanmış. Bu ilginç olguyu nasıl açıklamalı? Şüphesiz ilk akla gelen açıklama bu fikirlerin 'moda oluşları'. Bu kadar geniş bir düşünce yelpazesindeki aydınların, bu kitapların içeriklerinde uzlaştıklarını varsaymak ilk bakışta olanaksız gibi görünüyor. Moda konusu, Alfa Yayınlarının Bilim-Felsefe dizisinden çıkartacağımız ilk dört kitaptan biri olan 'Mem Makinesinde' ayrıntılı olarak ele alınıyor. Susan Blackmore, bir çeşit kültürel genler olan ''mem''lerin nasıl taklit yoluyla kendilerini kopyalattığını detaylı bir şekilde inceliyor. Ama 'postmodern memlerin' kendilerini kopyalatarak çoğalması bir sonuçtur. Peki bu memlerin başarılı olmasının ardında yatan sır nedir? Neden son yıllarda 'faşist bilim', 'paradigma', 'sömürgeci batı bilimi', 'gerçeklik görecelidir', 'bilim toplumsal bir inşadır' tarzındaki memler başarı kazandı? İşte Sokal, bu postmodern yazarların söylediklerinin bu kadar geniş bir çevrede ilgi çekmesinin nedenlerini araştırıyor kitabında. Bir bilim adamı titizliğiyle postmodern argümanları masaya yatırarak, bu yanlış argümanların izini Kuhn ve Feyerabend'in eserlerine kadar sürüyor.
Sokal'a göre başta gelen etmenlerden ilki ''tembellik'', çünkü ''perspektivizm ve radikal toplumsal inşacılık, politik olarak kendini adamış fakat entelektüel açıdan tembel insanlar için fazlasıyla doğal bir felsefe ...''. Günümüzde en sevilen kavram paradigma. Herkesin 'kendi paradigması' var. Oysa gerçek bilim yapmak zor. Eğer herşey bir yorum ve kanaat meselesiyse, zamanımızı neden ciddi biçimde fizik, biyoloji ve istatistik öğrenmeye harcayalım ki? Tembelliğin yanı sıra akıl-dışılığa duyulan ilgi, bilimin 'otoriterliğinden' korku,...vb gibi etmenler de var. Özellikle Türkiye gibi bilimsel formasyonun zayıf olduğu ülkelerde bunlar daha da baskın hale geliyor.
Sokal'ın amacı, genel anlamda kanıt ve mantığa duyulan saygı olarak özetlediği bilimsel bir dünya görüşünü savunmak. Ama bu sadece akademik bir savunma değil, aynı zamanda politik bir savunma. Kitaptaki tezler her ne kadar akademik düzeyde de olsa, sonuçları politik. Sokal bütün bu tartışmaların akademik düzeyde kalmayıp, dünyamızı da etkilediğini vurguluyor. Bilim düşmanlığının, göreciliğin ve sahte bilimlerin en büyük zararının, özellikle Türkiye gibi ''Aydınlanmanın modası geçmiş olduğu varsayılan işinin henüz tamamlanmadığı Üçüncü Dünya ülkelerinde'' görüldüğünü söylüyor. Sokal kitabın son bölümünde bu zararlara örnek olarak Hindistan'ı seçmiş. Ancak Hindistan' da yaşananların bir kısmı Türkiye'de de yaşanmakta ve yaşanma tehlikesi var.
Alan Sokal'ın bu kitabının, Türkiye'deki postmodern modanın yol açtığı zararların telafisine yönelik önemli bir tartışma zemini yaratmasını umuyoruz.
Kerem Cankoçak, Eylül 2011

The blurb doesn't give much away, so I'll fill you in on the content as I go along:
Chapter 1 (60-odd pages plus bibliography) is a reproduction of Sokal's 1996 publication in social science journal 'Social Text', which he later revealed to be deliberately composed of ambiguity, misused terms, and quotes of what Sokal considered to poor science or else total nonsense. The reproduction is also accompanied by commentary from Sokal in the form of annotations. That means your attention is divided three ways: to the article, to the footnotes to the article, and to the annotations. This works pretty well, and I think is probably better than if the article had been reproduced as a stand-alone piece which was then followed by the commentary, but I did get a bit tired at times of having to move my attention around the pages all the time. You don't get the same satisfaction you get from just going at a chunk of text and blasting through it.
In terms of content, this chapter is reasonably interesting (for someone with very very little previous experience of social science or post-modern deconstructivism and what have you), but I did get a bit bored before the end. To be fair, it probably didn't help that I was often unable to discern the nonsense from the partly or entirely sensical until I read the explanatory comment for that particular bit, because this meant that I spent a fair amount of time in a pretty clueless state. But then, if the editors of Social Text were fooled, and they were supposed to be experts, what hope did I have? Most of the comments are quite interesting or funny, but I was quite glad to finally finish the chapter.
The rest of part 1 (which constitutes around one third of the book) is comprised of comment on the hoax and what it did and didn't demonstrate. This and the rest of the book are presented in the more familiar text-and-footnote format, so are less of an effort to read. Plus, they're pretty interesting.
However, it was parts 2 and 3 that I had highest hopes for, once the attraction of reading the hoax had lost its initial shine, and I think these parts are the most interesting overall. Part 2 consists of 2 essays on science and philosophy, and part 3 of 3 essays on science and culture. In truth, the two essays from part 2 and the first from part 3 are pretty similar, and in fact certain paragraphs from the different essays are repeated word-for-word not just once but a couple of times between the different essays. I didn't exactly feel cheated by that, because the meat of the essays IS different, but I did think it was just a teeny bit rich for Sokal to talk in the preface about how much it annoys him when academics release compendiums of essays that have bugger all to do with each other but try to pass the volume off as a coherent whole, only to then go to the opposite extreme and actually repeat content over and over again! But it's a minor gripe.
To wrap it up, the final 2 essays on politics and religion were the most accesible for me, but also the most familiar and least revelatory (but still intereting).
So what did I think of the book? Well, I hadn't realised that it was going to be about the attempts of certain groups to attack science for the very thing that makes it worthwhile - i.e., its objectivity - and if I had realised that it was going to be about that (a topic that would have struck pre-BTH me as being pretty much irrelevant to serious science), then I would probably have been less inclined to buy it. However, in the course of reading the book, I did come around to the idea that these groups, although small, do have quite a bit of influence, so I'm glad that I did decide to take it home. It IS a bit repetitive, and the analysis is never really all that deep, mostly coming in the form of quotes from other works that Sokal then briefly comments on or to which he supplies comment from other sources, but then, Sokal never attempts to hide the fact that with these essays he's sticking his nose into areas in which he's not a specialist, and I felt that, although a little shallow, his analysis was always very fair and often quite insightful. Plus, he comes across as a very likeable guy, and at times his comments or the sources he's selected are actually very funny.
I'm only giving this three stars, but they're a very happily granted three stars. I wouldn't want to give the wrong impression of the book by giving it a higher score, because it is a lot of pages on quite a niche topic, and because the actual input from the author constitutes only so much of the book, and contributes only so much insight, but it's a book that I for the most part really enjoyed reading, and I find myself liking and admiring Sokal himself rather a lot too.
Overall: recommended, but only for those who've read this far and haven't sighed yet or skipped along. Three and a half stars if I could...

Sokal protests that this is not a collection of B-sides, so to speak, but a continuous whole, even if its parts were previously published separately. Unfortunately the consistency is not the same all the way through, and this was not a text which was designed to be read from cover to cover in the same way that the previous book, Fashionable Nonsense, was. Many sections seem as if they were a pouring-out of paragraphs clipped from sessions at the library, with minimal commentary.
When Sokal draws conclusions he has an honest perspective about things, for example he reviews the literature of "Post-Modern Nursing" but comes to conclusion that such things are as marginal as they sound from the phrase itself. For another example he reviews the cross-section of New Age Healers and straight-out Post-Modernists, and finds less than he expected. This is admirable in itself, but seems to say that this book was hardly deserving of the lofty sounding title on the front cover.
Rather than creating any unique persepective on "Science, Philosophy and Culture," Sokal merely adds his 2p on issues as broad as atheism, homeopathy, Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Only for the hard-core fans. The hight may be the first chapter: a kind of "director's commentary" on the original hoax-article. The dual-footnotes are sometimes difficult to negotiate but contain a lot of nuggets which are worthwhile.

Much more than I expected in more ways than one.
I expected the text of the Sokal Hoax, exposing anti-reality post modernism, but the extensive footnotes where a bonus.
Then there was plenty of food for thought exploring more examples that started from merely doubting the existence of a real world and the equality of all points of view when it comes to matters of fact but progressed into the direct promotion of nonsense beliefs at the expense of science and to the detriment of innocents.
I was particularly dismayed to spot yet another ocean of alternative silliness lapping at the shores of rationality in the form of Rogerian nursing.
Finally I was delighted to find a perspective on the Politics of the Left at challenged my previous views and seems to make good sense. With a bit of luck this might even lead me to changing my mind about some things, for good, evidence based reasons of course.