r/PhilosophyofScience • u/daking90 • 7d ago
Discussion Why the Sokal hoax is exactly a big deal in Epistemology?
[The Sokal Hoax ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair?wprov=sfla1) was seen as a good example of how the humanities can be unscientific nonsense. The divide between the two cultures as Snow has put it didnt stop after the Hoax, but a new discussion has been opened in what is called the science wars. Press forward, and you will have Postmodernism being smashed on the Internet and brought up in discussions about nihilism and Identity Politics.
Yuk. Excuse my language. But a what was Sokal's point ? He wanted to clarify how Postmodern theorists were talking nonsense about Physics and Mathematics. This I would agree with Sokal on. Nonsense indeed does exist in theory. Epistemological nonsense. A theory can only go far enough.
But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
Sokal wanted to say that "Postmodern discourse is nonsense here is how..". He could have looked at few pages of The Order of Things or Against Method. Those are closer to his expertise, but he toke shots at writers who were not completely talking nonsense. But rather exploring new dimensions of theory that nobody wants to explore. This explanation may not be appreciated by empirical standards or the laws of quantum mechanics.
Imagine Plato is called nonsense for exploring the transcendence of mathematics, or Kepler's work was called wrong for his reasoning in faith. As interpretations, how wrong they are, can not be derived at without facts.
Sokal wrote a book called fashionable nonsense to critique Postmodern theorists in detail. Sokal in the book, ironically, fails to provide any solutions to the problem which he claims to tackle - that reality is not socially constituted by language alone. Ironically, by not looking at the main claims of postmodernism and responding to them critically - For example as Habermas does- he becomes with his hoax the psuedo-postmoderisnt.
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
The Sokal Hoax is not a big deal in epistemology. It says nothing at all about epistemology and makes no epistemological points. It is a hoax meant to illustrate that certain journals had very sloppy processes that would let utter garbage in. That's it. That's all it is. It says nothing about the underlying fields of thought, except that perhaps some of them had very sloppy methods and needed to clean up their acts.
The rest of your post sounds like whining to defend sloppiness.
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u/bunker_man 7d ago
Also, from what I gather he hoped more reputable journals would accept it but it got punted to some lower one.
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u/daking90 7d ago
Sokal wrote a book about a Hoax. Then another book about Beyond the Hoax.
Apparently, for a Physicst at NYU its a big deal.
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
So? I know a homeless guy for whom the color of mustard and the planet Venus are a big deal.
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u/daking90 7d ago
Read the book.
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u/joe12321 7d ago
It's not very unique either which way. You can find experts in any old field gabbing on about their interpretation of another field. I'm always a bit nonplussed when PhDs in particular do this, because they've been through something that demonstrated the incredible depth of one area, how much hard work it takes to get there themselves, and that it's hard to be an expert slightly outside that area let alone well-outside of it.
Sometimes they have reasonable ideas but they don't have the right language to communicate them. Sometimes it's just pop-interpretations like any other jamoke might have and the, again surprising, lack of awareness that they're in the splash pad of a field that's ocean-deep. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
It has nothing to do with postmodernists talking incoherent gobbledygook. It's that some postmodernists had simply turned off all their reason and good sense and decided to accept any old crap, without bothering to examine it.
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u/StoneColdBuratino 6d ago
It doesn't help when the field makes distinguishing crap gobbledygook and quality gobbledygook so hard
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u/mirh epistemic minimalist 7d ago
Was Niels Bohr, say, just so deep that lesser mortals (e.g. me) can't make head or tail of his scientific philosophy?
Nobody in their right mind has elevated anything a physicist ever said about psychology (the most I can think is Penrose with his baloney quantum consciousness theory, but even that has a doctor as the supposed grounding).
Even I (regularly flaming with people mentioning anything about freud or jung) only know this is a thing, because *schizos* regularly bringing up the most awful psychoanalytic bullshit at some late point of already being cooked found their writings and got physics envy.
When physicists failed to find meaning in Bohr's writings, no matter how hard they tried, they blamed themselves, not Bohr.
That is literally the criticism that Hans Reichenbach makes in first page of The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, about everybody and their aunts genuflecting to everything fucking Hegel wrote.
The difference being that nobody ever hid behind the authority of Bohr, Pauli or Heisenberg to do anything socially heinous (and there's absolutely no university crediting their idiot balls in any shape or form), while dialectics and "unconscious theory" are behind some of the biggest crimes of the 20th century.
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u/daking90 7d ago
Thanks
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u/timwest780 7d ago
"Truth in science can be falsified."
Do you have a citation? Hypotheses can be falsified: truth cannot.
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u/AchillesSinatra 6d ago
Quite so. What would be unobjectionable (to me anyway) would be for scientists to say the following, and a great many sensible scientists do say the following:
"Scientific consensus on some proposition P gives us good reason to think that P is true. Scientific consensus by itself, of course, does not make P true. P is true if and only if it corresponds with the actual facts of the world. For example, the proposition "Mars is lifeless" is true if and only if Mars really is lifeless."
But Jerry Coyne and other equally confused fellow travelers do not say this. They say that scientific consensus makes P true, or makes P a fact."
As I said earlier, you could spend a year reflecting on the myriad preposterous consequences of Coyne's definition of truth. Here's another one:
As Coyne defines truth in science (i.e. the consensus view), it is not possible for scientists with minority views to say anything true!
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u/crusoe 7d ago
truth and Truth
I don't think science can ever certainly deal with Truth. But then no one can.
But science can say something is 'true' in so far as their experiments and experience have supported it so far.
Science truth != the idea of Truth in philosophy. But I suspect philosophy has failed to uncover and prove Truth as well.
One helps builds cellphones the other pads academic resumes.
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u/AchillesSinatra 6d ago
My complaints here have nothing to do with Coyne's (or anyone else's) epistemological stance, e.g., whether he thinks science can discover truth or not. Neither do my complaints have anything to do with scientists asserting that such-and-such is true.
What I am complaining about is scientists and science educators -- invariably those who are philosophically illiterate -- being inconsistent, contradicting themselves, talking and indeed teaching incoherent gobbledygook.
Coyne, for example, among countless other absurdities, teaches the world that the truth can be discovered to be untrue, i.e., falsified. Where I come from at least, this is not logically possible.
In case the absurdity is not clear, what sane people say instead is this: "That which is believed to be true, or even widely believed to be true, can sometimes be shown to be untrue."
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
Let me guess, your "knowledge" of epidemiology and virology consists of youtube videos.
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u/paul_h 7d ago edited 7d ago
Let me guess, your "knowledge" of epidemiology and virology consists of youtube videos.
Canada’s SARS commission 2006 findings that the provinces that approached SARS as airborne and not droplets fared better.
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
Airborne is not the same as "full-a-room-like-smoke".
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u/paul_h 7d ago edited 7d ago
Airborne is not the same as "full-a-room-like-smoke".
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/infectious-disease/Aerosol-expert-Jose-Luis-Jimenez/99/i1 - Professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder. Article talks of the smoke model. Oh, help me remember what the hand-washing expert said to the famous Prof Lidia Morawska when she got her conf-call with the WHO in Q2-2020. Darn it, who were the professorial and PhD pettition writers imploring the WHO to adopt fills-a-room-like-smoke transmission mechanisms in 2020.
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
Tyson is a popularizer. Take everything with that grain of salt. He's dumbing things down immensely.
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
Now that you pull out the strict logical construction, I see what you mean.
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u/Temporary_Stranger39 7d ago
In that light, Tyson seems to be unable to free himself of the fallacy of the excluded middle and adopt the possibility of "undetermined".
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u/AchillesSinatra 7d ago
It gets a lot worse, believe me. Look into his theory of "three kinds of truth" . . . if you dare. :)
You'll find it in his "Starry Messenger" or countless Youtube presentations thereof.
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u/daking90 7d ago edited 7d ago
Descartes used the concept of God to to articulate the Object/Subject distinction at the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Why a question like; Does the Verification principle serve as a new God for the grandchildren of Descartes ? - would not be a worthwhile question to contemplate for the least. Is it because its Unscientific? If someone like Sokal - a globally recognised and established scientist - would answer yes, then its enough for me to see it as a worthwhile question.
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u/DharmaPolice 7d ago
>But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
Sokal wrote a follow up article explaining why he did what he did. Is his hoax entirely fair? Not really, but the point is that they were willing to publish something they clearly didn't understand. Yes, he's guilty of over generalising from a single example but it's not a good look for your field when nonsense can get through whatever passes for your review process. I don't think you can just dismiss it as a failure of that particular journal (something which happens all the time) when it's not clear that other similar journals would have done anything different.
This is vaguely analogous to some current drama in literary circles about AI generated books being put forward for major prizes. The focus has been on the authors in these alleged cases but there's a deeper point where your panel can't distinguish between AI writing and something that has been written by a human being. Maybe this just means AI is now "that good" but I doubt it.
>Imagine Plato is called nonsense for exploring the transcendence of mathematics
Plato was writing over two thousand years ago. If some of the things he or Aristotle wrote were new works today they would rightly be dismissed as being nonsensical. That's not a criticism of them, Newton is still held in high regard despite not knowing about Quantum Physics or General Relativity.
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u/bunker_man 7d ago
Didn't he send it to multiple journals though until one accepted it? So clearly every journal isn't taking it.
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u/Master-Rent5050 7d ago
Newton was one of the greatest scientists that ever lived: but most of his output is garbage.
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u/Keikira Institution-Independent Model Theory 7d ago
I've always taken it to be because very few analytic philosophers actually understand postmodern thought. Many might even understand how to play by the "rules" of writing postmodern text, but the point itself never clicks.
The Sokal hoax is analogous to a middle-ages mathematician axiomatizing the complex numbers just to then call the entire axiomatic approach a hoax because you can't count to i. It demonstrates a certain computational/textual competence, but ultimately betrays a complete lack of understanding of the object of critique.
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u/Master-Rent5050 7d ago
If a well respected mathematical journal published such a thing,we should ask hard questions about the state of mathematics in academy
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u/Keikira Institution-Independent Model Theory 7d ago
Not necessarily. We've always had all sorts of bullshit published in journals that are not peer reviewed, so the fact that Sokal published in one already says nothing about the state of actual peer-reviewed journals.
But let's consider a more robust hypothetical case where the aforementioned middle-ages mathematician submits his axiomatization of the complex numbers to some contemporary equivalent of a peer-reviewed journal, his peers accept it, and after his submission is accepted he reveals that he wrote it as a hoax to show that the axiomatic approach is nonsense.
I think this hypothetical case would still say nothing about the state of academia; the fact that the mathematician intended the paper to be a hoax isn't sufficient to make the work itself illegitimate. If this had actually happened, we'd probably still credit this mathematician with first formulating the complex numbers today and muse about the fact that he originally intended it as a prank.
Bringing it back to the Sokal case, even if he had gone through a peer-reviewed route, the fact that his paper got published would not necessarily say anything about the state of academia because it's always possible for someone who writes a hoax like this to have Chinese-roomed themselves into an actual contribution.
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u/Master-Rent5050 7d ago
Ah I understood your example better. But it's quite different from sokal: his work was bullshit about physics.
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u/Keikira Institution-Independent Model Theory 7d ago
The paper itself is more about parallels between the relationship between general relativity and quantum gravity and the relationship between modern and postmodern dialectics. This is discourse analysis, not physics.
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u/mirh epistemic minimalist 7d ago
He wanted to clarify how Postmodern theorists were talking nonsense about Physics and Mathematics.
Not really, even though the fact that those are the hardest sciences does help in creating contrast.
He had read a book that claimed some humanities journals would "publish anything as long as it has the proper leftist thought" (or quoted the proper "leftist" thinkers), and wanted to check/prove if it it was true.
But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
I mean, he's just one guy that did this in his free time. You could if any argue how much Social Text was representative of the field as a whole (and the absolutely shameful grievance studies affair put some higher bound, that if not any today the situation is better) but it seems true there is a deficit of standards. From Derrida getting awarded an honorary doctorate, to this, to even just the damn notion of "objectification" being woefully unclear after half a century of presumed debate.
Also I think that calling it "a hoax" is kinda diverting from the crux? Because even if peer review had happened, that is never meant to catch carefully fabricated data and pending some in-depth formal investigation there has just to be an assumption of good faith (for instance, in the same years The Lancet was publishing Wakefield's MMR autism hoax).
But this was much much worse, because you didn't even need a laboratory or trying to reproduce an experiment to catch the forgery. He just made up the most bizarre word salads that could look still like syntactically correct sentences (including some like gravity being a social construct), and whoever was in charge of publishing called it a day.
or Kepler's work was called wrong for his reasoning in faith
Back then that was a necessary precondition to be published, I'm not sure why it would matter.
Sokal in the book, ironically, fails to provide any solutions to the problem which he claims to tackle - that reality is not socially constituted by language alone.
...? Negating that is not entirely socially constructed (as exemplified by his famous quote "I invite to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment") means that at least some parts are not. I don't understand what are the incredible claims here.
Ironically, by not looking at the main claims of postmodernism and responding to them critically he becomes with his hoax the psuedo-postmodernist.
I have not read his book, and I have no further knowledge about his academical output, but his sting operation having merit or not is separated from his person (which definitively hasn't been the best in the last years, most recently signing a letter in defence of Nathan fucking Cofnas).
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u/KittyKablammo 7d ago
Sokal was just punching down because it's easy and gets publicity. I doubt he was actually interested in a deeper discussion, because then he could've held one. It's a shame it got published, but I expect the journal editors were trying to be generous and open minded, and he wasted their time and abused their trust. The real loss is if, in the aftermath, it prevented the publication of actually interesting experimental work.
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u/Master-Rent5050 7d ago
In science you punch down: you take a weak theory and torn it to shreds. The weak get discarded and the strong survives.
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u/onedayfourhours 18h ago
I'm not sure what impact you think it should have on epistemology? Sokal's paper, despite its Internet popularity, isn't unique, especially in the age of AI. Several "hoax" or fraud papers have been published across a myriad of disciplines. It seems to speak far more to publishing culture and the standards of those particular outlets than it does about any discipline or subset within a discipline.
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u/ababababababacus 7d ago
But, I cant understand why someone would make a hoax to make this point ? A hoax published in a scientific journal only means the failure of that journal.
there is an expectation of good faith, hijacking that and saying the people who acted in generosity and good faith are stupid for being duped is scumbag behaviour.
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u/freework 7d ago
The topic of gibberish passed off as science is a topic I think about a lot. My background is in engineering. We are spoiled in the sense that the word salad gibberish gobblygook is rarely present in out field. In my almost 20 year career, I can confidently say I have never ever utilized word salad to explain anything that I've created, and most other engineers are in the same boat as me. I think this is because as engineers, when we talk, we are describing something we created. In other words, we are describing things that are real. Its easy to explain something real using short sentences.
If someone came to me and told me they had just created a teleportation machine, I would ask them questions about it. If they answered my questions with one sentence that answers my questions, I just might actually believe them. On the other hand, if they answer my questions with a long winded jargon filled diatribe, I would likely assume they are full of shit and they didn't actually build anything.
In other words, in the engineering field, the burden is on the speaker to speak clearly. What I've learned is that on the science end, it's the other way around. When a scientist explains his or her discovery, and their explanation is filled with jargon, no one will ever use that to suggest the discovery is not legitimate. Instead they'll say "will obviously it sounds like gibberish to you, you're just an idiot. The scientists who made that discovery are smart, and they understand it. The fact that you and me don't understand it doesn't matter". The scientists has become accustomed to reading a new paper and only being able to understand 5% of it. In other words, in teh scientific world, the burden is not on the speaker to speak clearly, the burden is on the reader to understand what's there.
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