Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The pomo authors weren't "attacking" physics. They used terminology sloppily in their writing and all Sokal proved was that if you find a publisher with sufficiently lax standards, they'll publish just about anything. I've read enough complete nonsense compsci papers from conferences with <15% acceptance rates, as well as seen the replication crisis get so bad that I've never taken Sokal's stunt as anything other than a party trick of philosophical philistinism. He showed that a journal that "covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture" doesn't perform adequate peer review of theoretical physics papers.


The fact that sokal was wrong doesn't mean that science criticism has offered anything more useful throughout all these years


The problem is that his motivation was to critique "science criticism", but nothing about what he did did anything of the sort. He went about it with the same scientific rigor that one would expect from Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, etc.

Anyone can feel free to provide examples of this happening, but I don't think there has been significant impact on scientific rigor in top theoretical physics journals and conferences as a result of needling from postmodernists, either during Sokal's time or now. If anything, his identification of "the Left" as the biggest enemy of science was profoundly off base in retrospect.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: