The One Time Alan Sokal Completely Destroyed Postmodernism

so that's the big question we're looking at those who believe that there's an absolute truth and absolute reality out there we could know and it's them versus the social construction the postmodern thinkers the followers of Michele Foucault Jacques Derrida Paul Feyerabend and they say that all knowledge and even science is relative it's continued it's uncertain or that and they claim that science is really culturally conditioned and that one kind of science is not necessarily better than another kind and to assert that your science is better than someone else's some of them say it's racist or it's chauvinistic or it's sexist one woman even claimed that Newton's Principia she said it was a rape manual another said that a equals mc-squared is a sexist equation because it favors the speed of light over you know over other speeds anyway that's the kind of stuff that we're dealing with here well in the midst of this battle there was a physicist of some renown his name was Alan SoCal and he was from New York University and he said it submitted a paper to a journal called social text which is kind of the flagship journal of the social constructionist folks the postmodern so who see science as they do all reality as a relative contingent and so forth and he titled the article he titled the article transgressing the boundaries toward a transformative hermeneutic of quantum gravity get that a hermeneutic of quantum gravity now in it let me read you one quote from what mr socko wrote in his paper as alphas are rightly commented Lac Han finally gives freud thinking the scientific concept that it requires more recently McCann's topology du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism and the psychoanalysis of aids in mathematical terms Lacan is here pointing out the first homology group of the sphere is trivial while those other surfaces are profound and this homology is linked with the connectiveness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or two more cuts now that sounds pretty deep doesn't it and pretty heavy well that it is but it was also patent nonsense macoco made the whole thing up what he did was he spent a great deal of time studying a language and jargon of the social constructionist people and he just put this hodge podge together a pure not nonsense almost all the paper was totally make-believe I mean you don't talk about nonsense what does he say in the paper but hey you guys are right quantum gravity is really purely a social construction as opposed to anything that's really out there now he took a gamble when he did this and he'd bet that the editors of this paper he bet that the editors would not have his paper vetted in a peer review he thought that be that these editors some of the leading thinkers of the social constructionist movement of knowledge would be so happy to have an eminent physicist on their side you know from the realist side they would be so happy to have him write a paper for their publication which pretty much takes their position he thought they're not even going to bother to get it checked out for the science because if they had done it if they had any scientists at all who knew anything about this would have told him that this is silliness it's nonsensical bladder well the bottom line was so killer was right the premier intellectual Journal of the social constructionist of the relative is published something a guy made up pure silliness then to make matters worse so-called even arranged to have an expose of his hoax published in another paper called lingua franca in which he in which he's basically said that this was an experiment to see if these people would even bother to get his paper peer-reviewed which they did now as you could imagine this caused this was quite a few this caused quite a fear at least among the postmoderns and the social constructionist theorists of knowledge and science now the realists of course they loved it they declared that these folks we knew these folks were phonies all along and they don't know what they were talking about and on and on and on now I like what Sokol did I like what he did because it does throw some water on this whole notion of the relativity of knowledge I say I mean come on folks I mean sure the world comes to us filtered through our senses you know and and and you know the world doesn't come to us objectively there's always contingencies in our knowledge there's only some questions about what we know that's fine I mean no one's going to deny that you know we all remember the image of the five five five blindfold and men who are placed before an elephant they put the blindfolds on and each one is asked to feel what's in front of them one says a tree one says a hole someone said something out the point is to show that there are different perspectives on things and that's fine I don't have a problem with that as long as you don't forget one crucial point and that point is that the elephant is still there there is something there there is a reality there something exists out there something that was real regardless of how difficult it was for the folks to know just what it was and I think this is a crucial point that we sometimes lose sight of

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 332,483

Keywords: Postmodernism, relativism, alan sokal, sokal hoax, hoax, journal, feminism, constructivism, constructivist, realism, science, modern, society, destroyed

Id: jGe5SDgsHtU

Length: 6min 2sec (362 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2017