Sokal affair

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The Sokal Affair (also Sokal Debate or Sokal Controversy ) was a dispute over intellectual standards in the social sciences and humanities , which was triggered by the publication of a hoax article by the physicist Alan Sokal in the social science journal Social Text . Sokal's article appeared in 1996 in an issue dedicated to Science Wars , which was intended to address the US-specific confrontation between scientific realism and postmodernism .

Sokal's contribution was formulated in postmodern jargon and pretended to interpret quantum gravity as a linguistic and social construct , with quantum physics supporting postmodernist criticism. Sokal had deliberately interspersed numerous logical and content-related errors that the journal's editors - they had not called in any physics experts for the final editing - did not, however, notice. An epistemological and public debate ensued about the lack of intellectual rigor in evaluating pseudoscientific articles in the social sciences and humanities and the potentially harmful influence of postmodern philosophy on these sciences. Furthermore, these disciplines were accused of using scientific concepts in senseless or abusive ways for their teaching.

prehistory

The American physicist Alan Sokal , who now teaches in New York , had noticed over the years that various authors of a school of thought in philosophy and sociology, which he himself roughly describes as "postmodernism", repeatedly refer to concepts and models in their essays refer to physics (sometimes just using terms and designations that are exactly defined in physics), without sufficient evidence of exactly where the similarities between their own and physical theories lie or, for example, to make clear to what extent they are any here See analogies or parallels.

That is why he wrote an essay in 1996 with the title Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (German: Crossing the borders: On the way to a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity ) and submitted it to the US for its postmodern orientation well-known journal for cultural studies Social Text for publication. Although Sokal rejected the changes requested by the editors, the article was reprinted with others in a special issue.

Shortly after its publication, Sokal announced in another magazine, Lingua Franca , that the article was a parody . With the typical jargon of this line of thought, he assembled the quotes from various postmodern thinkers into a text whose nonsensical content should have been recognized as such if scientific principles had been observed, according to the reproach to the editors of Social Text . In this first article, he already expressed his sympathy for left-wing, critical scientific discussions and describes himself as a leftist and an internationalist .

debate

The incident sparked a public discussion in the academic community and in the press (the case made it to the front page of the New York Times , after all) about how it should be assessed in particular and the seriousness of postmodern philosophy in general. Sokal and representatives of the criticized group of people continued the discussion in further magazine articles and defended their points of view. Together with his Belgian colleague Jean Bricmont , Sokal published the monograph Impostures Intellectuelles (“Intellektuelle Hochstapeleien”) in 1997 , with a German title: Elegant nonsense - How postmodern thinkers abuse the sciences . In an afterword it contains the trigger of the affair, the article “Crossing the boundaries” in its form published in Social Text with notes and an afterword.

In the main part, Sokal and Bricmont demonstrate using the example of selected texts by authors who, in Sokal's view, belong to the “postmodern” (namely Jean Baudrillard , Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari , Luce Irigaray , Julia Kristeva , Jacques Lacan , Bruno Latour and Paul Virilio and - although not a postmodern, as a historical example - Henri Bergson ), what exactly is the "abuse" that they criticize.

“The word 'abuse' here implies one or more of the following meanings

  1. The rambling presentation of scientific theories, of which at best one has an extremely vague idea. [...]
  2. The adoption of terms from the natural sciences in the humanities or social sciences without the slightest substantive or empirical justification. [...]
  3. The display of half-education by shamelessly throwing technical terms around that are completely irrelevant in the concrete context. [...]
  4. The use of basically meaningless keywords and phrases. [...]

Perhaps [the authors] think they can use the prestige of science to paint their own discourses with the veneer of accuracy. And they seem to trust that no one will notice their misuse of scientific terms, that no one will shout out to proclaim that the King is naked. [...] Our aim is not to ridicule humanities scholars who made mistakes when quoting Einstein or Gödel, but to defend the canon of rationality and intellectual honesty that is common to all scientific disciplines (or should be) . "

- A. Sokal, J. Bricmont : Eleganter Unsinn, 1997, pp. 20f., 23

Finally, Sokal and Bricmont also mention a political motive for their advance: They profess to support the political left and argue that the increasing spread of the postmodern school of thought on the left is weakening its capacity for effective social criticism.

From 1997 to 1999, the topic in the ZEIT was a controversial discussion in a series of articles.

In 2013, Sokal, co-author of an essay by Nicholas Brown and Harris Friedman, criticized the use of differential equations from fluid dynamics to model observations from positive psychology as theoretically and empirically unjustified.

reception

In October 2018 it became known that a group of three scholars had submitted a total of 20 bogus articles to scientific journals in the field of gender studies . For this purpose, Yascha Mounk, based on the original Sokal affair and with reference to the much larger scope, coined the catchphrase Sokal Squared .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bruce Robbins, Andrew Ross: Mystery Science Theater . In: Lingua Franca . July 1996.
  2. ↑ Paul Boghossian: The science fraud of the physicist Alan Sokal and his teachings , In: Die ZEIT , January 24, 1997.
  3. ↑ Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht: How Alan Sokal's science fraud was first moralized and then talked to death. About the relationship between political commitment and scientific research. In: Die ZEIT , February 28, 1997.
  4. ↑ Dirk Baecker: We construct our world with belief in reality. A final word to the Alan Sokal science fraud debate. Who wants to distinguish between reason and madness? In: Die ZEIT , March 7, 1997.
  5. ^ Johannes Wetzel: Crisis in the dromosphere. Alan Sokal's second trick: in a book he attacks French philosophy. In: Die ZEIT , October 10, 1997.
  6. ↑ Maria Beller: Who did we laugh at? Physicists are not entirely innocent of the excesses of postmodern theories (sic) . In: Die ZEIT, March 25, 1997.
  7. ↑ Ulf von Rauchhaupt: No kidding! Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont attack postmodern thinkers. In: Die ZEIT , December 9, 1999.
  8. ↑ Bruno Latour: Yesterday's news. There is no "fight" between humanists and geneticists , translated by Gustav Roßler. In: Die ZEIT , December 28, 2000.
  9. ↑ Nicholas JL Brown, Alan D. Sokal, Harris L. Friedman: The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking. The Critical Positivity Ratio . In: American Psychologist , vol. 68, No. 9, 2013, pp. 801-813.
  10. ↑ Yascha Mounk: What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia. October 5, 2018. Retrieved January 8, 2019 (American English).