Sokals Hoax Transgressing the Boundaries Towards a Transformative

科學戰爭背後的文化意義科學戰爭 Sokal's Hoax (索可的惡作劇) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity "Social Text" ( Spring/Summer, 1996) P. 217 -252

• Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity Alan D. Sokal Department of Physics New York University 4 Washington Place New York, NY 10003 USA Internet: SOKAL@NYU. EDU Telephone: (212) 998 -7729 Fax: (212) 995 -4016 • • November 28, 1994 revised May 13, 1995 Note: This article was published in Social Text #46/47, pp. 217 -252 (spring/summer 1996). Biographical Information: The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. He has lectured widely in Europe and Latin America, including at the Università di Roma ``La Sapienza'' and, during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua. He is co-author with Roberto Fernández and Jürg Fröhlich of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (Springer, 1992). Transgressing disciplinary boundaries. . . [is] a subversive undertaking since it is likely to violate the sanctuaries of accepted ways of perceiving. Among the most fortified boundaries have been those between the natural sciences and the humanities. -- Valerie Greenberg, Transgressive Readings (1990, 1) The struggle for the transformation of ideology into critical science. . . proceeds on the foundation that the critique of all presuppositions of science and ideology must be the only absolute principle of science. -- Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power (1988 b, 339) There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ``eternal'' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ``objective'' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

Sokal's Hoax Steven Weinberg The New York Review of Books, Volume XLIII, No. 13, pp 11 -15, August 8, 1996 • • Like many other scientists, I was amused by news of the prank played by the NYU mathematical physicist Alan Sokal. Late in 1994 he submitted a sham article to the cultural studies journal Social Text, in which he reviewed some current topics in physics and mathematics, and with tongue in cheek drew various cultural, philosophical and political morals that he felt would appeal to fashionable academic commentators on science who question the claims of science to objectivity. The editors of Social Text did not detect that Sokal's article was a hoax, and they published it in the journal's Spring/Summer 1996 issue. 1 The hoax was revealed by Sokal in an article for another journal, Lingua Franca; 2 he explained that his Social Text article had been "liberally salted with nonsense, " and in his opinion was accepted only because "(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions. " Newspapers and newsmagazines throughout the U. S. and Britain carried the story. Sokal's hoax may join the small company of legendary academic hoaxes, along with the pseudo-fossils of Piltdown man planted by Charles Dawson and the pseudo-Celtic epic Ossian written by James Macpherson. The difference is that Sokal's hoax served a public purpose, to attract attention to what Sokal saw as a decline of standards of rigor in the academic community, and for that reason it was unmasked immediately by the author himself.

帕叵費耶阿本拉卡托司孔恩拉圖謝平 Karl Popper Paul Feyeraben Imre Lakatos Thomas Kuhn Bruno Latour Steven Shapin

KARL POPPER 1902 -1994

Theorem is Scientific only if it can be Falsified

John Horgan The Author of The End of Science

Is this falsifiability theorem falsifiable?

A theory is an invention, an act of creation, based more on a scientist’s intuition than on preexisting empirical data

The history of science is everywhere speculative

“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite

The Open Society and its Enemies The Open Society by one of its Enemies

帕叵費耶阿本拉卡托司孔恩拉圖謝平 Karl Popper Paul Feyeraben Imre Lakatos Thomas Kuhn Bruno Latour Steven Shapin

Paul Feyerabend (1924 - February 11, 1994)

The Worst Enemy of science?

Farewell to Reason The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education

Against Method There is no any single form of reasoning that can be labelled “the scientific method”

How to Defense Society Against Science Scientists are every bit the equal of ancient myth-tellers, troubadous and court jesters. Leading Intellectuals with their zeal for objectivity……. are criminals, not the liberators of mankind. Science is become kind of a religion.

帕叵費耶阿本拉卡托司孔恩拉圖謝平 Karl Popper Paul Feyeraben Imre Lakatos Thomas Kuhn Bruno Latour Steven Shapin

Imre Lakatos (1922 -1974 )

Proofs and Refutations • The thesis of 'Proofs and Refutations' is that the development of mathematics does not consist (as conventional philosophy of mathematics tells us it does) in the steady accumulation of eternal truths. Mathematics develops, according to Lakatos, in a much more dramatic and exciting way - by a process of conjecture, followed by attempts to 'prove' the conjecture (i. e. to reduce it to other conjectures) followed by criticism via attempts to produce counterexamples both to the conjectured theorem and to the various steps in the proof. • that Proofs and Refutations is: - • . . . an overwhelming work. The effect of its polemical brilliance, its complexity of argument and self-conscious sophistication, its sheer weight of historical learning, is to dazzle the reader.

IMRE LAKATOS

帕叵費耶阿本拉卡托司孔恩拉圖謝平 Karl Popper Paul Feyeraben Imre Lakatos Thomas Kuhn Bruno Latour Steven Shapin

Thomas S. Kuhn (1922 - 1996)

Paradigm • Paradigm shift, sometimes known as extraordinary science or revolutionary science, is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science. • It has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share. ” (The Essential Tension, 1997). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, “a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself. ” (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). A scientist, however, once a paradigm shift is complete, is not allowed the luxury, for example, of positing the possibility that miasma causes the flu or that ether carries light in the same way that a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19 th century theory of poetics, for instance, or select Marxism as an explanation of economic behaviour. Thus, paradigms, in the sense that Kuhn used them, do not exist in Humanities or social sciences. Nonetheless, the term has been adopted since the 1960 s and applied in non-scientific contexts.