•  24
    The implicit epistemology of White Fragility
    Journal of Philosophy of Education 57 (2): 517-552. 2023.
    I extract, and then analyse critically, the epistemological ideas that are implicit in Robin DiAngelo's best-selling book White Fragility and her other writings. On what grounds, according to DiAngelo, can people know what they claim to know? And on what grounds does DiAngelo know what she claims to know?
  •  31
    Clarity, charity and criticism, wit, wisdom and worldliness: Avoiding intellectual impositions (review)
    with David Turnbull, Henry Krips, Val Dusek, Steve Fuller, Jean Bricmont, Alan Frost, Alan Chalmers, Anna Salleh, Alfred I. Tauber, Yvonne Luxford, Nicolaas Rupke, Steven French, Peter G. Brown, Hugh LaFollette, and Peter Machamer
    Metascience 9 (3): 347-498. 2000.
  •  1
    Impostures intellectuelles
    with Jean Bricmont
    LGF/Le Livre de Poche. 1999.
    Au printemps 1996, une revue américaine fort respectée - Social Text - publiait un article au titre étrange : "Transgresser les frontières : vers une herméneutique transformative de la gravitation quantique". Son auteur, Alan Sokal, étayait ses divagations par des citations d'intellectuels célèbres, français et américains. Peu après, il révélait qu'il s'agissait d'une parodie. Son but était de s'attaquer, par la satire, à l'usage intempestif de terminologie scientifique et aux extrapolations abu…Read more
  •  1
    Med udgangspunkt i fysikeren Alan D. Sokals videnskabelige nonsens-artikel i det amerikanske tidsskrift Social text (Spring/Summer 1996) er her samlet et udvalg af artikler fra aviser og tidsskrifter.
  •  15
    Beyond the hoax: science, philosophy and culture
    Oxford University Press. 2008.
    In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled: 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and t…Read more
  •  36
    When it was published in France, this book shocked the philosophers of the Left Bank with its plain-speaking attack on some of France's greatest minds.
  •  6
    Sokal and Bricmont in their exposé of allegedly meaningless statements about science by recent French philosophers take errors of particular applications of philosophical ideas to science as refutations of the whole general framework utilized. They also seem to think that taking snippets out of context is sufficient to expose the "fashionable nonsense." In the early twentieth century, British analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead did the same with Hegel on mathematic…Read more
  •  55
    The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.
  •  20
    The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London. His main research interests are in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. He is co-author with Roberto Fern´andez and J¨.
  •  3
    ALAN SOKAL'S HOAX, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which was published in the "Science Wars" issue of Social Text ,1 and the debate that has followed it, raise important issues for the left. Sokal's article is a parody of postmodernism, or, more precisely, the amalgam of postmodernism, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism which has come to hold sway in large areas of academia, especially those associated with Cu…Read more
  •  14
    Credit for squelching this peculiar trend goes largely to one man, NYU physicist -- and it should be mentioned, leftist -- Alan Sokal. Three years ago, he submitted a parody of postmodernist thought to the postmodernist journal Social Text , which article purported to mock, in true postmodernist fashion, the silly old "dogma" that "there exists an external world," asserting instead that "physical `reality'" is just "a social and linguistic construct." The..
  •  16
    The publication in France of our book Impostures Intellectuelles [1] appears to have created a small storm in certain intellectual circles. According to Jon Henley in The Guardian, we have shown that ``modern French philosophy is a load of old tosh.''[2] According to Robert Maggiori in Libération, we are humourless scientistic pedants who correct grammatical errors in love letters.[3] We shall try to explain here why neither is the case.
  •  48
    The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London. His main research interests are in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. He is co-author with Roberto Fern´andez and J¨.
  •  19
    But let me not beat a dead horse: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. More interesting are the substantive philosophical and political issues raised in Professor Aronowitz's critique of my Afterword. Unfortunately, Aronowitz seems to have had difficulty in reading my plain words.
  •  68
    Every author has to expect that some reviewers will dislike his book, perhaps intensely. That is par for the course. But one might hope that even a scathingly negative review would be accurate in its summary of the book’s contents and principal arguments. Alas, Peter Saulson’s review1 of my book Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture 2 fails to meet this minimum standard
  •  17
    The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. In the summers of 1986{88 he taught mathematics at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua. He is co-author with Roberto Fernandez and Jurg Frohlich of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (Springer, 1992), and co-author with Jean Bricmont of the forthcoming Les impostures scientiques des philosophes (post-)modernes.
  •  17
    This affair has brought up an incredible number of issues, and I can't dream of addressing them all in 10 minutes, so let me start by circumscribing my talk. I don't want to belabor Social Text 's failings either before or after the publication of my parody: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. I won't go here into the ethical issues related to the propriety of hoaxing. I won't address the obscurantist prose and the uncritical celebrity-worship that have infected c…Read more
  •  7
    On many issues Robbins and I are in agreement. Science and technology are legitimate, indeed crucial, subjects of public critique and democratic debate. The funding of scientific research by private corporations poses grave dangers to scientific objectivity. (But to make this argument, one must first believe in objectivity as a goal; postmodernists and relativists don't.) Finally, cultural questions are as important as economic ones -- sometimes more so.
  •  32
    The debate over objectivity and relativism, science and postmodernism, which for the past eight months has been rocking American academic circles -- particularly those of the political left -- has apparently now arrived in France. And with what a bang! Following Denis Duclos..
  •  8
    oes anything exist outside culture? Is there anything that we do that is free of the distortions of our tastes and customs? That isn't irrevocably shaped by the languages we speak or our material interests? Is there anything out there that we can assume to be noncultural or transcultural or even universal?
  •  9
    Social Text , along with an explication of all the relatively minor errors and jokes planted in the article that would have been caught by the cognoscenti in physics. That alone has been sufficient to attract global media attention about the alleged lack of quality control in cultural studies scholarship. However, Sokal and Bricmont are out for bigger game. They want to trace these lapses from professionalism to a relativist philosophical sensibility, which in turn is held responsible for the di…Read more
  • Demolidor de barracas... Inclusive a própria
    with Ma Guerrieri
    Episteme 12 113-138. 2001.
  •  11
    When I was a boy, I was friendly with a lad who lived a few doors away. We used to take bicycle rides together and have gunfights on the waste land and light fires and play scratch cricket. Our ways parted as our interests evolved in different directions. There were no hard feelings and, indeed, much residual good will. Roger (this is not his true name, which I shall withhold for the sake of his family) did not share any of my own developing intellectual interests and I felt none of his love for…Read more
  •  1
    Une des réactions qui m’a le plus surpris suite à la publication, avec Alan Sokal, d’ Impostures intellectuelles (1), c’est l’accusation qui nous a été faite d’être « positivistes ». En effet, nulle part nous ne défendons cette doctrine et, les rares fois où nous en parlons, c’est pour la critiquer. Néanmoins j’ai vite compris qu’il fallait distinguer entre positivisme et « positivisme », c’est-à-dire entre une doctrine philosophique complexe ayant prospéré à une certaine époque et à laquelle pl…Read more
  •  4
    The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives i…Read more
  •  16
    Intellectual Impostures , for example, written together with Jean Bricmont, the authors (hereafter S&B) criticise the way in which French poststructuralist critics, such as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, have abused the scientific terminology to which, Sokal claims, they exhibit slavish adherence. Many authors, such as Andrew Ross and Stanley Aronowitz, have taken up the cudgels against S&B. But their replies often miss the mark either by arguing at too abstract a level agains…Read more
  •  47
    Transgressing the boundaries: An afterword
    Philosophy and Literature 20 (2): 338-346. 1996.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword*Alan D. SokalAlas, the truth is out: my article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which appeared in the spring/summer 1996 issue of the cultural-studies journal Social Text, is a parody. 1 Clearly I owe the editors and readers of Social Text, as well as the wider intellectual community, a non-parodic explanation of my motives and my tru…Read more
  •  33
    My favorite poststructuralist is Gilles Deleuze (with or without Guattari). I like to think that he was really writing an elaborate series of works of science fiction, in a non-fictional format (much as Stanislaw Lem did in Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum ), only without letting anyone in on the joke. Partly this is because there are moments where what he says is almost right (such as the definition of "relation" he gives in his interview with Claire Parnet, where he visibly reaches for…Read more