The Ongoing Sokal Hoax

November 1st, 2007

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Posted by ChrisG at 12:42 pm

Uh-oh. Looks like another indomitable free-thinker just discovered Sokal and Bricmont, via Richard Dawkins’ review of Intellectual Impostures, their assault on the ‘cohesive intellectual movement’ known by people who have never read anything by those authors who are presumed to be its members, as ‘postmodernism’.

The strategy Sokal and Bricmont employed in carrying out this assault, and which Dawkins (whose entire review amounts to little more than fawning submission to the argument from authority) takes as some sort of model of academic practice, basically runs as follows.

1. Take a short extract from a text, chosen more or less at random. I have selected Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

6.45

The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.

The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.

2. Say ‘what the fuck was that about?’

3. Wait to be accepted as a new intellectual authority, whose name defenders of the Enlightenment everywhere can invoke in order to shut people up.

More grumblings from April this year on this subject here.