The curse of theory’s meta-language is an occupational hazard of non-science discourse and one satirized by a science community. One whose most banal version is the entire tenure of RFKjr at HHS, which only reminds us of some anachronistic disputes from the 1990s.
Then there’s mathematical discourse that mystifies scientific research that makes one think of the Sokal Affair and wonder whether there is a similar yet less reactionary one except as a critique of science. The conclusion is that there are both right-wing and left-wing versions of “ideological bias and obscure jargon (that) could substitute for intellectual rigor”. Both require extreme versions of critical discourse analysis. Peer review could have solved this entire issue.
Today the decisions of scholarly journals is more like “inside baseball” or at least baseball explained by Ludwig Wittgenstein, working in spite of Nazi fascism.
The thing is, Trumpian public policy all too often reveals “the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ‘objectivity’.”
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The Sokal Affair and Its Scientific Echoes
The original Sokal Affair was itself rooted in science — physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996, claiming quantum gravity was a "social and linguistic construct." It was published without peer review, and Sokal revealed the hoax three weeks later 1.
So the original hoax went in one direction: a scientist exposing lax standards in humanities/social science journals. But there are examples going the other way:
Hoaxes Targeting Scientific or Technical Journals
- The Grievance Studies Affair (2018) — also called "Sokal Squared," a team submitted bogus papers to peer-reviewed social science journals, with several being accepted 1
.
- Sokal III (2021) — a fake paper was published in Higher Education Quarterly before being retracted 1
.
- Computer-generated papers — tools like SCIgen have successfully placed nonsense papers in legitimate computer science conferences and journals. (Nonsensical research papers generated by a computer program are still popping up in the scientific literature many years after the problem was first seen, a study has revealed; Publishers still serve and sometimes sell the remaining 197 papers without any caveat)
The Core Issue
The Sokal Affair highlighted that ideological bias and obscure jargon could substitute for intellectual rigor 4
. The most damning finding was that the most absurd parts of Sokal's article were direct quotes from real postmodern thinkers, not his own fabrications 4
The debate ultimately reflects a broader tension between scientific and humanistic disciplines about objectivity, evidence, and what constitutes valid knowledge 2.
Reactionary public policy and influence from reactionary realms like Project 2025 give credence to hateful and bias screeds made policy by what polling indicates is a population that never went to college or dropped out like Charlie Kirk and Glenn Beck and is no different than anyone else south of Houston Street in Manhattan (the one not in Kansas).
“Transgressing the Boundaries” hits all the right progressive buttons. The essay begins by rebuking the mainstream scientists who resist being enlightened by their postmodernist superiors. These recalcitrant schmucks are still trapped in the “post-Enlightenment hegemony,” Sokal writes, clinging to outdated dogmas such as the idea “that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that humans 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.”
In plain English, Sokal’s essay says that science as most of us conceive it is a scam. How do we know? Because, the essay goes on to argue, 20th-century breakthroughs in physics and in the philosophy of science have properly undermined the credibility of science in general. Meanwhile, “feminist and poststructuralist critiques” have (so its facetious argument goes) revealed “the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ‘objectivity’.”
In the end, the essay claims, “we can only conclude that physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ‘knowledge’, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it.”
The essay, therefore, argues both that scientific insights are bogus and that they exist only to serve the needs of various power elites. Finally, it concludes that science and scientists don’t deserve the respect our society affords them. Or, to put that in postmodern-ese: “the discourse of the scientific community … cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.”
You’ll note I write that “the essay” says these things rather than Sokal saying these things because, of course, Sokal actually believes none of this.
www.commentary.org/...
However there are good reasons to engage reactionary discourse of only to hone pedagogical skills.
In Teach Like a Champion 2.0, Doug Lemov (2015) describes two important “ratios” that need to occur simultaneously in classrooms, the participation ratio and the think ratio (pp. 234-235). The participation ratio is a ratio of students’ active participation in the lesson, while the think ratio is about the level of rigor in the lesson. Full participation with low rigor is no better than low participation with high rigor. We need high ratios of participation by students and high levels of rigor in what we are asking from students. Lemov goes on to identify three key areas for teaching and learning that build both ratios: questioning, writing, and discussion. Discourse, both in talking about and writing about mathematical ideas, is critical for revealing, deepening, and expanding mathematical knowledge.
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Classroom discourse played a major role in advancing student thinking. Students shared, compared, refined, and corrected their methods. Writing was instrumental at first in students collecting, processing, and furthering their own thoughts before sharing with another student, and finally as a process to record and organize thinking after discussion with a partner and the whole class. With guidance from the teacher, providing focused prompts, discussion and writing were instrumental in developing, deepening, and solidifying key mathematical knowledge.
www.corelearn.com/...
The Sokol affair has reached an apocryphal status and I arrived at this piece in WYFP? by considering that there are entire subfields studying the social epistemology that compelled Sokol’s hoax.
The new book Who Paid the Piper... by Gabriel Rockhill makes a similar argument about the difference between those who might be class traitors like those radicals in the professional-managerial class (PMC) and those who have ignored the current need to resist imperialist domination represented by US foreign and military adventures.
‘Bad writing’ is only one element since the point of discourse is to “collecting, processing, and furthering their own thoughts before sharing”, then actually sharing, which is what First Amendment enemies are currently doing in a variety of media.
"Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized."
The above is an excerpt from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s magnum opus, suitably titled: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein puts forth the fairly simple idea that the clarity of a thought or argument depends on the language we use. What’s ironic about the paragraph is that the thought behind the language is considerably simpler than the language used to express the thought.
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
www.socialsciencespace.com/...
The thing is that there are people who actually know what the above paragraph is saying, but alas, unless you’re in the Academy, few need know its meaning, much less its message. Fortunately nonsense papers generated by computer still lurk in cyber-space just waiting for future scholars like the Shroud of Turin to treat them like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
When we look at the collapse of rationality all around us, it seems that while Alan Sokal might have won his battle with postmodern lunacy, he ultimately lost the war. Sokal wrapped up his 1996 hoax essay with a resounding call to action, a campaign that “must start with the younger generation.” One hears a faint echo of China’s Cultural Revolution in his urgent admonition: “The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics, and the content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of feminist, queer, multiculturalist, and ecological critiques.”
Sokal meant his essay as a parodic warning. Twenty-five years later, it appears that the Sokal Hoax was actually an instruction manual.
www.commentary.org/...
“I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses (it).” —Umberto Eco
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