I've read about this incident before, and as someone who transitioned from the 'hard' sciences (specifically semiconductor engineering) to the 'soft' or social sciences (specifically education and economics) it has been a bit disquieting.
First, for Dr. Sokal, I am a bit...bemused or surprised I guess I would say...at what seems like a quite childish simplification and overall process. This was not a peer review journal, as is implied in most coverage of the incident. Further, I strongly suspect (as I have seen from my former colleagues when I discuss my new field with them) Sokal showed an enormous amount of hubris (as Robbins and Ross note "What Sokal’s confession most altered was our perception of his own good faith as a self-declared leftist...On the other hand, we recognize that professional scientists like Sokal do feel that their beliefs and their intellectual integrity are threatened by the diverse work done in the field of science studies"). To attempt to speak ill of a field you know little about and yet still find to be trivial or unrigorous is puzzilingly tactless and embarrassingly presumptuous. It is a bit as if Sokal found himself laughing at the naked emperor, unaware that it was a mirror.
Second, I have always wondered what about what this incident, and its references, says about other disciplines understanding and approach to social sciences and fields like philosophy and psychology. We tend to have a natural search for truth as scientists...one of the fundamental questions though is what is meant by truth and, further, what is the interrelationship between a truth and the context in which it is observed? Engineering colleagues I have look at the fact that things are rethought, changed, dismissed, in conflict, can't be confirmed, etc. is seen as a flaw whereas I see it a reality. Much of the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain. True social experiments are difficult or legally/ethically untennable. When they are conducted, they are often conducted in ways that try to minimize outside variables...but reality isn't that simple. Human beings don't share a universal 'ground state' from which decisions or behaviors emminate.
This is symptomatic of the postmodernist nonsense that Sokal pointed out.
1. Politicising what ought to be science: "What Sokal’s confession most altered was our perception of his own good faith as a self-declared leftist".
2. Claiming that people outside the field are unable to understand that it's drivel: "To attempt to speak ill of a field you know little about and yet still find to be trivial or unrigorous is puzzilingly tactless and embarrassingly presumptuous".
3. Pulling up the smoke screen that truth is subjective: "We tend to have a natural search for truth as scientists...one of the fundamental questions though is what is meant by truth and, further, what is the interrelationship between a truth and the context in which it is observed?"
4. Using scientific terms in a nonsensical way: "the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain"
Postmodernism is a blight upon the human intellect that is not only destroying the social sciences but increasingly also politics.
I have no love for postmodernism, but this seems at least mildly unfair. Sokal's initiating action was entirely political. Responding by saying that Sokal hurt himself more than anyone else is a decent strategy, and might be true too, but it's not a symptom of postmodernism.
Claiming that people outside a field don't understand is a symptom of academics, and of most groups of humans, but it is not something in any way unique to postmodernism.
Whether or not his action was political, their response that insinuates that he is not a true leftist is not only incorrect but irrelevant, though it's understandable that somebody in a field where virtue signalling is so critical might think that this is a valid counterargument. Imagine that somebody pointed out that articles in a mathematical journal are incorrect and the editor responds with "yea, but you're not a true leftist!!". Virtue signalling and victimology over arguments, opinion over facts, obscurantism over clarity, etcetera.
The claim that people outside of the field have a hard time understanding it has the advantage of being correct when applied to science and mathematics. This is why Sokal's book only analyses the use of physics and mathematics in postmodernist literature. Since he is physicist and mathematician the claim that he just doesn't understand what he is talking about in his criticism falls flat.
I know I'm being harsh, but ridicule and contempt is the only way to get rid of this before it further infects campuses and, after the current generation of students grows up, politics.
> 4. Using scientific terms in a nonsensical way: "the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain"
I think that a big part of the problem is trying to make Quantum Mechanics more layman friendly with nice stories without math. Quantum mechanics is unintuitive but the math is very clear, so "anyone" can get the same correct result for an experiment. When you remove the math, you keep only the unintuitive part.
I'm not interested in getting into a huge argument on this, the post is my opinion take it as you will. I will note that as someone who has worked specifically with both the social sciences (including post modernism) and quantum mechanics I am actually quite familiar with both and I stand by my statements.
But hey lets go a little further because, its the internet why not there's no page charge here...
Heisenberg postulates a very specific mathematical formulation for a core quantum phenomenon. While there is no exact equivalence in social science research, phenomenon like WEIRD are reasonably close parallels in terms of the attempts to control for one phenomenon having impacts in unintitive or counterproductive ways that impact the search for truth.
Further, I, as someone who works in technical education (and who is also an engineer), find conceptions of truth such as the one you imply deeply problematic. I see them as a concern for the future of technical fields and technical personnel. Look at the impact of design and design thinking on many fields. The search there is less interested in truth and more in meaning. I suspect that your misconception is related to fundamental questions about the difference between truth and meaning. Post modernism doesn't try to make truth subjective, it fundamentally rejects truth (largely in favor of meaning). Post modernism began as a rejection of the modernist ideals that we could find with absolute certainty. This is not the realm of 'scientific' (i.e., convergent closed form solution). The questions, and therefore many of the answers, are not tractable in a mathematics sense and work is typically on finding a tractable form that serves as a reasonable approximation rather than a tractable, single, answer.
The difference is one of abductive vs. deductive/inductive schools of formal logic. This is where a lot of technical education fails students, as well as why ideas like constructionism and poststructuralism are important in seemingly clean/refined fields like engineering. An entrepreneur seeking to understand customer value (and their products proposition thereof) does not seek truth but meaning (what you might call a subjective truth or others a personal truth). Choosing to reject as 'nonsense' that thinking is really at the heart of our innovation problem more so than a lack of technical ability in the population. Market formation processes, Schumpeter's creative destruction, and Knightian uncertainty...find the truth in these explanations for real situations. They are abductive in nature and best treated through a non-positivist, non-modern point of view. But that is what we are talking about at the core, point of view.
Additionally, it is why diversity is so important...because that thing you call 'truth' is really a very personal rather than absolute thing except in the rare frames where it can be explicitly measured without affecting the result (and what does that sound like). Having the differing perspectives, points of view, and personal truths helps link customers and companies far better. [1]
"To attempt to speak ill of a field you know little about and yet still find to be trivial or unrigorous is puzzilingly tactless and embarrassingly presumptuous."
This is one of the most common academic tactics: to claim that those who are outside the field are ignorant of it and therefore cannot pass judgment. As someone who claims to be a scientist, you should know that this is an appeal to authority and that a scientist would welcome criticism from anyone regardless of training or background provided their argument was well-argued and supported by evidence.
I understand your point, I just disagree. As you point out in the your last sentence, there is an enormous and quite uncanny trench between principled and unprincipled critique. One comes from a place of understanding and heartfelt disagreement, one does not (although one is often presumed by authors). While the former is possible, I would confidently say the both Sokal's and the commenter's came from the later.
Edit to add: Sokal's entire proposition (based in frankly an attempt to embarrass a field) exposes the lie underneath the straw man being built to support him.
>The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
You can read Sokal's various commentaries on this topic. His point was that many philosophers tried to make grandiose statements about science and mathematics that did not make sense at all. The philosophers were making statements based on their imagination of what certain terms meant, and not on the actual meaning of those terms.
First, for Dr. Sokal, I am a bit...bemused or surprised I guess I would say...at what seems like a quite childish simplification and overall process. This was not a peer review journal, as is implied in most coverage of the incident. Further, I strongly suspect (as I have seen from my former colleagues when I discuss my new field with them) Sokal showed an enormous amount of hubris (as Robbins and Ross note "What Sokal’s confession most altered was our perception of his own good faith as a self-declared leftist...On the other hand, we recognize that professional scientists like Sokal do feel that their beliefs and their intellectual integrity are threatened by the diverse work done in the field of science studies"). To attempt to speak ill of a field you know little about and yet still find to be trivial or unrigorous is puzzilingly tactless and embarrassingly presumptuous. It is a bit as if Sokal found himself laughing at the naked emperor, unaware that it was a mirror.
Second, I have always wondered what about what this incident, and its references, says about other disciplines understanding and approach to social sciences and fields like philosophy and psychology. We tend to have a natural search for truth as scientists...one of the fundamental questions though is what is meant by truth and, further, what is the interrelationship between a truth and the context in which it is observed? Engineering colleagues I have look at the fact that things are rethought, changed, dismissed, in conflict, can't be confirmed, etc. is seen as a flaw whereas I see it a reality. Much of the social sciences is closer to the quantum domain. True social experiments are difficult or legally/ethically untennable. When they are conducted, they are often conducted in ways that try to minimize outside variables...but reality isn't that simple. Human beings don't share a universal 'ground state' from which decisions or behaviors emminate.