Patently ridiculous on its face.
Posted on 12/06/2004 8:38:38 PM PST by DaveCooper
IF BEING A NATIONAL LAUGHINGSTOCK cannot derail a career as a university scholar, what can?
The City University of New York graduate school just promoted Stanley Aronowitz from plain old professor to distinguished professor of sociology. Aronowitz’s fifteen minutes of fame came three years ago when his left-wing journal, Social Text, fell prey to “Sokal’s Hoax.” Six ST editors read and accepted physicist Alan Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”—without realizing it was a parody of academic double-talk.
With mock seriousness, Sokal claimed to show how “the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality”—in other words, he set out to prove the world itself doesn’t exist.
“The pi of Euclid and the g of Newton,” Sokal wrote, “formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point.”
Don’t bother deciphering the sense: there is none.
The writing, Sokal explained, “wasn’t obliged to respect any standards of evidence or logic.” He simply strung together “the silliest quotes about mathematics and physics from the most prominent academics”—including Aronowitz himself.
That Aronowitz and his cronies accepted the paper strongly suggests that their own thought processes had become so jargon-muddled that they were unable to perceive Sokal’s spoof of those thought processes as a spoof—in other words, they accepted a paper based on a scattershot of jargon alone.
In the nonacademic world, Aronowitz was instantly recognized as a charlatan. At CUNY, little more than an instant later, he is “recognized.” That’s the problem—and it’s larger than Aronowitz. Absurdity—in a person or an idea—is no bar to academic promotion. Stripped of the Darwinian control of a reality check, humanities professors nationwide are now spinning out invincibly ignorant, incandescently silly variations on the ancient theme of Protagorean relativism—variations that go by resonant names like “poststructuralism,” “perspectivism,” and “discourse analysis.” Their common features: baseless, shifting, virtually impenetrable jargon, and a dogmatic insistence that there is no independent reality beyond appearances, that knowledge is always a tool of power.
Aronowitz, indeed, provoked Sokal’s hoax by his commitment to the relativist point of view—even in the realms of mathematics and physical science. The resulting whiff of national humiliation does, in a sense, distinguish Aronowitz from most of his peers. But he is only one among hundreds of professors of gibberish currently employed at American universities. It is up to the schools themselves to stop perpetuating nonsense.
BTTT
I remember when this happened. The NY Times ran no news article reporting the incident. But, they ran an op-ed by Stanley Fish saying that the uproar and the incident didn't matter. The usual objective reporting: it wasn't important enough to get a news mention, but then our op-ed page will bash it anyway.
I've posted this quote before I am sure I will post it again!
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
Romans 1:22
But back then they hadn't figured out how to become highly paid fools at taxpayer expense. This is the true genius of today's academics.
The funniest thing has been happening to me lately; I have been having dreams of having dreams and I have to make myself wake up twice when I realize I'm dreaming.
In the old days, being found in bed with a young boy could be counted on to derail a career, but in academia vintage 2004, I'm not even sure it would be a scandal.
La vida es sueño y los sueños, sueños son.
Patently ridiculous on its face.
That's why we call them, "liberal institutions".
What do you think of red Stan?
ROTFL!
Isn't that last name: Aro No-Wits?
Sokal-duper-hokum-licious-expialidocious!
If it was a serious field of study, it would have went the way of alchemy.
At least alchemy produced Isaac Newton.
What'd sociology produce? Misery, dictators, authoritarian regimes, agony, and despair.
And "Tune in, turn on, drop out, right on".
I had a great sociology prof in college who was a copilot flying B-24s in ETO in WWII. One in a million since he was not a liberal, but a fairly straight-up guy. He thought 90% of sociology was pure garbage.
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