I accidentally flooded this toad out of his hole a couple of days ago while pressure-washing my parents’ house. He was nice enough to sit still while I took some close-ups, although I got the idea that he didn’t like being moved into the good light very much.

Over the last couple of days, I have been reading a bunch of old articles and essays about the Sokal Hoax. If you’ve never heard of the Sokal Hoax, here is Wikipedia’s abstract:

The Sokal affair (also Sokal’s hoax) was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper of nonsense camouflaged in jargon for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal’s words: “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”

The paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, which was “structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics” made by postmodernist academics.

I had read about the Hoax some time in high school, around the time that I was first becoming interested in PoMo stuff. At face value, it is very funny, and also satisfying for someone who has been forced to read a lot of things approaching the malarky levels of Sokal’s essay, mostly in English and Humanities classes. What led me to start reading about it in this case was an essay I found by a philosopher named Paul Boghossian,a couple of whose essays on truth I am reading in preparation for a comprehensive exam.

The essay was written in 1996, shortly after the hoax had become news. It’s fairly interesting in its seriousness: Boghossian seems genuinely concerned by the implications of the hoax:

I believe [the hoax] shows three important things. First, that dubiously coherent relativistic views about the concepts of truth and evidence really have gained wide acceptance within the contemporary academy, just as it has often seemed. Second, that this has had precisely the sorts of pernicious consequence for standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility that one would expect it to have. Finally, that neither of the preceding two claims need reflect a particular political point of view, least of all a conservative one.

Boghossian does a fairly excellent job of arguing for these claims, and I think I more or less agree with his conclusions. Moreover, I don’t think that his observations have grown any less poignant over the last twelve years. If you’re at all interested in higher education, check out the article.

I found one piece of Boghossian’s conclusion to be of particular interest. In response to the question of how such unreasonable views came to have such wide acceptance, Boghossian offers the following partial diagnosis:

…the short answer is that questions about truth, meaning and objectivity are among the most difficult and thorny questions that philosophy confronts and so are very easily mishandled. A longer answer would involve explaining why analytic philosophy, the dominant tradition of philosophy in the English-speaking world, wasn’t able to exert a more effective corrective influence. After all, analytic philosophy is primarily known for its detailed and subtle discussion of concepts in the philosophy of language and the theory of knowledge, the very concepts that postmodernism so badly misunderstands. Isn’t it reasonable to expect it to have had a greater impact on the philosophical explorations of its intellectual neighbors? And if it hasn’t, can that be because its reputation for insularity is at least partly deserved? Because philosophy concerns the most general categories of knowledge, categories that apply to any compartment of inquiry, it is inevitable that other disciplines will reflect on philosophical problems and develop philosophical positions. Analytic philosophy has a special responsibility to ensure that its insights on matters of broad intellectual interest are available widely, to more than a narrow class of insiders.

I find this passage very interesting, not least because it strikes me simultaneously as very much correct and rather pompous. Correct because I agree that analytic philosophy has higher standards of rigor and more fine-grained attention to argumentative and expository detail than any other field; pompous in the attitude that one discipline could claim stewardship over the rigor and attention to detail of all others. I am not entirely sure how to reconcile these opposing attitudes toward Boghossian’s diagnosis, but I am leaning in the direction that he is right, and that what seems like pomposity is actually not. Compare mathematics, part of whose job it is to make sure that the mathematical judgments made in the context of other disciplines are sound. But in the case of philosophy, rigor itself (or the concepts which underlie it—truth, inference, knowledge, justification, etc.) are a huge part of what is studied. And this makes me wish that there could be more public intellectuals with a background in logic and analytic epistemology.

I’ll leave you with another view of my toad friend.