Up to Kiran's Response
First of all, I want to be very clear that nowhere in my piece did I ever state that Sokal's parody was "brilliant." Quite the opposite. The piece was intellectually lightweight. Clearly, Sokal demonstrates a startling ignorance of some very basic philosophical concepts concerning our understanding of truth and scientific evidence-gathering.
As to your point that such a hoax would be impossible in another discipline, I disagree. The use of field-specific jargon is too often used as a litmus-test to determine the legitimacy of work submitted in a given discipline. Perhaps, in the humanities and social sciences, such use of jargon has been abused to the point where someone such as Sokal got away with what he did, but such misuses are not unique to these academic areas. And it has happened before. Certainly, most Americans recall the successful hoax carried out against the Washington Post by reporter Janet Cooke in the early 1980s. Unlike Sokal, Cooke - a young African-American woman - was not rewarded for her deed.
Robin Markowitz
rmarkowitz@earthlink.net
Copyright © 1996 by Robin Markowitz. All Rights Reserved.
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