ABSTRACT
At this very moment, we are all falling from the twenty-first story of an apartment building in lower Manhattan. Having stepped outside of Alan Sokal’s window, we are confronting the full force of gravity and are speeding towards a certain, rather concrete, doom. We have been encouraged to take this step by a statement made by Alan Sokal in his second most notorious article, his announcement in Lingua Franca (1996b) of the parodic nature of his most notorious article “Transgressing the boundaries,” which originally appeared in Social Text (1996a). While making clear that he meant nary a word in the first piece, Sokal insists on the seriousness of this second one by quoting himself. He declares that his earlier statement,” ‘physical reality’…is at bottom a social and linguistic construct,” is easily and obviously negated by his later statement, “anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment.” Disregarding the significance of the word, “mere,” we are taking the physicist at his (second) word and, at this moment, are falling.
