ABSTRACT
With these words, Alan Sokal (a professor of physics at New York University) explains what motivated him to submit an article to cultural studies journal Social Text and, after it was accepted and published, reveal that it was a parody. Responses to Sokal’s hoax appeared in mainstream newspapers and magazines as well as nearly every left-liberal and intellectual publication (e.g., The Nation, Village Voice, In These Times, Dissent, Times Literary Supplement [UK], and The New York Review of Books). Much of the dialogue, however, didn’t really go anywhere, as both sides took a defensive posture. Sokal continued to show the “silliness” of the postmodern “Masters” especially their fuzzy thinking, and insist that the Science Wars, characterized as a fight picked by conservatives against postmodernists,
feminists and left intellectuals, was not really a war because many of the scientists who were against postmodernism (he cited himself) were politically progressive. Social Text retaliated by pointing out Sokal’s poor scholarship (for example, his errors in describing the members of Social Text’s editorial board deconstructionists) and by trying to distinguish postmodern deconstruction from science studies. As for substantive issues, Sokal kept arguing for the existence of material reality; his critics for the acceptance that scientific laws are social constructions.
