forgotten elements of the Sokal hoax

A couple of factors that no one ever seems to remember about Sokal’s hoax article… (And as a reminder, I found the article itself hilarious, but Sokal’s attitude about the hoax smug and shallow.) If you’re too young to remember the 1996 hoax, or want a refresher, here it is–

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

The article was 33 pages long.

It contained 109 footnotes.

It also contained a 12-page Bibliography. That’s right… 12 pages of Bibliography for a 33-page article.

It was comic genius that Sokal included that many footnotes and that much bibliographical material, and I can honestly say that I as editor would have instantly rejected any article with that sort of nauseatingly excessive apparatus attached to it.

But what if Sokal had included no footnotes or Bibliography with the article? I’ll bet it would have been rejected in a minute flat. And that tells us something unfortunate.

The problem, as I recall, was that Sokal turned out not to be mocking just the excesses of catch-phrases, pointless footnotes, and sucking up (the epigraph to the article was by one of the journal’s editors, a deliberate parody of sucking up). He was also mocking anti-realism, as though it were just as bad as the other elements of the hoax.

Now, you all know that I’m a rabid realist. But that doesn’t mean that saying the external world is a fabrication or fiction is anywhere near as ridiculous as adding a 12-page Bibliography to a 33-page article. I don’t like anti-realism either, but it is by no means ludicrous on a priori grounds. There are plenty of smart anti-realists in the history of philosophy, including today. The good ones deserve our respect, just like the good people defending any philosophical standpoint.

In short, what was funny about Sokal’s article was primarily the form, not the content.