Craig on the Sokal hoax

Just to tie up some loose ends from the discussion a couple of weeks ago about Sokal, here is CRAIG OF THEORIA WITH HIS THOUGHTS.

In some ways he has a point– Sokal shouldn’t really have announced immediately that Social Text had published a hoax article. All he really proved is that he duped a few editors at one journal. He should have waited to see if it would be taken seriously, then published his findings afterward.

I tend to agree with Craig that, most likely, the Sokal article would have gone unnoticed and without much of a response. If I had happened to read that article, I’d have said “what a piece of junk!”, but I can’t imagine ever having taken the trouble to write an attack on it, and I imagine other readers would have had the same reaction.

Nonetheless, I think a wider point in Sokal’s favor is that a lot of stuff was being seriously written at the time that wasn’t always significantly worse than the article he put together.

Maybe I should try a hoax article somewhere, in some journal that stands for some tendency I really detest.