scientific version of the Sokal hoax

This is a few weeks old, but I just read it. The story is HERE. A bogus scientific article laden with errors was accepted by more than half of the journals to which it was sent (several hundred of them, in fact).

The main difference from Sokal is that this one was a targeted sting against open-access science journals, with the intended lesson being that they are shoddy compared with mainstream journals. But it wasn’t all ticky-tack operations: Sage and Elsevier were among the publishers whose journals were duped.

Unlike many of my friends, I thought the original Sokal hoax was pretty funny. I simply didn’t agree at all with Sokal’s conclusion as to the lesson it taught us: roughly, “French postmodernists are nothing but nonsense.”

French postmodernists are not nothing but nonsense, a thesis that simply reflected Sokal’s rather boring bias. What I thought was funny about the hoax was the way that professions can become so deadened to their own jargon that they automatically start giving the thumbs-up to any work that sounds like it comes from their own tribe.

I suppose the sciences can be guilty of this too: see the amusing SNARXIV, which randomly generates technical-sounding science abstracts. (My favorite “article” title there so far: “Bosonic Strings Far From a Stack of D3 Branes Wrapped on an ALE Fibration With General Fundamental Group as a Geometric Langlands-dual of a WZW Yang-Mills Theory.”)

That said, there’s a fundamental incommensurability between jargon in the sciences and in the humanities, as nicely noted by Michel Serres in his conversations with Bruno Latour, available HERE. As Serres points out, technical terminology in the sciences is a way to say more using fewer words– here a term is shorthand for things the readers already know about. But in the humanities, too often, terminology is a way to say less using more words. It’s a point worth reflecting on as we write in the humanities.