From the current issue: Ana Teixeira Pinto on the Sokal hoax and Science after the Cold War Social Text’s Issue devoted to the “Science Wars” was planned as a response to the above-mentioned positions, but the hoax to which it fell prey cast the journal not as a facilitator of discussion between both sides of the debate, but as a proponent of the academic Left, even though, as the editors noted, the article’s publication was twice postponed due to Sokal’s refusal to engage in the editorial process and published only due to a, perhaps misplaced, wish to accommodate the philosophical positions of a practicing scientist. Social Text did not conduct peer reviews because its editors believed in an open editorial policy, and as Sokal himself acknowledges, “professional communities operate largely on trust”. Needless to say, the subtleties of the editorial process were lost on the wider audience, which was eager to take Sokal’s populism at face value and to cheer the brave outsider who had just exposed the corrupt academic elite.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 09:08:54 +0000
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