It is 1996. In the cultural studies journal Social Text, an academic journal popularized by Duke University Press, and born in 1979 out of the intentions of an independent publishing collective, an article signed by noted physicist Alan Sokal (1955) is published: Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. The terminology used draws, right from the title, from the increasingly ambiguous vocabulary of postmodernism, particularly beloved in American academia and now well beyond the native enclosure of literary and philosophical criticism. The author's expressed (but as we shall see, not actual) intentions would be to investigate the ideological, philosophical and political implications of new theories and considerations in contemporary physics, with particular reference to the Quantum gravity. Such intentions are deemed reliable by the editors of Social Text, who decide to publish without verifying the actual imprint from the piece or ascertaining its scientific assumptions (a kind of blind review devoid of any form of peer review) . Appropriating formulas typical of the prevailing cultural relativism, cleverly mixed with scientific jargon, Sokal argues that "physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is ultimately a social and linguistic construction, far from being objective, it reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations typical of the culture that generated it," and adds that "the truths of science are inherently dependent on the theoretical context used and therefore self-referential [... ] while undeniably valuable, cannot claim a privileged cognitive position over counterhegemonic narratives that are produced in dissident or marginalized communities" (Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, Garzanti, Milan 1999, p. 218).
Being, therefore, pretendedly aligned with relativist academic thought, and manifesting the mode of terminological and conceptual transposition typical of the adherents of postmodernism, the article is read and appreciated, until the author himself reveals the hoax by issuing a statement in A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies, a counter-article published in the journal Lingua Franca, which reveals the "hoax" and the parodic purpose of the former.
Attack on postmodernism
Sokal's real intent, in fact, is to debunk the prevailing cultural temperament, denouncing its absurdity and the evanescence of methods and content based on intellectual arrogance, empty rhetoric, linguistic digression, superficiality, ignorance, and wilful incomprehensibility in which "allusions, metaphors and puns replace evidence and logic."
The protest is against the political-ideological instrumentalization typical of relativism, a subject the author explores in depth with fellow Belgian Jean Bricmont (1952) in his book Impostures Intellectuelles (1997), published in the wake of the controversy triggered by the articles , and in which the two analyze the texts of some of the founding fathers of postmodernism and posthumanism such as Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) and even Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995).
The denunciation of philosophical abuse
The meticulous analysis of their works would highlight, for Sokal and Bricmont, sought-after expository ambiguity, superficial knowledge of the plundered scientific fields, illogical and content-free imitation of scientific language, and cumbersome isolation of metaphors drawn from different contexts, placing them outside their original value and meaning, all with the aim of deconstructing - and thus denying - objective reality in order to give authority to a relativism fed on philosophical authoritarianism. The abuse of scientific meanings thus generates nonmeanings, urging fluidity of values, ethics, individual, social, even sexual identity.
The linguistic - and conceptual - analogies embroidered with countless rhetorical stylistic devices between science, philosophy, sociology, or even psychology, seem to be nothing more, in the end, than overwriting to give authority to theories that scientifically have none, since they lack any empirical basis. The result would be a "soup of ideas, often poorly formulated, which can be grouped under the name of relativism and which are currently quite influential in some academic fields of the humanities and social sciences" (Intellectual Impostures, op. cit. p. 58).
The ambiguity of relativism
The problem is, however, that the postmodernist texts carefully read and dismantled by the authors of Intellectual Impostures are the basis for much of contemporary culture, where there seems to be no longer an equal relationship between the idea and reality. The aesthetic, cognitive, moral or ethical relativism that underpins postmodernism has, for Sokal, "enormous consequences for culture in general and for people's way of thinking"; it cannot give rise to objective knowledge of the world; on the contrary, it leads to nihilism, the defragmentation of truth and the annihilation of reason, contributing to scientific and ontological drift.
. There are rugby and NFL players who are basically fat (but not mobidly obese) and no one can deny their athleticism and condition. In fact, they eat and train a certain way to maintain their body mass at the level it's at.
, writing this but I was wondering is this interview with dr. Fatima Cody Standford had impact on these people. I could easily imagine someone saw this and said: "Off course it's genetics and I can't do nothing to change my condition!"