This video is a response to a video essay by Dr. Fatima who vehemently criticized Alan Sokal and the Sokal Hoax. I believe Dr. Fatima (who labels herself as a postmodernist) makes many misleading comments in her video, my aim is to straighten the record a bit to benefit the general public.

The Sokal Hoax refers to an academic prank orchestrated by physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 to criticize the lack of intellectual rigor in certain areas of postmodern cultural studies. Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to the journal Social Text, a publication in cultural studies. The paper was filled with jargon and absurd claims, suggesting that quantum gravity had cultural and political implications, but it lacked any real scientific basis. To Sokal’s surprise, the journal published the paper. Afterward, Sokal revealed the hoax, sparking a heated debate about academic standards, the divide between the sciences, critical theory and culture studies, and the role of postmodernism in scholarship.


References:

Sokal's paper
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgr...

[1] Response of the editors to the Sokal Hoax:

https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialT...

[2] Sokal on his own parody:

https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/noretta...

[3] Chomsky on Postmodernism:

http://bactra.org/chomsky-on-postmode...



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