Alan Sokal knows a thing or two about bullshit. He single-handedly made a mockery of Social Text, [1]an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. His 1996 article,
“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was published in the journal’s spring/summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
The reemergence of post-modernism, now in the form of Woke culture concerns Sokal in a big way, as he writes in ARC: [2]
What postmodernist relativism has wrought is, rather, something more insidious: by devaluing the concept of objective truth, it has undermined our own ability to combat objective untruths—to develop herd immunity to a pandemic of viral disinformation, as one writer eloquently put it. Now the genie is out of the bottle, and I honestly don’t know how to put it back in.
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