In 1998, physicist Alan Sokal decided to prove that the impenetrable language used by various post-modernists rendered their work incomprehensible, not only to the public at large, but even to other post-modernists.
Sokal submitted an article, intended as a joke, to an American academic journal called Social Text. John Sturrock, writing in the LRB in 1999, summed up Sokal’s aim:
This Duke University periodical likes, by the sound of it, to give air-space to the arguments of the epistemic relativists and other anti-foundationalists. Sokal knew the sort of thing the editors favoured, and he sent them a ‘parody’, as he puts it, entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. The text of this reappears as an Appendix in Intellectual Impostures, though by the time you get to it, whatever life might have been left in the joke has been well and truly eroded by the content of the earlier chapters. The ‘parody’ makes relativist claims – for, to take an example more glaring than most, a ‘relational and contextual concept of geometry’ – so far out, as Sokal sees it, for the editors of Social Text to have realised that they were being had and to have turned it down.
While Sturrock mounted an admirable defence of Social Text‘s editors, the hoax was widely seen as an embarrassment for the publication, and a killer blow from Sokal in his self-declared “science wars”.
If there ever was such a thing, however, fifteen years later it appears that the humanities may be equalising the score. The LRB blog reports:
Last month That’s Mathematics! reported another landmark event in the history of academic publishing. A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics.
The paper, “Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE” has the abstract:
Let ρ = A. Is it possible to extend isomorphisms? We show that D´ is stochastically orthogonal and trivially affine. In [10], the main result was the construction of p-Cardano, compactly Erdős, Weyl functions. This could shed important light on a conjecture of Conway–d’Alembert.
And concludes:
Now unfortunately, we cannot assume that
The LRB‘s Paul Taylor explains:
Baffled? You should be. Each of these sentences contains mathematical nouns linked by the verbs mathematicians use, but the sentences scarcely connect with each other. The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator. Mathgen has a set of rules that define how papers are arranged in sections and what kinds of sentence make up a section and how those sentences are made up from different categories of technical and non-technical words. It creates beautifully formatted papers with the conventional structure, complete with equations and citations but, alas, totally devoid of meaning.
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