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Alan Sokal

AKA Alan David Sokal

Born: 1955

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Occupation: Hoaxer

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Transgressing the Boundaries

Notable for authoring a nonsensical article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", in the journal Social Text. After its appearance Sokal published a paper in the now-defunct magazine Lingua Franca, titled "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies", describing his prank and decrying the state of the cultural sciences. Unfortunately, his point is not as strong as it would be -- he chose a small, unrefereed journal, one that has a willingness to publish all manner of submissions, including fiction. It is plausible that Social Text took him as a physicist venturing a bit too ambitiously out of his field. Sokal refused a request to tone down the speculation in his paper.

    Professor: National University of Nicaragua
    Professor: Physics, New York University

    MoveOn.org

Author of books:
Impostures Intellectuelles (1997, with Jean Bricmont)


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