Noted. In another draft I’ll change this to make the point how easy it is for high-status academics to deal in gibberish. Maybe they didn’t have so much status external to their group of peers, but within it, did they?
What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove
“From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn’t prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science—much less sociology of science—is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a conveniently credentialed ally'' (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted[12]), flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions, and attacked theirenemies″.[13]”
Noted. In another draft I’ll change this to make the point how easy it is for high-status academics to deal in gibberish. Maybe they didn’t have so much status external to their group of peers, but within it, did they?
What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html
“From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn’t prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science—much less sociology of science—is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a
conveniently credentialed ally'' (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted[12]), flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions, and attacked theirenemies″.[13]”I’d forgotten that Sokal himself admitted that much about it—thanks for the cite.