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The Sokal Hoax
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Download or read book Beyond the Hoax written by Alan Sokal and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 771 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging controversy. Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention to a new set of targets - pseudo-science, religion, and misinformation in public life. 'Whether my targets are the postmodernists of the left, the fundamentalists of the right, or the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes, the bottom line is that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence, are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.' The book also includes a hugely illuminating annotated text of the Hoax itself, and a reflection on the furore it provoked.
Download or read book The Sokal Hoax written by Alan D. Sokal and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Med udgangspunkt i fysikeren Alan D. Sokals videnskabelige nonsens-artikel i det amerikanske tidsskrift Social text (Spring/Summer 1996) er her samlet et udvalg af artikler fra aviser og tidsskrifter.
Book Synopsis Fashionable Nonsense by : Alan Sokal
Download or read book Fashionable Nonsense written by Alan Sokal and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy. Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Sokal and his fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a delightfully witty and clear voice, the two thoughtfully and thoroughly dismantle the pseudo-scientific writings of some of the most fashionable French and American intellectuals. More generally, they challenge the widespread notion that scientific theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions.
Book Synopsis Higher Superstition by : Paul R. Gross
Download or read book Higher Superstition written by Paul R. Gross and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1997-12-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widely acclaimed response to the postmodernists attacks on science, with a new afterword. With the emergence of "cultural studies" and the blurring of once-clear academic boundaries, scholars are turning to subjects far outside their traditional disciplines and areas of expertise. In Higher Superstition scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt raise serious questions about the growing criticism of science by humanists and social scientists on the "academic left." This edition of Higher Superstition includes a new afterword by the authors.
Book Synopsis Intellectual Impostures by : Jean Bricmont
Download or read book Intellectual Impostures written by Jean Bricmont and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Intellectual Impostures was published in France, it sent shock waves through the Left Bank establishment. When it was published in Britain, it provoked impassioned debate. Sokal and Bricmont examine the canon of French postmodernists - Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari - and systematically expose their abuse of science. This edition contains a new preface analysing the reactions to the book and answering some of the attacks.
Download or read book Science Studies written by David J Hess and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997-10-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive survey of the nascent field of "science studies" Thrust into the public eye by the contentious "Science Wars"—played out most recently by physicist Alan Sokal's hoax—the nascent field of science studies takes on the political, historical, and cultural dimensions of technology and the sciences. Science Studies is the first comprehensive survey of the field, combining a concise overview of key concepts with an original and integrated framework. In the process of bringing disparate fields together under one tent, David J. Hess realizes the full promise of science studies, long uncomfortably squeezed into traditional disciplines. He provides a clear discussion of the issues and misunderstandings that have arisen in these interdisciplinary conversations. His survey is up-to-date and includes recent developments in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, and feminist studies. By moving from the discipline-bound blinders of a sociology, history, philosophy, or anthropology of science to a transdisciplinary field, science studies, Hess argues, will be able to provide crucial conceptual tools for public discussions about the role of science and technology in a democratic society.
Download or read book Virtue Hoarders written by Catherine Liu and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
Book Synopsis A House Built on Sand by : Noretta Koertge
Download or read book A House Built on Sand written by Noretta Koertge and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-27 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural critics say that "science is politics by other means," arguing that the results of scientific inquiry are profoundly shaped by the ideological agendas of powerful elites. They base their claims on historical case studies purporting to show the systematic intrusion of sexist, racist, capitalist, colonialist and/or professional interests into the very content of science. Physicist Alan Sokal recently poked fun at these claims by foisting a sly parody of the genre on the unwitting editors of the cultural studies journal Social Text touching off a still unabated torrent of editorials, articles, and heated classroom and Internet discussion. This hard-hitting collection picks up where Sokal left off. The essayists offer crisp and detailed critiques of case studies offered by the cultural critics as evidence that scientific results tell us more about social context than they do about the natural world. Pulling no punches, they identify numerous crude factual blunders (e.g. that Newton never performed any experiments) and egregious errors of emission, such as the attempt to explain the slow development of fluid dynamics solely in terms of gender bias. Where there are positive aspects of a flawed account, or something to be learned from it, they do not hesitate to say so. Their target is shoddy scholarship. Comprising new essays by distinguished scholars of history, philosophy, and science (including Sokal himself), this book raises a lively debate to a new level of seriousness.
Book Synopsis Knowledge and the World: Challenges Beyond the Science Wars by : Martin Carrier
Download or read book Knowledge and the World: Challenges Beyond the Science Wars written by Martin Carrier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fundamental question whether, or in which sense, science informs us about the real world has pervaded the history of thought since antiquity. Is what science tells us about the world determined unambiguously by facts or does the content of any scientific theory in some way depend on the human condition? "Sokal`s hoax" added a new dimension to this controversial debate, which very quickly came to been known as "Science Wars". "Knowledge and the World" examines and reviews the broad range of philosophical positions on this issue, stretching from realism to relativism, to expound the epistemic merits of science, and to address the central question: in which sense can science justifiably claim to provide a truthful portrait of reality? This book addresses everyone interested in the philosophy and history of science, and in particular in the interplay between the social and natural sciences.
Author :Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science Michael Ruse Publisher :Harvard University Press ISBN 13 :0674042980 Total Pages :320 pages Book Rating :4.6/5 (74 download)
Book Synopsis Mystery of Mysteries by : Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science Michael Ruse
Download or read book Mystery of Mysteries written by Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science Michael Ruse and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the recent Sokal hoax--the publication of a prominent physicist's pseudo-article in a leading journal of cultural studies--the status of science moved sharply from debate to dispute. Is science objective, a disinterested reflection of reality, as Karl Popper and his followers believed? Or is it subjective, a social construction, as Thomas Kuhn and his students maintained? Into the fray comes "Mystery of Mysteries," an enlightening inquiry into the nature of science, using evolutionary theory as a case study. Michael Ruse begins with such colorful luminaries as Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) and Julian Huxley (brother of novelist Aldous and grandson of T. H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog" ) and ends with the work of the English game theorist Geoffrey Parker--a microevolutionist who made his mark studying the mating strategies of dung flies--and the American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, whose computer-generated models reconstruct mass extinctions and other macro events in life's history. Along the way Ruse considers two great popularizers of evolution, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as two leaders in the field of evolutionary studies, Richard Lewontin and Edward O. Wilson, paying close attention to these figures' cultural commitments: Gould's transplanted Germanic idealism, Dawkins's male-dominated Oxbridge circle, Lewontin's Jewish background, and Wilson's southern childhood. Ruse explicates the role of metaphor and metavalues in evolutionary thought and draws significant conclusions about the cultural impregnation of science. Identifying strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the "science wars," he demonstrates that a resolution of the objective and subjective debate is nonetheless possible.
Book Synopsis Hitler’s Uranium Club by : Jeremy Bernstein
Download or read book Hitler’s Uranium Club written by Jeremy Bernstein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From April through December of 1945, ten of Nazi Germany's greatest nuclear physicists were detained by Allied military and intelligence services in a kind of gilded cage at Farm Hall, an English country manor near Cambridge. The physicists knew the Reich had failed to develop an atomic bomb, and they soon learned, from a BBC radio report on August 6, that the Allies had succeeded in their own efforts to create such a weapon. But what they did not know was that many of their meetings and private conversations were being monitored and recorded by British agents. This book contains the complete collection of transcripts that were made from these secret recordings, providing an unprecedented view of how the German scientists, including two Nobel Laureates, thought and spoke about their roles during the war.
Book Synopsis Sins Against Science by : Lynda Walsh
Download or read book Sins Against Science written by Lynda Walsh and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2006-09-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the fake news stories, written from 1830 to 1880, about scientific and technological discoveries, and the effect these hoaxes had on readers and their trust in science.
Book Synopsis Cynical Theories by : Helen Pluckrose
Download or read book Cynical Theories written by Helen Pluckrose and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.
Book Synopsis Why Evolution is True by : Jerry A. Coyne
Download or read book Why Evolution is True written by Jerry A. Coyne and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-01-14 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all the discussion in the media about creationism and 'Intelligent Design', virtually nothing has been said about the evidence in question - the evidence for evolution by natural selection. Yet, as this succinct and important book shows, that evidence is vast, varied, and magnificent, and drawn from many disparate fields of science. The very latest research is uncovering a stream of evidence revealing evolution in action - from the actual observation of a species splitting into two, to new fossil discoveries, to the deciphering of the evidence stored in our genome. Why Evolution is True weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, palaeontology, geology, molecular biology, anatomy, and development to demonstrate the 'indelible stamp' of the processes first proposed by Darwin. It is a crisp, lucid, and accessible statement that will leave no one with an open mind in any doubt about the truth of evolution.
Book Synopsis The Origins of Modern Science by : Ofer Gal
Download or read book The Origins of Modern Science written by Ofer Gal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Origins of Modern Science is the first synthetic account of the history of science from antiquity through the Scientific Revolution in many decades. Providing readers of all backgrounds and students of all disciplines with the tools to study science like a historian, Ofer Gal covers everything from Pythagorean mathematics to Newton's Principia, through Islamic medicine, medieval architecture, global commerce and magic. Richly illustrated throughout, scientific reasoning and practices are introduced in accessible and engaging ways with an emphasis on the complex relationships between institutions, beliefs and political structures and practices. Readers gain valuable new insights into the role that science plays both in history and in the world today, placing the crucial challenges to science and technology of our time within their historical and cultural context.
Book Synopsis Science and Anti-science by : Gerald James Holton
Download or read book Science and Anti-science written by Gerald James Holton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is good science? What goal--if any--is the proper end of scientific activity? Is there a legitimating authority that scientists mayclaim? Howserious athreat are the anti-science movements? These questions have long been debated but, as Gerald Holton points out, every era must offer its own responses. This book examines these questions not in the abstract but shows their historic roots and the answers emerging from the scientific and political controversies of this century. Employing the case-study method and the concept of scientific thematathat he has pioneered, Holton displays the broad scope of his insight into the workings of science: from the influence of Ernst Mach on twentiethcentury physicists, biologists, psychologists, and other thinkers to the rhetorical strategies used in the work of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and others; from the bickering between Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Congress over the proper form of federal sponsorship of scientific research to philosophical debates since Oswald Spengier over whether our scientific knowledge will ever be "complete." In a masterful final chapter, Holton scrutinizes the "anti-science phenomenon," the increasingly common opposition to science as practiced today. He approaches this contentious issue by examining the world views and political ambitions of the proponents of science as well as those of its opponents-the critics of "establishment science" (including even those who fear that science threatens to overwhelm the individual in the postmodern world) and the adherents of "alternative science" (Creationists, New Age "healers," astrologers). Through it all runs the thread of the author's deep historical knowledge and his humanistic understanding of science in modern culture. Science and Anti-Science will be of great interest not only to scientists and scholars in the field of science studies but also to educators, policymalcers, and all those who wish to gain a fuller understanding of challenges to and doubts about the role of science in our lives today.
Book Synopsis Arguing About Knowledge by : Duncan Pritchard
Download or read book Arguing About Knowledge written by Duncan Pritchard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is knowledge? What are the sources of knowledge? What is the value of knowledge? What can we know? Arguing About Knowledge offers a fresh and engaging perspective on the theory of knowledge. This comprehensive and imaginative selection of readings examines the subject in an unorthodox and entertaining manner whilst covering the fundamentals of the theory of knowledge. It includes classic and contemporary pieces from the most influential philosophers from Descartes, Russell, Quine and G.E. Moore to Richard Feldman, Edward Craig, Gilbert Harman and Roderick Chisholm. In addition, students will find fascinating alternative pieces from literary and popular work such as Lewis Caroll, Jorges Luis Borges and Paul Boghossian. Each article selected is clear, interesting and free from unnecessary jargon. The editors provide lucid introductions to each section in which they give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers. Arguing About Knowledge is an inventive and stimulating reader for students new to the theory of knowledge.
