In 1996, Alan Sokal got published a paper he wrote called: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Don’t be put off by the title. I’ll let you do the research on the paper and on Sokal. I think you will find it all interesting. Don’t worry if you get a headache from reading his article, I did. Just read it and then research what happened. Technically, what Sokal wrote was a persuasion article, though, the article is not persuasive in itself. He was trying persuade a point about the academic publishing industry via this article. Don’t worry about what the article says, though, I hope you read through it, if you can, as your assignment will be about what Sokal did. The second half of the paper, the part about philosophy, was a little easier for me to follow than the science part. Have fun. It’s an interesting situation.
Questions to address for your paper:
1. What is Sokal’s claim?
2. What kind of a claim is Sokal’s?
3. What language function is Sokal using?
4. Should Sokal have tried in a different way to make his moral appeal about how things are done, sometimes, in the academic publishing industry?
5. Did Sokal know his audience, or should he have realized his audience’s vulnerable nature and found a different way to address the problem?
6. Was Sokal deceiving in his act or honest?
7. Did Sokal misuse his authority on the subject by writing this article?
8. Was Sokal merely imparting information about the publishing industry with his article, or, did he have a moral lesson in mind with his writing?
9. What evidence does Sokal use to make his argument?
10. Was Sokal’s argument convincing and why?
12″ Arial font, 1″ margins all around, double spaced, 6-8 pages. Please take your papers to the Writing Center to have them checked over before you submit them for grading.
Link for Sokal’s article: http://compbio.biosci.uq.edu.au/mediawiki/upload/f/f9/Sokal-transgressing-boundaries.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Link for Sokal’s revelation of the hoax:
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9605/sokal.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Postmodernism is a pluralistic theory that looks at all things in many ways. The “liberating” factor he is talking about is that sometimes valuations of people or things are wrong, even morally wrong. An example is “Children should be seen and not heard.” This came from the Victorian period. Of course, we no longer talk this way because we have learned, from the 1950s, that a child’s work is his/her play, and we allow full creativity, nowadays. So, we have learned that the Victorian period did not correctly value children as should be quiet and stay out from under foot, but children wear many hats as they learn and grow, and they are people as much as adults are. Looking at children in the many ways they express themselves liberated children from being dominated into silence by society.
That is really all you need to know about the theory, again, the paper is focused on Sokal, himself. He feels that no liberation needs to be done to science, and that postmodernism is misapplied when it comes to science
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