Today, Bruce Robbins, a Columbia University humanities professor who was a co-editor of Social Text, tells the Chronicle of Higher Education that Sokal’s essay appealed because he seemed to be a scientist “kind of on ‘our side.’” Robbins and another Social Text editor promptly claimed victim status, saying that “the deceptive means by which Sokal chose to make his point” will injure “the openness of intellectual inquiry.”
Sokal’s point, however, was that intellectual inquiry in the humanities often is not open. The humanities, he today tells the Chronicle, had become a “subculture” that was “ingrained and self-referential and mostly disdained critiques from outsiders, so that an ordinary type of intellectual critique was precluded.”
Today, Robbins says Sokal was not unethical, but he should not have regarded those whom Social Text spoke for as “enemies.” Says Robbins, “I mean, there were epistemological differences, but so what?”
So what? Epistemology is the field of philosophy concerning the theory of knowledge, of the methods of arriving at certainty. It concerns the distinction between mere unfounded opinion and well-grounded belief. Their “epistemological differences” were not simply wholesome “diversity.” The epistemology Sokal attacked precludes serious discussion of knowable realities. What Sokal exposed was — and remains — radical relativism that asserts the impossibility of serious science and scholarship.
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