''Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture'' is a 2008 book by

Alan Sokal Alan David Sokal (; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmo ...

detailing the history of the Sokal affair in which he submitted an article full of "nonsense" to a journal and was able to get it published.

Reception

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...

'' writes that "Sokal's essays—and his hoax—achieve their purpose of reminding us all that, in the words of the Victorian mathematician-philosopher William Kingdon Clifford, 'It is wrong, always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. But it also notes that ''Beyond the Hoax'':

fails to reflect the fact that Sokal's concerns are now widely shared—and that progress is being made in addressing them, the emergence of evidence-based social policy being an obvious example. His critique would also gain more credibility from encompassing his own community: the failure of scientific institutions to address the abuse of statistical methods or promote systematic reviews is no less of a threat to progress than the ramblings of postmodernists or fundamentalists.

Michael Shermer Michael Brant Shermer (born September 8, 1954) is an American science writer, historian of science, executive director of The Skeptics Society, and founding publisher of ''Skeptic'' magazine, a publication focused on investigating pseudoscientifi ...

"Fight for the Life of the Mind," by Michael Shermer, ''

New York Sun ''The New York Sun'' is an American online newspaper published in Manhattan; from 2002 to 2008 it was a daily newspaper distributed in New York City. It debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of the earlier New York ...

'', May 21, 2008

/ref> praised the book as "an essential text" and summarized the argument, writing that:

There is progress in science, and some views really are superior to others, regardless of the color, gender, or country of origin of the scientist holding that view. Despite the fact that scientific data are "theory laden," science is truly different than art, music, religion, and other forms of human expression because it has a self-correcting mechanism built into it. If you don't catch the flaws in your theory, the slant in your bias, or the distortion in your preferences, someone else will, usually with great glee and in a public forum—for example, a competing journal! Scientists may be biased, but science itself, for all its flaws, is still the best system ever devised for understanding how the world works.

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

solid-state physicist

N. David Mermin Nathaniel David Mermin (; born 30 March 1935) is a solid-state physicist at Cornell University best known for the eponymous Mermin–Wagner theorem, his application of the term " boojum" to superfluidity, his textbook with Neil Ashcroft on sol ...

wrote in

Nature (journal) ''Nature'' is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, ''Nature'' features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. ...

, Mermin continued that, Mermin states that "I would like to think that we are not only beyond Sokal's hoax, but beyond the

science wars The science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world. HighBeam Encyclopedia defines the science wars as the discussions about the "way the sc ...

themselves. This book might be a small step backwards."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Beyond The Hoax 2008 non-fiction books English-language books Oxford University Press books Sociology books Works by Alan Sokal

Reception

See also

References