Beyond the Hoax

Alan Sokal is famous, even notorious, for his spoof article parodying post-modernists and which was published in the cultural studies Journal Social Text in 1996. This interdisciplinary volume on science, philosophy and culture begins with a detailed annotation of the parody article and an afterword considering further implications. His leitmotif is clear thinking and respect the evidence, especially inconvenient and unwanted evidence that challenges our preconceptions. I found this statement slightly ironic when I came to his essay on pseudoscience and post-modernism, where his own preconceptions become very clear, for instance in the diagram depicting a continuum from genuine science to pseudoscience with homoeopathy at the far end. He does provide a good definition of pseudoscience at one level, but slides into value judgements when he uses phrases such as ' that mainstream science justifiably considers to be utterly implausible' or refers to evidence as 'utterly unconvincing'. Utterly unconvincing evidence is necessarily a function of one's preconceptions. Having said that, some of his criticisms of therapeutic touch are justified and his writing is nothing if not rigorous and stimulating. The essay on religion, politics and survival presents a critical analysis of Sam Harris's book The End of Faith and Michael Lerner's Spirit Matters as a way of approaching the epistemic status of religious ideas, which he treats as another form of pseudoscience - which might certainly be applied to creationism, but arguably not to theology as a whole since it is quite a different form of discourse.