Sokal's hermeneutic hoax
physics and the new inquisition
pp. 67-78
in: Babette Babich (ed), Hermeneutic philosophy of science, van Gogh's eyes, and God, Berlin, Springer, 2002Abstract
As a so-called post-analytic philosopher of science,1 if also from the marginalized sidelines, I have been able to tease analytic philosophers, calling them to account for their desire to imitate scientists and their habit of numbering their paragraphs and their passion for the acronym. Much more seriously, the scientists themselves have recently begun to raise the ante for analytic philosophers in the so-called science wars. In essays and op-ed pieces, physicists are repaying the philosophers' compliment — not only by adopting, as popular science writers have long done, the role of cultural critic, but also by assuming the mantle of philosophy. Science, once the arbiter of scientific truth, proposes now to vet the truth about everything else. And, as we shall see below, the philosophy of science appears to find itself compelled to offer an uncritical response.