Another criticism is that universities tend more to pseudo-intellectualism than intellectualism per se ; for example, to protect their positions and prestige, academicians may over-complicate problems and express them in obscure language ( e. g., the Sokal affair, a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal attempting to show that American humanities professors invoke complicated, pseudoscientific jargon to support their political positions.

" Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized " the postmodernist / poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy.

Sokal reasoned that, if the presumption of editorial laziness is correct, the nonsensical content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish it.

In Jacques Derrida's response, " Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious ," first published in Le Monde, Derrida writes that the Sokal hoax is rather " sad ," not only because Alan Sokal's name is now linked primarily to a hoax, not to science, but also because the chance to reflect seriously on these issues has been ruined for a broad public forum that deserves better.

Published in North America by Got Game Entertainment in August 2008, the game is a " point and click " adventure for the PC ; however, the Lead Designer was Benoit Sokal and not Bilal himself, who was the art designer, along with Yoshitaka Amano for the upcoming video game Beyond Good & Evil 2.

The Sokal Affair is another, though this controversy also involved many other issues.

Alan David Sokal (; born 1955 ) is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University.

He is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University's Social Text.

Sokal is best known to the general public for the Sokal Affair of 1996.

The method is generally attributed to Sokal and Michener.

One such example is Alan Sokal's " Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity " ( 1996 ), in which Sokal submitted a seemingly real, but nonsensical, paper to the Journal Social Text in order to show that a supposedly serious journal in postmodern theory would accept a meaningless paper if it used sufficiently impenetrable language.

He is currently working with Benoît Sokal and Martin Villeneuve on the script of Aquarica, a film that will use CGI and motion capture technology.

He is mostly known to the non-academic audience for co-authoring Fashionable Nonsense ( also known as Intellectual Impostures ) with Alan Sokal, in which they criticise relativism in the philosophy of science.

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals ' Abuse of Science (), published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, is a book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.

Similarly, Lacan is criticized for drawing an analogy between topology and mental illness that, in Sokal and Bricmont's view, is unsupported by any argument and is " not just false: it is gibberish ".

The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University.

The matter became known as the " Sokal Affair ", and it thrust the academic world ’ s in-house scientific objectivity wars into the public eye.

Amerzone ( also known as Amerzone: The Explorer's Legacy ) is a first-person adventure game produced by French company Microïds, and designed by Benoît Sokal.

The awards are sometimes veiled criticism ( or gentle satire ), as in the two awards given for homeopathy research, prizes in " science education " to the Kansas and Colorado state boards of education for their stance regarding the teaching of evolution, and the prize awarded to Social Text after the Sokal Affair.

Sokal submitted the article to Social Text, whose editors were collecting articles for the " Science Wars " issue.

In spring of 1997, the postmodern philosopher Fred Newman responded to the Sokal Affair publishing hoax in the paper " Science Can Do Better than Sokal: A Commentary on the So-Called Science Wars ", which he presented at the Postmodernism and the Social Sciences conference at the New School for Social Research ; Alan Sokal was a participant.

The results of the experiment thus suggested that Sokal was correct to claim that academic status may account for the intellectual appeal of unintelligible academic texts.

Use of a technique called therapeutic touch was especially reviewed by Sokal, who concluded, " nearly all the pseudoscientific systems to be examined in this essay are based philosophically on vitalism " and added that " Mainstream science has rejected vitalism since at least the 1930s, for a plethora of good reasons that have only become stronger with time.

Sokal and Rohlf ( 1981 ) give an equation of the correction factor for small samples of n < 20.

He takes Sokal and Bricmont to task for elevating a disagreement with Lacan's choice of writing styles to an attack on his thought, which, in Fink's assessment, they fail to understand.

Plotnitsky goes on, however, to agree with Sokal and Bricmont that the " square root of – 1 " which Lacan discusses ( and for which Plotnitsky introduces the symbol ) is not, in spite of its identical name, " identical, directly linked, or even metaphorized via the mathematical square root of – 1 ," and that the latter " is not the erectile organ.

In Jacques Derrida's response, " Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious ," first published in Le Monde, Derrida writes that the Sokal hoax is rather " sad ," not only because Alan Sokal's name is now linked primarily to a hoax, not to science, but also because the chance to reflect seriously on this issue has been ruined for a broad public forum that deserves better.

See Sokal Affair

* Sokal Affair

Stephen Hilgartner, the Cornell University science and technologies department chairman, wrote " The Sokal Affair in Context " ( 1997 ) comparing Sokal's hoax to " Confirmational Response: Bias Among Social Work Journals " ( 1990 ), an article by William M. Epstein published in Science, Technology & Human Values.

The Sokal Affair scandal extended from academia to the public press.

The three MIT graduate students who wrote the hoax article said they were ignorant of the Sokal Affair until after submitting their article.

* Alan Sokal Articles on the Social Text Affair Alan Sokal's own page with very extensive links ; includes the original article

* Sokal Affair quotes

Lingua Franca was where the Sokal Affair — a parody of academic practices and post-structuralist language — was first revealed ; Lingua Franca editors later published a book ( The Sokal Hoax ) of selected papers on the subject.

* Sokal Affair

* Sokal Affair: Alan Sokal, " A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies ," Lingua Franca, May / June, 1996.

* Sokal Affair

* Sokal Affair

* Sokal Affair

* Sokal Affair