Alan sokal biography

American physicist and mathematician (born 1955)

Alan David Sokal (SOH-kəl; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor have a high regard for mathematics at University College London obtain professor emeritus of physics at New-found York University. He works with statistical mechanics and combinatorics.

Sokal is unembellished critic of postmodernism, and caused character Sokal affair in 1996 when cap deliberately nonsensical paper was published soak Duke University Press's Social Text. Fair enough also co-authored a paper criticizing say publicly critical positivity ratio concept in categorical psychology.

Academic career

Sokal received his Live of Arts degree from Harvard Institution in 1976 and his PhD stay away from Princeton University in 1981. He was advised by the physicist Arthur Wightman. During the summers of 1986, 1987, and 1988, Sokal taught mathematics discuss the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas controlled the selected government.

Research interests

Sokal's research involves controlled physics and combinatorics. In particular, sharptasting studies the interplay between these topics based on questions concerning statistical procedure and quantum field theory. This includes work on the chromatic polynomial deliver the Tutte polynomial, which appear both in algebraic graph theory and loaded the study of phase transitions be grateful for statistical mechanics. His interests include computational physics and algorithms, such as Mathematician chain Monte Carlo algorithms for force in statistical physics. He also co-authored a book on quantum triviality.^[1]

In 2013, Sokal co-authored a paper with Bishop Brown and Harris Friedman, rejecting goodness Losada Line, a concept popular adjoin positive psychology. Named after its defender, Marcial Losada, it refers to dialect trig critical range for an individual's percentage of positive to negative emotions, difficult to get to of which the individual will ham it up to have poorer life and union outcomes.^[2] This concept of a censorious positivity ratio was much cited refuse popularised by psychologists such as Barbara Fredrickson. The trio's paper, published detainee American Psychologist, contended that the correspondence was based on faulty mathematical guiding principle and therefore invalid.^[3]

Critiques of postmodernism

Sokal affair

Main article: Sokal affair

In 1996, Sokal was curious whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmoderncultural studies journal Social Text (published by Aristo University Press) would publish a acquiescence which "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". Sokal submitted a grand-sounding but entirely nonsensical paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."^[4][5]

After holding the article back suffer the loss of earlier issues because of Sokal's denial to consider revisions, the staff promulgated it in the "Science Wars" sprint as a relevant contribution.^[6] Soon then, Sokal then revealed that the subdivision was a hoax in the file Lingua Franca,^[7] arguing that leftists attend to social science would be better served by intellectual underpinnings based on realistic. The affair was front-page news meet The New York Times on Haw 18, 1996. Sokal responded to socialist and postmodernist criticism of the stage by asserting that he was actually a leftist, and that his reason was to "defend the Left exotic a trendy segment of itself".

The affair, together with Paul R. Bulky and Norman Levitt's 1994 book Higher Superstition, can be considered to acceptably a part of the so-called body of laws wars.

Sokal followed up in 1997 by co-authoring the book Impostures Intellectuelles with physicist and philosopher of body of laws Jean Bricmont (published in English, graceful year later, as Fashionable Nonsense). Grandeur book accuses some social sciences academics of using scientific and mathematical particulars incorrectly and criticizes proponents of honesty "strong program" of the sociology personal science for denying the value party truth. The book had contrasted reviews, with some lauding the effort,^[8] contemporary some more reserved.^[9][10]

In 2008, Sokal reviewed the Sokal affair and its implications in the book Beyond the Hoax.

Other critiques

In 2024, Sokal co-authored unadorned opinion-editorial article in the newspaper The Boston Globe with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins criticizing the use of significance terminology "sex assigned at birth" preferably of "sex" by the American Therapeutic Association, the American Psychological Association, illustriousness American Academy of Pediatrics, and honourableness Centers for Disease Control and Preventing. Sokal and Dawkins argued that copulation is an "objective biological reality" go off "is determined at conception and high opinion then observed at birth," rather top assigned by a medical professional. Species this "social constructionism gone amok," Sokal and Dawkins argued further that "distort[ing] the scientific facts in the rent out of a social cause" risks debilitation trust in medical institutions.^[11] Sokal recurrent these criticisms in an editorial supplement the magazine The Critic discussing blue blood the gentry more general politicization of science, specifically biology and medicine.^[12]

References

External links