[n4r9]

Although this was an interesting exercise, I'm not sure if you can use it to make any strong claims about the rest of the journal (or field). They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.

[unmole]

> They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.

The most obvious solution is to have a physist referee the paper. Publishing a paper they didn't understand and couldn't peer review most definitely suggests a lack of rigor.

[esrauch]

Even top journals in hard sciences sometimes publish papers that aren't actually peer reviewed based solely on the authors credentials. I once heard a National Academy member claim they get some number of papers automatically published into PNAS bypassing review as part of their position. Those papers aren't flagged as different than the others.

On some level given the context of the journal them saying "these known scientists are saying a weird thing which is interesting, even if you ask three other peers in their field think this is entirely bogus and even if it's entirely bogus it's still interesting and basically on the authors reputation if it's really junk".

[wzdd]

They unquestioningly published literal nonsense and you think there's a case to be made that they don't lack intellectual rigour?

[n4r9]

I think "unquestioning" undersells it. They requested that he remove a lot of the pshilosophising and footnotes, but he refused. Then they put it aside until deciding it might be okay to put in a special "Science Wars" issue.

[denton-scratch]

Thing is, I'm a layman, and Sokal's paper reeks to me of bullshit. I'm neither a physicist nor a sociologist; but that pasaage about the "hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework", with its implication that the axiom of equality is somehow political, is pretty obvious nonsense. I don't hve to understand set theory to see that.

[beepbooptheory]

May I introduce you to Alain Badiou, a massive and important figure of contemporary philosophy? "Being and Event" is probably the most focused work around ZF theory stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou

[denton-scratch]

Thanks; never heard of him before. according to that wikipedia link, Scruton says:

"No proof is clearly stated or examined, and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician's wand, to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics."

That seems to be exactly what Sokal was parodying.

I have very little time for what the French have been referring to as "philosophy" since roughly 1970. It's a sort of overproof bollocks.

[beepbooptheory]

Thats a pretty sweeping statement for a self-described layman. But either way, got it, have a nice day.

[denton-scratch]

"Layman", i.e. not a physycist or a sociologist. I did a philosophy degree, thankfully not involving any Foucault or Derrida.

[beepbooptheory]

Just an aside really, but when I hear comments like this I am always so grateful ending up with the professors I did, at the programs I was at, where effort was made to ignore or constructively address "the divide" of contemporary philosophy. I was probably a year into my MA before I learned how some might think it wrong, or silly to appreciate people like Cavell and Derrida, or Frege and Deleuze, etc. at the same time.

To me, the experience of talking with the true partisans of either the analytic/continental tradition is exhausting and at times absurd. Where else in academia do you have otherwise wonderful scholars being proud of never having read someone?

In my mind continental people are the worst offenders in this, but I guess your helping balance the scales here.

Thankfully, not everyone in the field is like this. Off the top of my head: Graham Priest and Paul Livingston are two guys doing good work to complicate the party lines here.

[qsort]

They could have asked someone who did know. If you are the editor of a publication you have editorial responsibility of what gets published, you don't get to abdicate that responsibility because you don't feel like doing your homework.

You cannot extrapolate to the field as a whole (at least not from this one example), but as far as the journal itself goes, it's damning evidence that they lacked the intellectual rigor required to talk about those topics (at least at that time, I have no idea if the journal still exists and has changed its ways).

[jeroenhd]

Perhaps, but blindly accepting a paper because you don't understand what it's saying is a sign of loose standards.

The editors don't need to be experts in every field, but they need to be able to admit that they lack the required experience and understanding to verify a paper's legitimacy. They could've reached out to a physicist before publication, but decided not to because the author was a big name in his field.

This raises the question of what other nonsense papers the journal has published that made it into publication simply because the editors didn't understand what the paper was saying.

In the context of the "science wars", this isn't saying much, because many publications of exact sciences have fallen for hoax papers before. SCIgen has been used to generate over 120 published papers (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763), since retracted; 16 of those were published by Springer, and the rest by the IEEE. This could just be a computer science issue, but I have no doubt that other exact sciences could fall for the same computer-generated nonsense had SCIgen supported generating papers about physics, chemistry, or maths (even before the age of ChatGPT).

The unfortunate reality is that many major fields and publications are susceptible to this nonsense. This is no doubt a result of the profit-oriented scientific publication industry, which prioritizes making money over finding scientific truth, with many publishers relying on volunteers to check the accuracy of papers published.

[eigenket]

They didn't blindly accept it. They originally rejected it, and eventually published it in a special issue called "science wars", the purpose of which was to have as many different points of view as possible. This special issue was not peer-reviewed at all, so saying they decided not to reach out to a physicist because he was a big name is inaccurate, they didn't peer review anyone.

I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour.

I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work.

The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The proper response would be: "Sorry, this is the wrong journal to submit to. We don't have any expertise in physics."

[renewiltord]

I suppose that seals it then. What was meant to be science is just priestly words repeated by those anointed priests. It is no sin to simply repeat the words of priests even if what they speak is nonsense.

When people say “trust the science” this must be what they’re referring to.

[alphanullmeric]

There is no rigour in “cultural studies”, or any other social “sciences”. Not only is it impossible to prove anything in what is essentially the study of opinions with opinions, they didn’t even bother to verify something that could have been verified when it said what they wanted to hear. Let alone the hilarity of the journal in question being titled Science Wars. It’s like how philosophers use Principia Mathematica as evidence that they’ve made useful contributions to science. But once you remove the mathematics part of the book and isolate the contributions of philosophy - it’s useless.

[oblmov]

I'm not sure how one could "remove the mathematics part" without removing the philosophy as well. The two aren't divided by hard boundaries and were particularly close during early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics. Poincare, Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Bernays, Hermann Weyl, and Hans Hahn all published philosophical work, just to name a few; even those who weren't themselves philosophers were at least involved with philosophy, e.g. Hilbert with the Berlin Circle. There are plenty of modern examples of crossover as well, such as Kripke, Putnam, Jaakko Hintikka, Saunders Mac Lane, George Boolos...

[alphanullmeric]

And like before, if you isolate the philosophy in their work, it’s useless. Philosophy by a mathematician is still philosophy. There is a clear distinction between rigorous proofs and blathering about how people think, or making up a bunch of axioms to prove god (Godel). You don’t get to take credit for contributions from other fields.

[pasabagi]

How do you isolate the philosophy without engaging in philosophy yourself?

My suspicion is that most people who don't like philosophy have lots of philosophical ideas - they are just really dogmatic about them and don't like to be challenged.

Philosophy is like maths. You can build a lot of bridges with a crummy understanding of maths. The Romans did it with the most pathological notation for numbers imaginable, and lacking all sorts of basic mathematical concepts. So you can say all that maths stuff is just nonsense and you can do it all by these seventeen-hundred ambiguous rules of thumb you really carefully follow. It's just you're not actually avoiding maths - you're just doing it in a really ad-hoc, inflexible, and inelegant manner. That's what people are doing when they say philosophy is a load of bunk but they still believe a whole load of things about the universe.

[alphanullmeric]

Criticizing philosophy is philosophy so it cannot be criticized, the classic philosopher get out of jail free card.

Philosophy is absolutely nothing like math. Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities. Changing how you interpret math doesn’t change the physical world. Philosophers do what is equivalent of arguing that prime numbers aren’t real because base 10 is arbitrary. Philosophers have proven nothing about the universe, those are the contributions of physics. The things philosophers discuss about the universe is more akin to religion and mythology. You, again, keep trying to take credit for the work of other fields.

[pasabagi]

> Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities.

That's just wildly wrong. I think you should probably just try to deepen your understanding of fields you're interested in, and leave your prejudices at the door.

[oblmov]

All of the mathematicians I mentioned believed philosophy was relevant to their mathematical work, and that period of work on the foundations of mathematics was accompanied by extensive discussion of the work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. Even if we pretend philosophy never involves rigorous proofs, mathematical theorems do not spring out of thin air, and saying "anything that isn't a formal, rigorous proof is useless to mathematics" is like saying "anything that isn't a finished house is useless to the process of building a house". https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236.pdf discusses this in more detail.

Here's a paper by Tarski, widely cited by both mathematicians and philosophers and containing both formal and informal reasoning: http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/R... I don't know how one could "remove the philosophy" from this work without making it far less useful to mathematicians. The entire reason the T-schema is used in model theory is because of Tarski's philosophical argument that it provides a meaningful definition of truth.

[alphanullmeric]

It doesn't matter what they believed. Philosophy never involves rigorous proofs. By adding them you would just end up doing math. A partially finished proof is still math and not equivalent to 20 pages of worthless babble about human understanding. Throwing darts at the page and putting equations where they land will not change that. Philosophers constantly pull from the same small bag of tricks - inserting "science" or "philosophy of <science>" or "meta<science>" into their titles, Sokaling in random disconnected bits of scientific terminology to sound more credible, and trying to claim criticizing philosophy is philosophy to avoid criticism. It's unconvincing and embarrassing to hear from the self declared intellectuals responsible for some of the biggest false beliefs about science in history.

[oblmov]

If by "philosophy" you mean work that not only lacks a rigorous proof, but isn't even a step in the direction of a rigorous proof, you'll be happy to hear that many philosophers - sorry, mathematicians who mistakenly consider themselves philosophers - share your opinion of it. When I said "philosophy" I was referring to the academic field, which includes a lot of work that you consider math. While I think complete non-mathematician philosophers like Deleuze have value in their own way, I certainly wouldn't call them rigorous or useful to modern science.

I'm not clear on whether you think The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages falls into the "actually just mathematics" category or the "making up random equations" category. If the latter, I assure you that Tarski's proofs are sound. Here's a simple explanation of the most famous result from the paper in case you found the original proof inaccessible: https://qubd.github.io/files/TarskiUndefinability.pdf. A more general discussion of Tarski's work and other axiomatic theories of truth can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Mathematics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/

[promiscous]

The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.

[jjgreen]

That empirical scientists are in the business of falsification is their view of their work, Feyerabend argues that they delude themselves.

[alphanullmeric]

False hypotheses like the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of gravity, or the orbit around the sun? All of which have been denied in the past by philosophers and other pseudoscientists with cultural “proofs” to the contrary?

Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.

[beepbooptheory]

You can hear 10,000 positivists rolling in their graves at Cambridge after this comment.