11

The Raw Materials

The Importance of Being Earnest
In early 1996, the journal Social Text published an article by Professor
Alan Sokal of New York University. Entitled “Transgressing the Bounda-
ries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”^1
(huh?), the article put forth the viewpoint that “physical ‘reality’... is at
bottom a social and linguistic construct” (say what?). The article was in
fact a giant intellectual hoax, and would soon become a cause célebre.
Sokal submitted his article because he feared that the view that the world
is how we perceive it, rather than how it is, was distorting one of the fun-
damental goals of science: the search for truth. The acceptance of the ar-
ticle by the journal had numerous side effects. It helped to increase the
degree of scrutiny with which articles dealing with technical subjects
were examined and also revealed how publication likelihood was affected,
at least in the liberal arts,^2 by the concordance of the article with the
philosophical or political positions of the editorial staff.
Mostly, however, it helped expose a disturbing trend: the belief that it
is the perception of reality, rather than reality itself, that matters most.