Alan David Sokal (1955 -) is a professor of Physique and a member of the teaching staff of the Department of mathematics of the Université of New York. In January 2006, it was named with pulpit of the statistical and combinative Mechanics of the University College of London. Directed by Arthur Wightman, it obtained its Ph.D. with the Université of Princeton in 1981. In Physical, the interests of search for Sokal include the Mécanique statistics, the Quantum theory of the fields, mathematics and applied information technology with physics.

Politically of left, Sokal taught mathematics at the National university of the Nicaragua during the government Sandinista.

Sokal business

It is especially known of the public for the Affaire Sokal of 1996. Curious to see whether the review of cultural studies (farming studies) postmodern Social Text would publish any tender which “would flatter the ideological preconceptions of the writers”, Sokal subjected to the publication grandiloquent, but foolish, article entitled “To transgress the borders: towards transformative hermeneutics of the quantum gravitation”

Indeed, the primary goal of this article was to show that it was possible to publish in certain fields of social sciences, and in particular those which touch with the ideas and the vocabulary of the Post-modernism, about any empty document of any direction but using a diverted scientific vocabulary. The review in question actually published the article, and it is at this time that Sokal reveals its Canular in the review Lingua Franca . , quoting, inter alia, Noam Chomsky to affirm that the left and social science would be been useful better by solids intellectual foundations based on the reason. He addressed to the gauchist and postmodernist criticizes his disappointment by explaining that its motivation had been “to defend the left of its current in vogue”.

The other objective was to show that the worst nonsenses can be defended while being pressed on the postmodern thinkers. On this point the question is to know if Sokal diverts or not the authors whom it quotes.

This business, jointly with the book of Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt: Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science , can be regarded as pertaining so that Social Text precisely called Guerre of sciences. The book in general shows the academics and the specialists in social sciences in particular to use with inaccuracy of the scientific and mathematical terms and the partisans of the strong Programme to deny the value of the scientific Vérité.