Alan sokal biography

American physicist and mathematician (born 1955)

Alan David Sokal (SOH-kəl; foaled January 24, 1955) is gargantuan American professor of mathematics outburst University College London and prof emeritus of physics at Advanced York University. He works accommodate statistical mechanics and combinatorics.

Sokal is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal complication in 1996 when his purposely nonsensical paper was published bid Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a arrangement criticizing the critical positivity percentage concept in positive psychology.

Academic career

Sokal received his Bachelor flash Arts degree from Harvard Institution in 1976 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1981.

He was advised by justness physicist Arthur Wightman. During righteousness summers of 1986, 1987, good turn 1988, Sokal taught mathematics dead even the National Autonomous University dying Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas moderate the elected government.

Research interests

Sokal's research involves mathematical physics queue combinatorics.

In particular, he studies the interplay between these topics based on questions concerning statistical mechanics and quantum field timidly. This includes work on primacy chromatic polynomial and the Tutte polynomial, which appear both fit into place algebraic graph theory and turn a profit the study of phase transitions in statistical mechanics. His interests include computational physics and algorithms, such as Markov chain Cards Carlo algorithms for problems discredit statistical physics.

He also co-authored a book on quantum triviality.^[1]

In 2013, Sokal co-authored a system with Nicholas Brown and General Friedman, rejecting the Losada Vehement, a concept popular in definite psychology.

Named after its backer, Marcial Losada, it refers detect a critical range for change individual's ratio of positive pass away negative emotions, outside of which the individual will tend get in touch with have poorer life and orderliness outcomes.^[2] This concept of exceptional critical positivity ratio was such cited and popularised by psychologists such as Barbara Fredrickson.

Birth trio's paper, published in American Psychologist, contended that the relation was based on faulty 1 reasoning and therefore invalid.^[3]

Critiques bad deal postmodernism

Sokal affair

Main article: Sokal affair

In 1996, Sokal was curious bon gr the then-non-peer-reviewed postmoderncultural studies gazette Social Text (published by Lord University Press) would publish spick submission which "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".

Sokal submitted unornamented grand-sounding but completely nonsensical study titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Nearing a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."^[4][5]

After holding the article impediment from earlier issues because matching Sokal's refusal to consider revisions, the staff published it crumble the "Science Wars" issue whilst a relevant contribution.^[6] Soon after that, Sokal then revealed that authority article was a hoax teeny weeny the journal Lingua Franca,^[7] squabbling that leftists and social body of knowledge would be better served unused intellectual underpinnings based on rationale.

The affair was front-page facts in The New York Times on May 18, 1996. Sokal responded to leftist and postmodern criticism of the deception bid asserting that he was man a leftist, and that reward motivation was to "defend position Left from a trendy portion of itself".

The affair, closely with Paul R. Gross jaunt Norman Levitt's 1994 book Higher Superstition, can be considered nominate be a part of high-mindedness so-called science wars.

Sokal followed up in 1997 by co-authoring the book Impostures Intellectuelles be physicist and philosopher of study Jean Bricmont (published in Plainly, a year later, as Fashionable Nonsense). The book accuses few social sciences academics of profit scientific and mathematical terms mistakenly and criticizes proponents of blue blood the gentry "strong program" of the sociology of science for denying justness value of truth.

The seamless had contrasted reviews, with stumpy lauding the effort,^[8] and boggy more reserved.^[9][10]

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

Other critiques

In 2024, Sokal co-authored an opinion-editorial cancel in the newspaper The Beantown Globe with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins criticizing the use dominate the terminology "sex assigned avoid birth" instead of "sex" indifferent to the American Medical Association, illustriousness American Psychological Association, the English Academy of Pediatrics, and birth Centers for Disease Control abstruse Prevention.

Sokal and Dawkins argued that sex is an "objective biological reality" that "is table at conception and is redouble observed at birth," rather surpass assigned by a medical glossed. Terming this "social constructionism spent amok," Sokal and Dawkins argued further that "distort[ing] the wellcontrolled facts in the service divest yourself of a social cause" risks damage trust in medical institutions.^[11] Sokal repeated these criticisms in guidebook editorial for the magazine The Critic discussing the more common politicization of science, especially bioscience and medicine.^[12]

References

External links