{"id":1068,"date":"2021-10-24T19:28:47","date_gmt":"2021-10-24T19:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1068"},"modified":"2021-12-04T13:13:52","modified_gmt":"2021-12-04T13:13:52","slug":"linguistics-sokal-affair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/linguistics-sokal-affair\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguistics has its own Sokal affair"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Sokal affair<\/em><\/a> was a minor incident in which physics professor Alan Sokal published a “hoax” (his term) paper in the cultural studies journal\u00a0Social Text<\/em>. Sokal’s intent was to demonstrate that reviewers and editors would approve of an article of utter nonsense so long as it obeyed certain preconceived notions, in this case that everything is a social construct. (It is, but that’s a story for another blog.)<\/p>\n

The affair has been “read” many ways but it is generally understood to illustrate poor editorial standards at top humanities journals and\/or the bankruptcy of the entire cultural studies enterprise. However, I don’t think we have any reason to suspect that either of these critiques are limited to cultural studies and adjacent fields.<\/p>\n

I submit that the Pirah\u00e3 recursion affair has many of the makings of a linguistic Sokal affair. But if anything, the outlook for linguistics is quite a bit worse than the Sokal story. By all accounts, Sokal’s hoax article was a minor scholarly event, and does not seem to have received much attention before it was revealed to be a hoax. In contrast, when Everett’s article first appeared in\u00a0Current Anthropology\u00a0<\/em>in 2005, it received an enormous amount of attention from both scholars and the press, and ultimately led to to multiple books, including a sympathetic portrait of Everett and his work by none other than the late Tom Wolfe (bang! krrp!). Finally, nearly all of what Everett has written on the subject is manifest nonsense<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I believe many scholars in linguistics and adjacent fields found Everett’s claim compelling, and while I think linguists should have seen through the logical leaps and magical thinking in the Current Anthropology<\/em> piece, it wasn’t until a few years later, after the exchange with Nevins et al. in Language<\/em>, that the empirical issues (to put it mildly) with Everett’s claims came to light. But the key element which gave Everett’s work such influence is that, like Sokal intended his hoax to do, it played to the biases (anti-generativist, and particularly, anti-Noam Chomsky) of a wide swath of academics (and to a lesser degree, fans of US empire, like Tom Wolfe). In that regard, it scarcely matters whether Everett himself believes or believed what he wrote: we have all been hoaxed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0Sokal affair was a minor incident in which physics professor Alan Sokal published a “hoax” (his term) paper in the cultural studies journal\u00a0Social Text. Sokal’s intent was to demonstrate that reviewers and editors would approve of an article of utter nonsense so long as it obeyed certain preconceived notions, in this case that everything is … Continue reading “Linguistics has its own Sokal affair”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1116,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions\/1116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}