艾伦·索卡尔

艾伦·索卡尔（英语：Alan David Sokal，1955年1月24日—），伦敦大学学院的美国数学教授，也是纽约大学的物理学名誉教授。他从事统计力学和组合学的研究。他是后现代主义的批评者，在1996年引发了所谓的索卡尔事件，当时他故意发布了一篇毫无意义的论文，该论文后来被杜克大学出版社的《社会文本》刊登。他还与他人合著了一篇批评积极心理学中批判性积极比例概念的论文。

观点

在《知识的骗局》一书中，艾伦·索卡尔通过引用布鲁诺·拉图尔于1998年在《La Recherche》杂志上发表的一篇文章，对拉图尔的相对主义观点进行了批评。在对显示法老拉美西斯二世可能死于结核病的研究作出反应时，拉图尔认为：“他怎么会因为科赫在1882年发现的一种杆菌而去世呢？……在科赫之前，这种杆菌并不存在。” 他表示这样的论断与声称法老死于机枪扫射一样，是一种时代错误的观点。

Alan David Sokal ( SOH-kəl; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works with statistical mechanics and combinatorics.

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

Early life and academic career

Sokal was born to Nathan O. Sokal (1929–2016), an electrical engineer of Polish descent, and Zelda Kaufman Sokal. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard College in 1976 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1981. He was advised by the physicist Arthur Wightman. During the summers of 1986, 1987, and 1988, Sokal taught mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas controlled the elected government.

Research interests

Sokal's research involves mathematical physics and combinatorics. In particular, he studies the interplay between these topics based on questions concerning statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. This includes work on the chromatic polynomial and the Tutte polynomial, which appear both in algebraic graph theory and in the study of phase transitions in statistical mechanics. His interests include computational physics and algorithms, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for problems in statistical physics. He also co-authored a book on quantum triviality.

In 2013, Sokal co-authored a paper with Nicholas Brown and Harris Friedman, rejecting the Losada Line, a concept popular in positive psychology. Named after its proposer, Marcial Losada, it refers to a critical range for an individual's ratio of positive to negative emotions, outside of which the individual will tend to have poorer life and occupational outcomes. This concept of a critical positivity ratio was much cited and popularised by psychologists such as Barbara Fredrickson. The trio's paper, published in American Psychologist, contended that the ratio was based on faulty mathematical reasoning and therefore invalid.

During his high school years and undergraduate studies at Harvard in the 1970s, Sokal collaborated with his father, Nathan, on his work on RF power amplifiers: their work was motivated by their mutual interest in amateur radio. This has resulted in the introduction of class-E high-efficiency power amplifier, and Sokals were awarded the U.S. Patents 3,900,823 and 3,919,656. In 2007, Alan and Nathan Sokal were awarded Microwave Pioneer Award by IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society for "development of the class E power amplifier."

Critiques of postmodernism

Sokal affair

In 1996, Sokal was curious whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press) would publish a submission which "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". Sokal submitted a grand-sounding but completely nonsensical paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".

After holding the article back from earlier issues because of Sokal's refusal to consider revisions, the staff published it in the "Science Wars" issue as a relevant contribution. Soon thereafter, Sokal then revealed that the article was a hoax in the journal Lingua Franca, arguing that leftists and social science would be better served by intellectual underpinnings based on reason. The affair was front-page news in The New York Times on May 18, 1996. Sokal responded to leftist and postmodernist criticism of the deception by asserting that he was himself a leftist, and that his motivation was to "defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself".