ecifically, “confusing truth with claims of truth, fact with assertions of fact, and knowledge with pretensions to knowledge”(Sokal Plea). Different levels of analysis could be used. Sokal explains this topic by using an example of a man running from a theater. He begins to explain that we see a man running from a theater screaming there are a herd of elephants in the theater. Now we don’t Hickey 4know if there are really elephants in the theater until we look for ourselves. If we see such clues that there were elephants in the room then we would call the zookeepers. If we don’t see any sign that there were elephants in the room then we assume that the man suffered from a psychosis and imagined it (Sokal Plea). Sokal uses this example to explain the “First Rule of Interpretation of Postmodern Academic Writing -- no sentence means what it says”(Sokal Plea). We can see how Sokal uses this in his essay in the second from last paragraph. “The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics, and the content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of the feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques”(Sokal Transgressing). Now how silly does it sound to ‘incorporate the insights of the queer and feminist’ into the teaching of math and science? Math and science don’t have a side to them that is queer. Scholarly journals are publishing the writings of credential people with very little review of their work. As Sokal pointed out in his explanation of the parody:It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a ``conveniently credentialed ally''…(...
