Abstract

The publication of Alan Sokal's hoax, Transgressing the Boundaries, in Donna Haraway the spring-summer 1996 issue of Social Text has already elicited a neverending profusion of pungent comment, complaint, exultation, accusation, and analysis on all sides. Engaging in the exchanges sometimes seems more like spreading an epidemic than conducting debate on important issues in science, history, politics, and culture. In my opinion, a spirit of revenge, resentment, and malice infects the attacks on science studies in the so-called Science Wars. In the fraternal text to Sokal's offerings, Higher Superstition (1994), Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's scholarly arguments are a joke, if not a hoax, and the polemical special pleading is a work of art. It is, frankly, hard to take such arguments seriously. But the Science Wars are serious.

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