80-709: The Sokal affair , additionally known as the Sokal hoax , was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal , a physics professor at New York University and University College London . In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text , an academic journal of cultural studies . The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor , specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross —[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered
160-406: A "liberatory science" and an "emancipatory mathematics", spurning "the elite caste canon of 'high science ' ", needed to be established for a "postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project." Moreover, the article's footnotes conflate academic terms with sociopolitical rhetoric, e.g.: Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with
240-582: A "standard scientific dogma," says that perpetual motion devices and inedia should be investigated as possible phenomena, and has said that "the evidence for energy conservation in living organisms is weak." He argues in favour of alternative medicine and psychic phenomena , saying that their recognition as legitimate is impeded by a "scientific priesthood" with an "authoritarian mentality." Citing his earlier "psychic staring effect" experiments and other reasons, he says that minds are not confined to brains and that "liberating minds from confinement in heads
320-443: A broader critique of philosophical materialism , with the title apparently mimicking that of The God Delusion by one of his critics, Richard Dawkins . In the book, Sheldrake proposes a number of questions as the theme of each chapter that seek to elaborate on his central premise that science is predicated on the belief that the nature of reality is fully understood, with only minor details needing to be filled in. This "delusion"
400-448: A class of plant hormone that plays a role in plant vascular cell differentiation . Sheldrake and Philip Rubery developed the chemiosmotic model of polar auxin transport . Sheldrake has said that he ended this line of research when he concluded: The system is circular. It does not explain how [differentiation is] established to start with. After nine years of intensive study, it became clear to me that biochemistry would not solve
480-446: A critical summary of postmodernism and criticism of the strong programme of social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge . In 2008, Sokal published a followup book, Beyond the Hoax , which revisited the history of the hoax and discussed its lasting implications. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida , whose 1966 statement about Einstein's theory of relativity
560-507: A dog were simply to do very little for a while, before visiting a window with increasing frequency the longer its owner was absent, and that such behaviour would make sense for a dog awaiting its owner's return. Under this behaviour, the final measurement period, ending with the owner's return, would always contain the most time spent at the window. Sheldrake argued that the actual data in his own and in Wiseman's tests did not bear this out, and that
640-612: A famous critic of esotericism in science, wrote in The Times Higher Education Supplement that "[t]here is a lot to be said for debunking orthodox science's pretensions to be on the verge of fitting the last grain of information into its towering edifice of universal knowledge", while also noting that Sheldrake "goes a bit too far here and there, as in promoting his morphic resonance theory." Bryan Appleyard writing in The Sunday Times commented that Sheldrake
720-1255: A fellow of the Temenos Academy, London. In 2017, Sheldrake published a dialog with science writer and skeptic Michael Shermer titled Arguing Science: A Dialogue on the Future of Science and Spirit . In 2023, at the How The Light Gets In festival of philosophy in Hay-on-Wye, UK, Sheldrake debated Shermer. In 2023, Sheldrake debated the existence of consciousness outside of brains at the University Aula in Bergen, Norway , alongside anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and neuroscientist Anil Seth . Sheldrake has outlined his spiritual practices in two books: Science and Spiritual Practices (2017) and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work (2019). Reviews of Sheldrake's books have at times been extremely negative about their scientific content, but some have been positive. In 2009, Adam Rutherford , geneticist and deputy editor of Nature , criticised Sheldrake's books for containing research that
800-506: A good deal of the philosophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes." Still, despite calling Sokal a "difficult, uncooperative author", and noting that such writers were "well known to journal editors", based on Sokal's credentials Social Text published the article in the May 1996 Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue. The editors did not seek peer review of the article by physicists or otherwise; they later defended this decision on
880-498: A lack of evidence for morphic resonance and inconsistencies between its tenets and data from genetics, embryology, neuroscience, and biochemistry. They also express concern that popular attention paid to Sheldrake's books and public appearances undermines the public's understanding of science. Sheldrake was born on 28 June 1942, in Newark-on-Trent , Nottinghamshire, to Reginald Alfred Sheldrake and Doris (née Tebbutt). His father
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#1732894607350960-523: A lot of convincing." Science journalist Nigel Hawkes, writing in The Times , said that Sheldrake was "trying to bridge the gap between phenomenalism and science," and suggested that dogs could appear to have psychic abilities when they were actually relying on more conventional senses. He concluded: "whether scientists will be willing to take [Sheldrake] seriously is ... [a question] that need not concern most readers. While I do not think this book will change
1040-442: A minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and " pro-choice ", so liberal (and even some socialist ) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo–Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice . Sokal submitted the article to Social Text , whose editors were collecting articles for
1120-432: A minor role, as cheerleaders for the texts we criticize." The French-language list, however, included Derrida: " Des penseurs célèbres tels qu'Althusser, Barthes, Derrida et Foucault sont essentiellement absents de notre livre " ("Famous thinkers such as Althusser, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault are essentially absent from our book"). According to Brian Reilly, Derrida may also have been sensitive to another difference between
1200-401: A physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax. The hoax caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; and academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive
1280-449: A priest and theologian, on two books in 1996. Sheldrake was one of six subjects, along with Oliver Sacks , Daniel Dennett , Stephen Jay Gould , Freeman Dyson , Stephen Toulmin , who were covered in 1993 by the Dutch filmmaker Wim Kayzer in A Glorious Accident , a documentary series that posed a series of questions about consciousness and culminated in a roundtable discussion between
1360-538: A result, according to Hilgartner, though competent in terms of method, Epstein's experiment was largely muted by the more socially accepted social work discipline he critiqued, while Sokal's attack on cultural studies , despite lacking experimental rigor, was accepted. Hilgartner also argued that Sokal's hoax reinforced the views of well-known pundits such as George Will and Rush Limbaugh , so that his opinions were amplified by media outlets predisposed to agree with his argument. The Sokal Affair extended from academia to
1440-653: A result, he suggests, newly acquired behaviours can be passed down to future generations—a biological proposition akin to the Lamarckian inheritance theory. He generalises this approach to assert that it explains many aspects of science, from evolution to the laws of nature , which, in Sheldrake's formulation, are merely mutable habits that have been evolving and changing since the Big Bang . John Davy wrote in The Observer that
1520-551: A similar method to Sokal's, submitting fictitious articles to real academic journals to measure their response. Though much more systematic than Sokal's work, it received scant media attention. Hilgartner argued that the "asymmetric" effect of the successful Sokal hoax compared with Epstein's experiment cannot be attributed to its quality, but that "[t]hrough a mechanism that resembles confirmatory bias, audiences may apply less stringent standards of evidence and ethics to attacks on targets that they are predisposed to regard unfavorably." As
1600-671: A single extemporaneous remark on relativity made in 1966 (before Derrida was "the Derrida" and, in a certain sense, even before "deconstruction") ... is made to stand for nearly all of deconstructive or even postmodernist (not a term easily, if at all, applicable to Derrida) treatments of science. Derrida later responded to the hoax in " Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux " ("Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious"), first published on 20 November 1997 in Le Monde . He called Sokal's action "sad" for having trivialized Sokal's mathematical work and "ruining
1680-663: A social and linguistic construct." Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor. In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science ; UK: Intellectual Impostures , 1998). The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals ' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology. It closed with
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#17328946073501760-489: A valid theory of quantum gravity. (A morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by Rupert Sheldrake in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre New Age idea.") Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook." After referring skeptically to
1840-682: A weak sense of being stared at, but no sense of not being stared at, and attributed the results to morphic resonance. He reported a hit rate of 53.1%, describing two subjects as "nearly always right, scoring way above chance levels." Several independent experimenters were unable to find evidence beyond statistical randomness that people could tell they were being stared at, with some saying that there were design flaws in Sheldrake's experiments, such as using test sequences with "relatively few long runs and many alternations" instead of truly randomised patterns . In 2005, Michael Shermer expressed concern over confirmation bias and experimenter bias in
1920-599: Is an English author and parapsychology researcher. He proposed the concept of morphic resonance, a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience . He has worked as a biochemist at Cambridge University , a Harvard scholar, a researcher at the Royal Society , and a plant physiologist for ICRISAT in India. Other work by Sheldrake encompasses paranormal subjects such as precognition , empirical research into telepathy , and
2000-671: Is constrained by the current scientific orthodoxy." David Sharp, writing in The Lancet , said that the experiments testing paranormal phenomena carried the "risk of positive publication bias ," and that the scientific community "would have to think again if some of these suggestions were convincingly confirmed." Sharp encouraged readers (medical professionals) to "at least read Sheldrake, even try one of his experiments—but pay very close attention to your methods section." Sharp doubted whether "a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs [was] going to persuade sceptics," and noted that "orthodox science will need
2080-708: Is like being released from prison." He suggests that DNA is insufficient to explain inheritance , and that inheritance of form and behaviour is mediated through morphic resonance. He also promotes morphic resonance in broader fashion as an explanation for other phenomena such as memory. Reviews were mixed. Anti-reductionist philosopher Mary Midgley , writing in The Guardian , welcomed it as "a new mind-body paradigm" to address what she called "the unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter." Philosopher Martin Cohen ,
2160-670: Is unfalsifiable, but no conclusive experiments have been performed since mainstream scientists do not wish to get involved in such experiments. In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988), Sheldrake expands on his morphic resonance hypothesis and marshals experimental evidence that he says supports it. The book was reviewed favourably in New Scientist by historian Theodore Roszak , who called it "engaging, provocative" and "a tour de force." When it
2240-481: Is what Sheldrake argues has turned science into a series of dogmas grounded in philosophical materialism rather than an open-minded approach to investigating phenomena. He argues that many powerful taboos circumscribe what scientists can legitimately direct their attention towards. The mainstream view of modern science is that it proceeds by methodological naturalism and does not require philosophical materialism. Sheldrake questions conservation of energy; he calls it
2320-473: The homing of pigeons , and on animal precognition , including premonitions of earthquakes and tsunamis. Sheldrake examined more than 1,000 case histories of dogs and cats that seemed to anticipate their owners' return by waiting at a door or window, sometimes for half an hour or more ahead of their return. He did a long series of experiments with a dog called Jaytee, in which the dog was filmed continuously during its owner's absence. In 100 filmed tests, on average
2400-523: The psychic staring effect . He has been described as a New Age author. Sheldrake's morphic resonance posits that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems ... inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." Sheldrake proposes that it is also responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms." His advocacy of the idea offers idiosyncratic explanations of standard subjects in biology such as development , inheritance , and memory. Critics cite
2480-477: The " strong programme " of the sociology of science. Stolzenberg replied in the same issue that their critique and allegations of misrepresentation were based on misreadings. He advised readers to slowly and skeptically examine the arguments of each party, bearing in mind that "the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true." In 2009, Cornell sociologist Robb Willer performed an experiment in which undergraduate students read Sokal's paper and were told either that it
Sokal affair - Misplaced Pages Continue
2560-522: The "Science Wars" issue. "Transgressing the Boundaries" was notable as an article by a natural scientist; biologist Ruth Hubbard also had an article in the issue. Later, after Sokal revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca , Social Text 's editors wrote that they had requested editorial changes that Sokal refused to make, and had had concerns about the quality of the writing: "We requested him (a) to excise
2640-455: The "so-called scientific method", the article declared that "it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical 'reality ' " is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct." It went on to state that because scientific research is "inherently theory-laden and self-referential", it "cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities", and that therefore
2720-534: The French and English versions of Impostures intellectuelles . In the French, his citation from the original hoax article is said to be an "isolated" instance of abuse, whereas the English text adds a parenthetical remark that Derrida's work contained "no systematic misuse (or indeed attention to) science." Sokal and Bricmont insisted that the difference between the articles was "banal." Nevertheless, Derrida concluded that Sokal
2800-527: The Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from 1974 to 1978. There he published on crop physiology and co-authored a book on the anatomy of the pigeonpea . Sheldrake left ICRISAT to focus on writing A New Science of Life , during which time he spent a year and a half in the Saccidananda Ashram of Bede Griffiths , a Benedictine monk active in interfaith dialogue with Hinduism. Published in 1981,
2880-479: The World , subtitled "A do-it-yourself guide to revolutionary science." He encouraged laypeople to conduct research and argued that experiments similar to his own could be conducted with limited expense. Music critic of The Sunday Times Mark Edwards reviewed the book positively, arguing that Sheldrake "challenges the complacent certainty of scientists," and that his ideas "sounded ridiculous ... as long as your thinking
2960-457: The article was published and the hoax revealed, he wrote: The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for
3040-416: The article. Scholarly publishing sting This is a list of scholarly publishing " sting operations " such as the Sokal affair . These are nonsense papers that were accepted by an academic journal or academic conference ; the list does not include cases of scientific misconduct . The intent of such publications is typically to expose shortcomings in a journal's peer review process or to criticize
3120-481: The barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. ... There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless, or even counterproductive. Social Text' s response revealed that none of
3200-449: The basis that Social Text was a journal of open intellectual inquiry and the article was not offered as a contribution to physics. In the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies" in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca , Sokal revealed that "Transgressing the Boundaries" was a hoax and concluded that Social Text "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in
3280-458: The book "disturbingly eccentric," combining "a disorderly collage of scientific fact and opinion with an intrusive yet disjunctive metaphysical programme." Reviews for the book were mostly positive. Kirkus Reviews described it as a "grounded and inspiring approach to appreciating the benefits of both science and religion". Adam Ford, reviewing the book for the Church Times , describes it as
Sokal affair - Misplaced Pages Continue
3360-932: The book in The Times , David E. H. Jones criticised the hypothesis as magical thinking and pseudoscience, saying that morphic resonance "is so vast and formless that it could easily be made to explain anything, or to dodge round any opposing argument ... Sheldrake has sadly aligned himself with those fantasists who, from the depths of their armchairs, dream up whole new grandiose theories of space and time to revolutionize all science, drape their woolly generalizations over every phenomenon they can think of, and then start looking round for whatever scraps of evidence that seem to them to be in their favour." Jones argued that without confirmatory experimental evidence, "the whole unwieldy and redundant structure of [Sheldrake's] theory falls to Occam's Razor ." Published in 1991, Sheldrake's The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God addresses
3440-430: The book outlines his concept of morphic resonance, of which he has said: The idea came to me in a moment of insight and was extremely exciting. It interested some of my colleagues at Clare College—philosophers, linguists, and classicists were quite open-minded. But the idea of mysterious telepathy-type interconnections between organisms and of collective memories within species didn't go down too well with my colleagues in
3520-549: The chance to carefully examine controversies" about scientific objectivity . Derrida then faulted him and Bricmont for what he considered "an act of intellectual bad faith " in their follow-up book, Impostures intellectuelles : they had published two articles almost simultaneously, one in English in The Times Literary Supplement on 17 October 1997 and one in French in Libération on 18–19 October 1997, but while
3600-424: The critique as a "repertoire of rationalizations" for avoiding the study of science. Sokal reasoned that if the presumption of editorial laziness was correct, the nonsensical content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish it. What would matter would be ideological obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers, and sufficient quantities of the appropriate jargon. After
3680-403: The dog spent far more time at the window when its owner was on her way home than when she was not. During the main period of her absence, before she started her return journey, the dog was at the window for an average of 24 seconds per 10-minute period (4% of the time), whereas when she was on her way home, during the first ten minutes of her homeward journey, from more than five miles away, the dog
3760-444: The dog went to wait at the window sooner when his owner was returning from a short absence, and later after a long absence, with no tendency for Jaytee to go to the window early in the way that he did for shorter absences. Reviewing the book, Susan Blackmore criticised Sheldrake for comparing the 12 tests of random duration—which were all less than an hour long—to the initial tests where the dog may have been responding to patterns in
3840-406: The editors had suspected Sokal's piece was a parody. Instead, they speculated Sokal's admission "represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." Sokal found further humor in the idea that the article's absurdity was hard to spot: In the second paragraph I declare without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' (note the scare quotes ) [...] is at bottom
3920-579: The editors or readers of Social Text ; and whether Social Text had abided by proper scientific ethics. In 2008, Sokal published Beyond the Hoax , which revisited the history of the hoax and discussed its lasting implications. In an interview on the U.S. radio program All Things Considered , Sokal said he was inspired to submit the bogus article after reading Higher Superstition (1994), in which authors Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt claim that some humanities journals will publish anything as long as it has "the proper leftist thought" and quoted (or
4000-486: The editors' ideological preconceptions." The article, " Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity ", was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 " Science Wars " issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review at the time, so it did not submit the article for outside expert review by
4080-507: The editors' response demonstrated the problem that he sought to identify. Social Text , as an academic journal, published the article not because it was faithful, true, and accurate to its subject, but because an "academic authority" had written it and because of the appearance of the obscure writing. The editors said they considered it poorly written but published it because they felt Sokal was an academic seeking their intellectual affirmation. Sokal remarked: My goal isn't to defend science from
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#17328946073504160-470: The implications of A New Science of Life were "fascinating and far-reaching, and would turn upside down a lot of orthodox science," and that they would "merit attention if some of its predictions are supported by experiment." In subsequent books, Sheldrake continued to promote morphic resonance. The morphic resonance hypothesis is rejected by numerous critics on many grounds, and has been labelled pseudoscience and magical thinking . These grounds include
4240-436: The lack of evidence for it and its inconsistency with established scientific theories . The idea of morphic resonance is also seen as lacking scientific credibility because it is overly vague and unfalsifiable . Sheldrake's experimental methods have been criticised for being poorly designed and subject to experimenter bias . His analyses of results have also drawn criticism. Alex Gomez-Marin denies that Sheldrake's basic idea
4320-551: The owner's journeys. Blackmore interpreted the results of the randomised tests as starting with a period where the dog "settles down and does not bother to go to the window," and then showing that the longer the owner was away, the more the dog went to look. Sheldrake's The Sense of Being Stared At explores telepathy, precognition, and the " psychic staring effect ." It reported on an experiment Sheldrake conducted where blindfolded subjects guessed whether persons were staring at them or at another target. He reported subjects exhibiting
4400-606: The participants. The film was shown on Dutch public broadcasting system VPRO in 1993, followed by United States PBS member station WNET in 1994. The book A Glorious Accident: Understanding Our Place in the Cosmic Puzzle was produced from the transcripts of the program and published in both Dutch and English. Since 2004, Sheldrake has been a visiting professor at the Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut , where he
4480-648: The problem of why things have the basic shape they do. From 1968 to 1969, Sheldrake worked at the University of Malaya . Having an interest in Indian philosophy , Hinduism and transcendental meditation , Sheldrake resigned his position at Clare and went to work on the physiology of tropical crops in Hyderabad, India , as principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for
4560-422: The progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" proposed that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the " morphogenetic field " could be
4640-642: The public press. Anthropologist Bruno Latour , who was criticized in Fashionable Nonsense , described the scandal as a "tempest in a teacup." Retired Northeastern University mathematician -turned social scientist Gabriel Stolzenberg wrote essays criticizing the statements of Sokal and his allies, arguing that they insufficiently grasped the philosophy they criticized, rendering their criticism meaningless. In Social Studies of Science , Bricmont and Sokal responded to Stolzenberg, denouncing his representations of their work and criticizing his commentary about
4720-626: The results as similarly positive and significant. Before the publication of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home , Sheldrake invited Richard Wiseman , Matthew Smith, and Julie Milton to conduct an independent experimental study with Jaytee. They concluded that their evidence did not support telepathy as an explanation for the dog's behaviour, and proposed possible alternative explanations for Sheldrake's conclusions, involving artefacts, bias resulting from experimental design , and post hoc analysis of unpublished data. The group observed that Sheldrake's observed patterns could easily arise if
4800-563: The science labs. Not that they were aggressively hostile; they just made fun of it. After writing A New Science of Life , he continued at ICRISAT as a part-time consultant physiologist until 1985. Sheldrake published his second book, The Presence of the Past, in 1988. In the 1990s and 2000s, he continued to publish books, which included several joint discussions with Ralph Abraham , a mathematician, and Terence McKenna , an ethnobotanist and mystic. Sheldrake also collaborated with Matthew Fox ,
4880-647: The standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14 ... I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who refused to get confirmed. In the nine-month period before starting college, Sheldrake worked at the Parke-Davis pharmacology research lab in London, an experience he described as formative due to the required destruction of lab animals, which he found deeply unsettling. At Clare College, Cambridge , Sheldrake studied biology and biochemistry. In 1964, he
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#17328946073504960-523: The standards of pay-to-publish journals. The ethics of academic stings are disputed, with some arguing that it is morally equivalent to other forms of fraud. The hoax was revealed and halted after one of the papers in the England-based feminist geography journal Gender, Place and Culture was criticized on social media, and then on Campus Reform , which led a Wall Street Journal editorial writer to investigate and report on it. The paper, which
5040-400: The subject of New Age consciousness and related topics. A column in The Guardian said that the book "seeks to restore the pre-Enlightenment notion that nature is 'alive'," quoting Sheldrake as saying that "indeterminism, spontaneity and creativity have re-emerged throughout the natural world" and that "mystic, animistic and religious ways of thinking can no longer be kept at bay." The book
5120-556: The subject" because of its ideological proclivities and editorial bias. In their defense, Social Text 's editors said they believed that Sokal's essay "was the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field" and that "its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document." Besides criticizing his writing style, Social Text 's editors accused Sokal of behaving unethically in deceiving them. Sokal said
5200-508: The tests, and concluded that Sheldrake's claim was unfalsifiable . David Jay Brown , who conducted some of the experiments for Sheldrake, states that one of the subjects who was reported as having the highest hit rates was under the influence of the drug MDMA (Ecstasy) during the trials. The Science Delusion , published in the US as Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery , summarises much of Sheldrake's previous work and encapsulates it into
5280-573: The two articles were almost identical, they differed in how they treated Derrida. The English-language article had a list of French intellectuals who were not included in Sokal's and Bricmont's book: "Such well-known thinkers as Althusser , Barthes , and Foucault —who, as readers of the TLS will be well aware, have always had their supporters and detractors on both sides of the Channel—appear in our book only in
5360-441: The world, it will cause plenty of harmless fun." Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home , published in 1999, covers his research into proposed telepathy between humans and animals, particularly dogs. Sheldrake suggests that such interspecies telepathy is a real phenomenon and that morphic fields are responsible for it. The book is in three sections, on telepathy, on sense of direction, including animal migration and
5440-753: Was "at his most incisive" when making a "broad critique of contemporary science" and " scientism ," but on Sheldrake's "own scientific theories" Appleyard noted that "morphic resonance is widely derided and narrowly supported. Most of the experimental evidence is contested, though Sheldrake argues there are 'statistically significant' results." Appleyard called it "highly speculative" and was unsure "whether it makes sense or not." Other reviews were less favourable. New Scientist ' s deputy editor Graham Lawton characterised Science Set Free as "woolly credulousness" and chided Sheldrake for "uncritically embracing all kinds of fringe ideas." A review in Philosophy Now called
5520-403: Was a University of Nottingham -educated pharmacist who ran a chemist's shop on the same road as his parents' wallpaper shop. Sheldrake credits his father (an amateur naturalist and microscopist) with supporting his interests in zoology and botany. Although his parents were Methodists , they sent him to Worksop College , an Anglican boarding school . Sheldrake has said: I went through
5600-736: Was also academic director of the Holistic Learning and Thinking Program until 2012. From September 2005 until 2010, Sheldrake was director of the Perrott–Warrick Project for psychical research for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded from Trinity College, Cambridge. As of 2014, he was a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California and a fellow of Schumacher College in Devon, England . Since 2014, he has been
5680-483: Was at the window for an average of five minutes 30 seconds (55% of the time). Sheldrake interpreted the result as highly significant statistically. He performed 12 more tests, in which the dog's owner travelled home in a taxi or other unfamiliar vehicle at randomly selected times communicated to her by telephone, to rule out the possibility that the dog was reacting to familiar car sounds or routines. He also carried out similar experiments with another dog, Kane, describing
5760-549: Was awarded a fellowship to study the philosophy and history of science at Harvard University . After a year at Harvard, he returned to Cambridge, where he earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1968 for his work in plant development and plant hormones . After obtaining his PhD, Sheldrake became a fellow of Clare College, working in biochemistry and cell biology with funding from the Royal Society Rosenheim Research Fellowship. He investigated auxins ,
5840-589: Was in the process of being retracted when the Wall Street Journal story broke, referred to dog parks as "petri dishes for canine rape culture ". The report also described a paper published in Affilia which contained a reworded excerpt from Mein Kampf . The definition of a 'sting' can also include a researcher failing to pay publication fees. Rupert Sheldrake Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942)
5920-608: Was not serious in his method, but had used the spectacle of a "quick practical joke" to displace the scholarship Derrida believed the public deserved. Sociologist Stephen Hilgartner , chairman of Cornell University 's science and technology studies department, wrote "The Sokal Affair in Context" (1997), comparing Sokal's hoax to "Confirmational Response: Bias Among Social Work Journals" (1990), an article by William M. Epstein published in Science, Technology, & Human Values . Epstein used
6000-464: Was not subjected to the peer-review process expected for science, and suggested that his books were best "ignored." Sheldrake's A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance (1981) proposes that through morphic resonance, various perceived phenomena, particularly biological ones, become more probable the more often they occur, and that biological growth and behaviour thus become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events. As
6080-501: Was quoted in Sokal's paper, was singled out for criticism, particularly in U.S. newspaper coverage of the hoax. One weekly magazine used two images of him, a photo and a caricature , to illustrate a "dossier" on Sokal's paper. Arkady Plotnitsky commented: Even given Derrida's status as an icon of intellectual controversy on the Anglo-American cultural scene, it is remarkable that out of thousands of pages of Derrida's published works,
6160-403: Was reissued in 2011 with those quotes on the front cover, New Scientist remarked, "Back then, Roszak gave Sheldrake the benefit of the doubt. Today, attitudes have hardened and Sheldrake is seen as standing firmly on the wilder shores of science," adding that if New Scientist were to review the reissue, the book's publisher "wouldn't be mining it for promotional purposes." In a 1988 review of
6240-453: Was reviewed by James Lovelock in Nature , who argued that "the theory of formative causation makes testable predictions," noting that "nothing has yet been reported which would divert the mainstream of science. ... Even if it is nonsense ... recognizing the need for fruitful errors, I do not regard the book as dangerous." In 1994, Sheldrake proposed a list of Seven Experiments That Could Change
6320-413: Was written by another student or that it was by a famous academic. He found that students who believed the paper's author was a high-status intellectual rated it better in quality and intelligibility. In October 2021, the scholarly journal Higher Education Quarterly published a bogus article "authored" by "Sage Owens" and "Kal Avers-Lynde III". The initials stand for "Sokal III". The Quarterly retracted
6400-442: Was written by) well-known leftist thinkers. Gross and Levitt had been defenders of the philosophy of scientific realism , opposing postmodernist academics who questioned scientific objectivity . They asserted that anti-intellectual sentiment in liberal arts departments (especially English departments) caused the increase of deconstructionist thought, which eventually resulted in a deconstructionist critique of science. They saw
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