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The Public Sphere


Oct 19, 2018

Pete and Luke are talking about the new Sokal Hoax, academic authority, and the economic context.

This new controversy was perpetrated by three scholars: James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. They wrote 20 fake papers in the style of cultural studies but with invented data or ostensibly ridiculous claims, as one title states: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct." They targeted gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. The hoaxers claim that because 7 of 20 papers were published in important academic journals—for the most part they were actually marginal publications—journals, it proves that the intellectual bankruptcy of academic identity studies.

 

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