You’re saying that Sokal’s research wasn’t like a paper with forged data, it was more like a paper with nonsensical logic. And so the editors should have caught it and rejected it.

Like the old joke about the biologist who trains an insect to jump on an auditory signal, and then pulls its legs off two at a time, and when the insect has no legs left it stop jumping. And the researcher concludes that insects have their ears in their legs.

But—how much should we give Sokal the benefit of the doubt? Would he stoop to writing a paper that actually did make sense in pomo terms, and then later publicly claim that it was entirely garbage? He was making a hostile attack, would he go that far?

If he did that, then a pomo editor could declare that the author of a work is not the final authority on what it means and it did in fact mean something that looked like it was worth publishing. But outside his own discipline that would get guffaws.

To test that, you’d have to learn enough about the pomo stuff to tell whether Sokal’s paper made sense in those terms, and then see whether you could make sense of it. A lot of work for a small reward.

The difference would be that in this example he is just lying, but lying about something no one else can know about (which would be fraud). Sokal was rather writing things that were just meaningless or obviously false (which would just be bad scholarship if he’d meant it). Perhaps a more relevant comparison is the claims made in something like Medical Hypotheses (not a peer reviewed journal) about what the scientific evidence shows (when normally it shows no such thing).

Here’s one that I think is supposed to be a piss take: “Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia?”

And one that is more seriously intended: “If Schizophrenia is enantiomorphism, is light the morphogen?”

In later decades Onsager and Kolmogorov developed these ideas, and they became familiar within specialized areas of physics and math, but the repercussions in the area of general science were few. (Contrast the repercussions of relativity or quantum theory). Only in the sixties or so, with the rise of chaos theory and fractal geometry, did specialists in other fields start to pay attention.

If I am not mistaken, large areas of economics (specifically, Econ 101 taught to hundreds of thousands of students every year) still have not taken these results into accounts, and are teaching things that are almost certainly false.”

I’m sorry but I don’t buy this. I think the phenomenon you describe is real, but this is a lousy example.

There are places where sensitive dependence on initial conditions matters, and places where it does not. If you are doing celestial dynamics it matters; if you are doing statistical mechanics it doesn’t. Likewise if you are forecasting weather it matters; if you are forecasting climate it may not. It all depends on the details.

If pressed, I expect most economists would consider what they do to be a whole lot closer to stat mech or climate prediction than celestial dynamics or weather prediction.

Do you actually have a concrete example of where the situation you describe has occurred—- where economists created a model with sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and then treat the individual predictions of the model as having specific validity, rather than looking at the pattern of the results generated and extracting value from that overall pattern?

This whole comment was very nicely put, Keith. I’d add just one thing which is that what is especially frustrating to people who know about these items technically is not simply that they are evoked as metaphors, but that they are evoked as metaphors INCORRECTLY.

For example Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, correctly understood, is not a statement about EPISTEMOLOGY, it is a statement about ONTOLOGY. It is not saying we cannot know certain things about the universe, it is saying that the universe is not made of the constituents that it was thought to be made of.

(And for the cognoscenti:
yeah, Heisenberg and Bohr and the rest of that crowd thought they WERE making statements about epistemology. That doesn’t change the fact that they were wrong. It was the 1920s for gods sake, 80 years ago, and some of us have moved on since then, even if the average pop physics book and intro textbook has not.)

Was it a peer-reviewed journal?

There’s a place for journals that aren’t peer-reviewed—like you can usually publish in them faster, which makes a big difference if you’re concerned somebody else might publish similar results before you. But I don’t expect them to do a good job of critiquing research.

I haven’t read the details about Sokal’s scam. But I can imagine similar things that I wouldn’t be impressed by. Say some pomo guy sends a paper to a psychology journal. He announces the experiment he’s done about people doing eye twitches when they’re lying. He gets some sort of more=or-less-boring result and he claims his results are significant at the 0.01 level and so on. And after it’s published in a journal that isn’t peer-reviewed, he announces that the whole thing was a hoax. He made it all up and he just copied the statistical results out of other published papers, his statistics were all garbage but nobody noticed.

Would you suppose from that, that the field of statistics is all garbage and also the field of psychology? Professional statisticians have told me that 90% or more of published papers in psychology have serious flaws in their statistics, but….

no, I don’t think it can actually be taken for granted that when we find out what it is that the excess mass is attributable to, that it’s going to be similar enough to the other things we call matter that we’re going to say that “it’s a type of matter”.

@101
“Both ideas have taken root because they make sense in such a wide range of contexts…”
This is more true of dark matter than dark energy. I think it is important to stress the differences between them, especially for the public. Both the measurements and the theory behind dark energy are a lot more tenuous.