-
When scientific research is increasingly funded by private corporations that have a financial interest in particular outcomes of that research—is the drug effective or not?—scientific objectivity is undermined. When universities are more interested in patent royalties than in the open sharing of scientific information, the public suffers. 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.[
Alan Sokal -
Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
Alan Sokal
-
The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.
Alan Sokal -
A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.
Alan Sokal -
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).
Alan Sokal -
And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.
Alan Sokal