Some people use this whole incident, which was an important one, as a support for arguments that attempt to diminish the importance of the humanities, or tout how 'the sciences' are superior. While I appreciate what Sokal did, I think it leads many people to draw hasty and value-laden conclusions which are otherwise unwarranted.<p>If anything the whole experiment points to the incommensurate nature (Kuhn) of discourses and the multiple levels at which degrees of incommensurability can occur.<p>The trendy and monistic nature of postmodern theories in the humanities is not an issue that has been ignored within the humanities either, and furthermore the problems of jargon, sycophantic behavior, and dogmatism that arise in the application of postmodern theory are problems for (ostensibly) <i>all</i> theories. A literary theorist from Yale, Quigley, has an excellent book on this subject and attempts to offer some means of resolution to the issues (see: Quigley <i>Theoretical Inquiry</i>).<p>The sciences are slightly more immune because while they diverge they have a shared ancestry and methodological base in mathematics (or, if you would, the 'scientific method' which is a highly problematic, over-general, and reductive term).<p>The sciences are also plagued with issues in academia. For instance, negative results, which are instrumentally important to the progression of science as conceived in our current model of what constitutes the scientific, are pretty much completely dissuaded and suppressed by the current academic apparatus--positive discoveries, not elimination of hypotheses, are sexy--that's what pulls in the money, that's what people want to read, but negative results that help us further narrow the field of inquiry are just as important, if not more so.<p>I think the whole Sokal thing was important--but I always think it's necessary to bear the banner for the humanities to an extent when this is brought up, as its easy to fall into notions that the humanities as an entire field of inquiry is sort of baloney or shaky or unstable. It definitely <i>is</i> unstable--but that doesn't make it worthless or unimportant...I think postmodernist theories and their application will probably go down in history as an important transitional period away from structuralism and other forms of analysis, but it's incredibly clear that they are not very sustainable means of inquiry going forward.