Alan Sokal Replies

I’m pleased to have Professor Aronowitz’s confirmation that the editors of Social Text believe in the existence of an external world. But I never thought otherwise. When I asserted in the second paragraph of my parody article that “physical ‘reality’ . . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct,” I wasn’t trying to summarize the editors’ views, but merely to test whether the bald assertion (without evidence or argument) of such an extreme thesis would raise any ...