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Deconstructing the hoax.

Article Excerpt
A review of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, by Alan Sokal. Oxford University Press, 2008. 448 pps., $39.93 ISBN: 978-019-923-920-7

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THE BEAUTY AND POWER OF A well-executed hoax is that it reveals deeper truths not only about both the victims of the hoax and the hoaxers themselves, but about human nature and the foibles of our belief systems.

Decades of careful and extensive research on cognition and the psychology of how beliefs are formed reveals that none of us simply gather facts and draw conclusions from them in an inductive process. What happens is that most of us most of the time arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons that have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our beliefs are shaped by those of our parents, our siblings, our peer groups, our teachers, our mentors, our professional colleagues, and by the culture at large. We form and hold those beliefs because they provide emotional comfort, because they fit well with our life styles or career choices, or because they work within the larger context of our family...

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