The most obvious solution is to have a physist referee the paper. Publishing a paper they didn't understand and couldn't peer review most definitely suggests a lack of rigor.
On some level given the context of the journal them saying "these known scientists are saying a weird thing which is interesting, even if you ask three other peers in their field think this is entirely bogus and even if it's entirely bogus it's still interesting and basically on the authors reputation if it's really junk".
"No proof is clearly stated or examined, and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician's wand, to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics."
That seems to be exactly what Sokal was parodying.
I have very little time for what the French have been referring to as "philosophy" since roughly 1970. It's a sort of overproof bollocks.
To me, the experience of talking with the true partisans of either the analytic/continental tradition is exhausting and at times absurd. Where else in academia do you have otherwise wonderful scholars being proud of never having read someone?
In my mind continental people are the worst offenders in this, but I guess your helping balance the scales here.
Thankfully, not everyone in the field is like this. Off the top of my head: Graham Priest and Paul Livingston are two guys doing good work to complicate the party lines here.
One thing that cuts through both the divide and the passed time here: it is still quite tough to write on Nietzsche outside of an intro class and get a good grade!
You cannot extrapolate to the field as a whole (at least not from this one example), but as far as the journal itself goes, it's damning evidence that they lacked the intellectual rigor required to talk about those topics (at least at that time, I have no idea if the journal still exists and has changed its ways).
The editors don't need to be experts in every field, but they need to be able to admit that they lack the required experience and understanding to verify a paper's legitimacy. They could've reached out to a physicist before publication, but decided not to because the author was a big name in his field.
This raises the question of what other nonsense papers the journal has published that made it into publication simply because the editors didn't understand what the paper was saying.
In the context of the "science wars", this isn't saying much, because many publications of exact sciences have fallen for hoax papers before. SCIgen has been used to generate over 120 published papers (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763), since retracted; 16 of those were published by Springer, and the rest by the IEEE. This could just be a computer science issue, but I have no doubt that other exact sciences could fall for the same computer-generated nonsense had SCIgen supported generating papers about physics, chemistry, or maths (even before the age of ChatGPT).
The unfortunate reality is that many major fields and publications are susceptible to this nonsense. This is no doubt a result of the profit-oriented scientific publication industry, which prioritizes making money over finding scientific truth, with many publishers relying on volunteers to check the accuracy of papers published.
I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour.
I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work.
The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.
When people say “trust the science” this must be what they’re referring to.
Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.
My suspicion is that most people who don't like philosophy have lots of philosophical ideas - they are just really dogmatic about them and don't like to be challenged.
Philosophy is like maths. You can build a lot of bridges with a crummy understanding of maths. The Romans did it with the most pathological notation for numbers imaginable, and lacking all sorts of basic mathematical concepts. So you can say all that maths stuff is just nonsense and you can do it all by these seventeen-hundred ambiguous rules of thumb you really carefully follow. It's just you're not actually avoiding maths - you're just doing it in a really ad-hoc, inflexible, and inelegant manner. That's what people are doing when they say philosophy is a load of bunk but they still believe a whole load of things about the universe.
Philosophy is absolutely nothing like math. Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities. Changing how you interpret math doesn’t change the physical world. Philosophers do what is equivalent of arguing that prime numbers aren’t real because base 10 is arbitrary. Philosophers have proven nothing about the universe, those are the contributions of physics. The things philosophers discuss about the universe is more akin to religion and mythology. You, again, keep trying to take credit for the work of other fields.
That's just wildly wrong. I think you should probably just try to deepen your understanding of fields you're interested in, and leave your prejudices at the door.
Here's a paper by Tarski, widely cited by both mathematicians and philosophers and containing both formal and informal reasoning: http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/R... I don't know how one could "remove the philosophy" from this work without making it far less useful to mathematicians. The entire reason the T-schema is used in model theory is because of Tarski's philosophical argument that it provides a meaningful definition of truth.
I'm not clear on whether you think The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages falls into the "actually just mathematics" category or the "making up random equations" category. If the latter, I assure you that Tarski's proofs are sound. Here's a simple explanation of the most famous result from the paper in case you found the original proof inaccessible: https://qubd.github.io/files/TarskiUndefinability.pdf. A more general discussion of Tarski's work and other axiomatic theories of truth can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Mathematics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/
The proofs are math. We've already established that math is sound. This discussion is not about the merits of math, we're talking about philosophy. Things like "The transfer of understanding from one person to another is not automatic. It is hard and tricky. Therefore, to analyze human understanding of mathematics, it is important to consider who understands what, and when." are philosophy. It's not difficult to separate, you're just trying to make it seem like it is to blur the lines between a pseudoscience and actual science. Again, disguising worthless philosophical ramblings with mathematics doesn't make your philosophy any more useful.
The passages that you describe as "worthless philosophical ramblings" are part of Tarski's results. He could not have left them out without obscuring the meaning of his proofs. Possibly model theory would not exist today had he done so. It would certainly have taken longer to develop.
Another instructive example is Per Martin-Lof's lectures On the Meanings of the Logical Constants and the Justifications of the Logical Laws: https://www.ae-info.org/attach/User/Martin-L%c3%b6f_Per/Othe.... Unlike Tarski's paper, this contains no formal proofs whatsoever; if the sentence you quote is worthless, then I imagine "There is no evidence outside our actual or possible experience of it. The notion of evidence is by its very nature subject related, relative to the knowing subject, that is, in Kantian terminology." is worse than worthless. Nevertheless these lectures have been of great importance in logic and computer science. You can see some of their impact in the citations here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2483744927635326348
You may be unable to find any useful meaning in this kind of writing, but most mathematicians do not share your difficulty. This is fortunate, since the field would be greatly impoverished if it purged itself of all philosophy and philosophy-adjacent work. I would normally encourage you to read https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-... on the role of non-rigorous big picture thinking in mathematics, but it deals entirely with human understanding of mathematics and is therefore only of interest to Terence Tao and other such pseudoscientists.