The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the journal's Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review at the time, so it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.

Gross and Levitt had been defenders of the philosophy of scientific realism, opposing postmodernist academics who questioned scientific objectivity. They asserted that anti-intellectual sentiment in liberal arts departments (especially English departments) caused the increase of deconstructionist thought, which eventually resulted in a deconstructionist critique of science. They saw the critique as a "repertoire of rationalizations" for avoiding the study of science.

Article

Sokal reasoned that if the presumption of editorial laziness was correct, the nonsensical content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish it. What would matter would be ideological obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers, and sufficient quantities of the appropriate jargon. After the article was published and the hoax revealed, he wrote:

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The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.

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Content of the article

"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" Later, after Sokal revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, Social Text editors wrote that they had requested editorial changes that Sokal refused to make, Still, despite calling Sokal a "difficult, uncooperative author", and noting that such writers were "well known to journal editors", based on Sokal's credentials Social Text published the article in the May 1996 Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue. Besides criticizing his writing style, Social Text editors accused Sokal of behaving unethically in deceiving them.

Book by Sokal and Bricmont

In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles (published in the US as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science and in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, 1998). The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology. It closed with a critical summary of postmodernism and criticism of the strong programme of social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

In 2008, Sokal published a followup book, Beyond the Hoax, which revisited the history of the hoax and discussed its lasting implications.

Jacques Derrida

The French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose 1966 statement about Einstein's theory of relativity was quoted in Sokal's paper, was singled out for criticism, particularly in U.S. newspaper coverage of the hoax. One weekly magazine used two images of him, a photo and a caricature, to illustrate a "dossier" on Sokal's paper. and one in French in ' on October 18–19, 1997, but while the two articles were almost identical, they differed in how they treated Derrida.

The English-language article had a list of French intellectuals who were not included in Sokal's and Bricmont's book: "Such well-known thinkers as Althusser, Barthes, and Foucault—who, as readers of the TLS will be well aware, have always had their supporters and detractors on both sides of the Channel—appear in our book only in a minor role, as cheerleaders for the texts we criticize." The French-language list, however, included Derrida: "" ("Famous thinkers such as Althusser, Barthes, Derrida and Foucault are essentially absent from our book").

According to Brian Reilly, Derrida may also have been sensitive to another difference between the French and English versions of Impostures intellectuelles. In the French, his citation from the original hoax article is said to be an "isolated" instance of abuse, whereas the English text adds a parenthetical remark that Derrida's work contained "no systematic misuse (or indeed attention to) science".

Sokal and Bricmont insisted that the difference between the articles was "banal". Nevertheless, Derrida concluded that Sokal was not serious in his method, but had used the spectacle of a "quick practical joke" to displace the scholarship Derrida believed the public deserved.

Criticism of social sciences

Sociologist Stephen Hilgartner, chairman of Cornell University's science and technology studies department, wrote "The Sokal Affair in Context" (1997), comparing Sokal's hoax to "Confirmational Response: Bias Among Social Work Journals" (1990), an article by William M. Epstein published in Science, Technology, & Human Values. Epstein used a similar method to Sokal's, submitting fictitious articles to real academic journals to measure their response. Though much more systematic than Sokal's work, it received scant media attention. Hilgartner argued that the "asymmetric" effect of the successful Sokal hoax compared with Epstein's experiment cannot be attributed to its quality, but that "[t]hrough a mechanism that resembles confirmatory bias, audiences may apply less stringent standards of evidence and ethics to attacks on targets that they are predisposed to regard unfavorably."

The Sokal Affair extended from academia to the public press. Anthropologist Bruno Latour, who was criticized in Fashionable Nonsense, described the scandal as a "tempest in a teacup". Retired Northeastern University mathematician and social scientist Gabriel Stolzenberg wrote essays criticizing the statements of Sokal and his allies, arguing that they insufficiently grasped the philosophy they criticized, rendering their criticism meaningless. In Social Studies of Science, Bricmont and Sokal responded to Stolzenberg, denouncing his representations of their work and criticizing his commentary about the "strong programme" of the sociology of science. Stolzenberg replied in the same issue that their critique and allegations of misrepresentation were based on misreadings. He advised readers to slowly and skeptically examine the arguments of each party, bearing in mind that "the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true". In her 1998 article "The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?", philosopher of science Mara Beller compared the "awe" physicists feel for Bohr's obscurity to their "contempt" for Derrida's density.

Influence

Sociological follow-up study

In 2009, Cornell sociologist Robb Willer performed an experiment in which undergraduate students read Sokal's paper and were told either that it was written by another student or that it was by a famous academic. He found that students who believed the paper's author was a high-status intellectual rated it better in quality and intelligibility.

Sokal III

In October 2021, the scholarly journal Higher Education Quarterly published a bogus article "authored" by "Sage Owens" and "Kal Avers-Lynde III". The initials stand for "Sokal III". The Quarterly retracted the article.

See also

  • Science wars
  • Academese
  • , sometimes referred to as a reverse Sokal hoax
  • , a software developer known for his early hoax involving postmodern deconstruction at the 2nd International Conference on Cyberspace in 1991
  • , an actor gave a lecture to a group of experts with almost no content but was praised
  • The Ern Malley affair, Australia's most infamous literary hoax
  • , a program that produces imitations of postmodernist writing
  • , also called "Sokal Squared"

References

Citations

Bibliography

  • – English translation.

Further reading

  • Alan Sokal Articles on the Social Text Affair Alan Sokal's own page with very extensive links; includes the original article
  • Original hoax article (HTML)