Sokal affair: Difference between revisions

The Sokal Affair (also Sokal’s Hoax) was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Prof. Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal dedicated to postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment testing the magazine’s editorial practice of intellectual rigor, to learn if an academic journal, would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”^[1]

The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct; it was published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. At that time, the journal did not practice peer review fact-checking, and did not submit the article for outside expert review, by a physicist. ^[2][3] On publication day, in May 1996, in the journal Lingua Franca, Sokal revealed that “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was a hoax, identifying it as “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics, he] could find about mathematics and physics”.

The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit, or lack thereof, of sociologic commentary about the physical sciences; the social disciplines influenced by postmodern philosophy, in general; academic ethics — including if Prof. Sokal was wrong in deceiving the editors and readers of Social Text; and if the journal had exercised the appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.

In an interview, on the National Public Radio program All Things Considered, New York University Prof. Alan Sokal said he was inspired to conduct his 1996 intellectual rigor experiment after reading Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, wherein they report an anti-intellectual trend in university liberal arts departments, especially in English departments, to become dominated by a “trendy” branch of post-modernist deconstructionism.

Higher Superstition reports that in the 1990s, the academic left-wing was dominated by professors concentrating upon racism and sexism, and other prejudices. Science was among the targets of this criticism that provoked the Science Wars questioning the validity of scientific objectivity. Academic humanities journals were publishing articles by extremely critical writers who demonstrated little or no knowledge of the science criticized; per the Introduction: “A curious fact about the recent left-critique of science is the degree to which its instigators have overcome their former timidity, of indifference towards the subject, not by studying it in detail, but rather by creating a repertoire of rationalizations for avoiding such study.”^[4]

Analyses of essays from the academic left wing, revealed writers ignorant of the (original) scientific documents they were criticizing, resulting in a series of nonsense statements about the nature and intent of science. Especially troubling was that academic journals were not judging the intellectual integrity of the scholarship by peer review, but by its political tilt. Higher Superstition reports that for some academic journals to publish an article, especially a humanities articles, it needed only to display “the proper leftist thought”, and be written by, or quote, well-known leftist authors.^{[citation needed]}

The purpose of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science was criticism of uncritical subjectivist thought, the intellectual rigor of which went unchallenged in its fields. Moreover, the book was an academic public notice that the Science Wars were primarily fought by laymen, by non-scientists publishing contentious claims about the dubiousness of scientific objectivity.

Prof. Sokal’s intellectual rigor experiment tested Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition proposals by publishing a pseudoscientific article in Social Text, a prime academic journal specialising in deconstruction. If his presumption of editorial intellectual laziness were correct, the (nonsense) content of the article would be irrelevant to whether or not the editors would publish it; what would matter would be ideologic obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers, and proportionate quantities of feminist and socialist thought.

Sokal wrote “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, an article proposing that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that the “morphogenetic field” (a New Age concept by Rupert Sheldrake) could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. He concluded that, since “physical reality” is, at bottom, a social and linguistic construct . . . a “liberatory science” and an “emancipatory mathematics”, spurning “the elite caste canon of ‘high science’ ”, must be established for a “postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project.”

Prof. Sokal submitted the article to Social Text, whose editors were collecting articles for the Science Wars issue; “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was the only article submitted by a “real scientist”, physicist Alan Sokal. Later, after Sokal’s self-exposure of his pseudoscientific hoax article in the journal Lingua Franca, the Social Text editors defended themselves by reporting that they had had concerns about the quality of the writing, and had requested editorial changes that Prof. Sokal refused. Nonetheless, despite considering the physicist an exemplar “difficult, uncooperative author”, and noting that such writers were “well known to journal editors”, Social Text published “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in the May 1996 Spring/Summer “Science Wars” issue.^[3] Moreover, the article’s footnotes contain more obvious (to mathematicians) jokes, such as:

Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and ‘pro-choice’, so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice.

In the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies”, Prof. Sokal revealed that his article “Transgressing the Boundaries” was a parody and a hoax, and concluded that Social Text, as an academic journal, ignored intellectual rigor and “felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject.” ^[5] In their defense, the Social Text editors said they believed that “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, “was the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field” and that “its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document.”^[6] Besides criticizing his writing style, the Social Text editors accused Prof. Sokal of behaving unethically in having deceived them.

In response, Sokal said that their response illustrated the problem he demonstrated; as an academic journal, Social Text published the article not because it was faithful, true, and accurate to its quantum gravity subject, but because an “Academic Authority” had written it, and because of the sound of the obscure writing. Defensively, the editors admitted that, yet said they thought it a poorly-written article, but published it because they felt he was an academic seeking their intellectual affirmation.

My goal isn’t to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we’ll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. . . . There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. [The] sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless, or even counterproductive.^{[This quote needs a citation]}

Intellectual impostures — In 1997, Prof. Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures Intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, UK: Intellectual Impostures, 1998), analyses of writing extracts by established intellectuals, containing blatant abuses of scientific terminology, and concluded with a critical summary of postmodernism, and criticism of the Strong programme of social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

In 2006, in the article “Experiments with Interactional Expertise”, published in Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, the social scientist Harry Collins reported a quantitative experiment to determine if he could successfully pose as a physicist.^[7] Based on short questions and answers, not every physicist could distinguish his social science writings from those of real physicists.

Science war commentary — In spring of 1997, the postmodern philosopher Fred Newman responded to the Sokal Affair publishing hoax in the paper “Science Can Do Better than Sokal: A commentary on the So-called Science Wars”, which he presented at the Postmodernism and the Social Sciences conference at the New School for Social Research; Prof. Alan Sokal was a participant. Newman calls for the union of science and postmodernism — proposing that postmodernism is not a critique of science, per se, but of the inappropriate application of the scientific paradigm to psychology.

In context — Stephen Hilgartner, the Cornell University science and technologies department chairman, wrote “The Sokal Affair in Context” (1997)^[8] comparing Prof. Sokal’s parody-article hoax to “Confirmational Response: Bias Among Social Work Journals” (1990), an article published in Science, Technology, & Human Values, reporting an experiment by William M. Epstein.^[9] He formulated an intellectual-bias hypothesis, tested 146 social work journals, used two versions of the report (one positive, one negative), randomly assigned a version to each journal (74 positive, 72 negative), and performed statistical and qualitative analysis of the results. For not obtaining the informed consent of his experimental subjects, Epstein was accused of behaving unethically; an academic ethics panel investigated him. He encountered much difficulty in being published, and received little publicity.

In contrast, “Sokal’s Hoax”, an intellectual rigor experiment, was not science, yet effected a greater academic and public impact. Hilgartner said that the intellectual impact of the successful Sokal hoax cannot be be attributed to its quality as a “demonstration”, but that it stemmed from journalistic hyperbole and from the anti-intellectual biases of some American journalists.

In public — The Sokal Affair scandal extended from academia to the public press. The anthropologist Bruno Latour, criticized in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1998), described it as a “tempest in a tea cup”. The mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg, wrote essays meant to discredit the claims of Sokal and his allies,^[10] arguing that Sokal and allies insufficiently grasped the philosophy they are criticizing, hence rendering their criticism meaningless. In the Social Studies of Science journal, Bricmont and Sokal replied to Stolzenberg, ^[11] indicating that what they claimed were “tendentious misrepresentations” of their work, and criticized Stolzenberg’s commentary about the Strong programme. Like-wise, in the same issue, Stolzenberg riposted, arguing that their critique, and allegations of misrepresentation, were based upon misreadings, advising readers to slowly and skeptically examine the arguments proposed by each party, bearing in mind the dictum that “the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true”.^[12]

Peer review — The controversial Sokal Affair parody-article hoax compelled Social Text magazine to establish an article peer review process; in 1996, it did not practice peer review fact-checking, because the editors believed that an editorial open policy would stimulate more original, less conventional, research.^[3] The editors argued that, in said context, Prof. Alan Sokal’s article, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, was a fraudulent betrayal of their trust. Moreover, they further argued that scientific peer review does not necessarily detect intellectual fraud, viz. the later Schön scandal (2002), the Bogdanov Affair (202), and other instances of published poor science.

• SCIgen program: a paper randomly generated by the SCIgen program was accepted without peer-review for presentation at the 2005 World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). The conference announced the prank of having accepted the article as not peer reviewed, despite none of the three assigned peer-reviewers having submitted an opinion about its fidelity, veracity, and accuracy to its subject. The three MIT graduate students who wrote the hoax article said they were ignorant of the Sokal Affair until after submitting their article.
• Bogdanov Affair: about theoretical physics, called a reverse-Sokal controversy.
• Jan Hendrik Schön: published 28 fraudulent papers in Nature, Science, and the Physical Review, which were logically consistent with the fabricated data.
• Rosenhan experiment: the admission of healthy pseudo-patients to twelve psychiatric hospitals.
• The Report From Iron Mountain: a hoax government think tank report.
• Project Alpha: a hoax by James Randi perpetrated upon a psychic foundation.
• Atlanta Nights: a hoax, by a group of professional authors, perpetrated upon a vanity press.
• Ern Malley: a modernist poetry hoax.
• Disumbrationism: a modern art hoax.
• Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments: a modernist poetry hoax.
• Nat Tate: a 1998 art world hoax, by William Boyd.

• Chomskybot, a computer program that generates nonsense text resembling the writing of Noam Chomsky.
• Continuity thesis
• False document
• Fashionable Nonsense — Sokal and Bricmont demonstrate the misuse of science and mathematics in giving authority to intellectually vacuous postmodern philosophic writings; a chapter explains the Sokal Affair parody-article hoax.
• Fictitious entry
• Journal club — a forum for peer review, “after the ink is dry”.
• Journal of Irreproducible Results
• Obscurantism
• On Bullshit
• Paradelle — Poet Billy Collins’s invented poetic form, published with fraudulent “historical” footnotes, in the Phi Beta Kappa journal The American Scholar, irking some scholars, and inspiring some poets to assume the paradelle as a poetic form; not all were in on the joke.
• “Politics and the English Language” (1946), by George Orwell, criticizing the use of verbose language in contemporary political British writing.
• Science wars — an entry with more information about the Sokal Affair hoax.

• How to Deconstruct Almost Anything — early hoax from 1991 at the International Conference on Cyberspace.
• 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)
• Sokal Affair quotes
• Sokal's response to the editors
• A discussion by Richard Dawkins of nonsense in post-modernist literature
• the new site for Andrew Bulkan's Postmodernism Generator mentioned in Richard Dawkins' article above
• Gabriel Stolzenberg's collected essays on this and related topics
• The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?
• The 2005 Metaphysics of Quality conference hoax