The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the publication's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to learn if such a journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
The article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[3][4] On its date of publication (May 1996), Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article 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".[2]
The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit, or lack thereof, of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was right or wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised the appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article.
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In an interview on the NPR program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. In their book, Gross and Levitt reported an anti-intellectual trend in university liberal arts departments (especially English departments) which had caused them to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of post-modernist deconstructionism.
Higher Superstition argued that in the 1990s, a group of academics whom the authors referred to collectively as "the Academic Left" was dominated by professors who concentrated on racism, sexism, and other perceived prejudices, and that science was eventually included among their targets—later provoking the "Science Wars", which questioned the validity of scientific objectivity. Academic journals in the humanities were publishing articles by writers who, scientists argued, demonstrated little or no knowledge of science. 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."[5]
After analyzing essays from "the academic Left", scientists argued that some of these critical writers were ignorant of the original scientific documents they were criticizing and, therefore, were making a series of nonsensical statements about the nature and intent of science. Gross and Levitt found it especially troubling that academic journals were not judging the intellectual integrity of the scholarship through peer review but were merely judging papers according to their political tilt. Higher Superstition argued that for an article to be published in some academic journals, especially those associated with the humanities, it needed only to display "the proper leftist thought" and to be written by—or to quote—well-known leftist authors.
Thus, Higher Superstition was an attempt to challenge purportedly uncritical subjectivist thought, the validity of which otherwise went largely uncriticized. Moreover, the book served as an argument from scientists that the Science Wars were primarily fought by non-scientists who were pushing contentious claims about the dubiousness of scientific objectivity.
Sokal reasoned that, if the presumption of editorial laziness is correct, the nonsensical content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish it. What would matter would be ideologic obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers, and sufficient quantities of feminist and socialist terminology.
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." Moreover, the article's footnotes contain 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.
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 natural scientist. Later, after Sokal's self-exposure of his pseudoscientific hoax article in the journal Lingua Franca, the Social Text editors explained that they had requested editorial changes that Sokal refused to make,[4] and had had concerns about the quality of the writing. Nonetheless, despite designating the physicist as a "difficult, uncooperative author," and noting that such writers were "well known to journal editors", Social Text published the article in acknowledgment of the author's credentials in the May 1996 Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue.[4]
In 1996, Social Text did not conduct peer review because its editors believed that an editorial open policy would stimulate more original, less conventional research.[4] The editors argued that, in that context, 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 (2002), and other instances of published poor science. After the Sokal Hoax, Social Text established an article peer review process.
In the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies", Sokal revealed that his "Transgressing the Boundaries" was a hoax and concluded that Social Text "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject" because of its ideological proclivities and editorial bias.[2] 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 Sokal of behaving unethically in deceiving them.
In response, Sokal said that their response illustrated the problem he highlighted. Social Text, as an academic journal, 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 appearance of the obscure writing. The editors admitted that was true; they said they considered it poorly written but published it because they felt Sokal was an academic seeking their intellectual affirmation. Sokal stated in his response:
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. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless, or even counterproductive.[4]
In the United States, as the hoax was revealed by Sokal, French philosopher Jacques Derrida was initially one of the favourite targets of discredit, particularly in newspapers coverage.[1] For instance a US weekly magazine used two images of Derrida, a photo and a caricature, to illustrate a "dossier" on the Sokal affair in which Derrida's name didn't appear once.[1]
Asked for a response by daily Le Monde, Derrida said that the aim of the US media was "to discredit what is considered the exorbitant and cumbersome 'credit' of a foreign professor."[1]
Stephen Hilgartner, the Cornell University science and technologies department chairman, wrote "The Sokal Affair in Context" (1997)[7] 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.[8] Epstein used a similar setup to Sokal's: he submitted fictitious articles to real academic journals to measure their response. Though far more methodologically rigorous than Sokal's work, it received scant media attention. Hilgartner thus argued that the intellectual impact of the successful Sokal hoax cannot be attributed to its quality as a "demonstration" but rather to journalistic hyperbole and the anti-intellectual biases of some American journalists.
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 the scandal as a "tempest in a tea cup". The mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg wrote essays meant to discredit the claims of Sokal and his allies,[9] 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 responded to Stolzenberg,[10] denouncing his "tendentious misrepresentations" of their work, and criticizing Stolzenberg's commentary about the Strong programme. In the same issue, Stolzenberg replied, arguing that their critique and allegations of misrepresentation were based upon misreadings. He advised 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".[11]
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; 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 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures Intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, UK: Intellectual Impostures, 1998). The book featured analysis of writing extracts from established intellectuals that contained blatant abuses of 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.
Even though many people found Sokal's hoax convincing, it was a demonstration as opposed to a rigorous scientific study. For this reason, its main hypothesis was later replicated in a controlled experiment by Cornell sociologist Robb Willer, who self-published the results in his homepage; the report was not published by a peer-reviewed journal, which returned it with a "Revise and Resubmit" advice.[12]
Student subjects were randomly separated into treatment and control groups; both groups were presented with copies of Sokal's hoax article. Those in the control condition were led to believe that it was penned by another student; those in the treatment condition were told it was written by a famous academic. The experimenters found that those subjects who believed that the author of the text was a high-status intellectual were significantly more likely to claim that the text was comprehensible, interesting and valuable. The results of the experiment thus suggested that Sokal was correct to claim that academic status may account for the intellectual appeal of unintelligible academic texts.[12]
[...] an unintelligible text [...] evaluated as significantly better [...] The results further suggest that high academic status could lead readers to evaluate an unintelligible text as intelligible. The research offers insights on the social psychological basis of biased evaluations of scholarship and points to one reason why unintelligible texts might be praised in academic discourse.