Sokal affair
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.
In an interview on the U.S. radio program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the bogus article after reading Higher Superstition (1994), in which authors Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt claim that some humanities journals will publish anything as long as it has "the proper leftist thought" and quoted (or was written by) well-known leftist thinkers.
After the article was published and the hoax revealed, he wrote: 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.
(A morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by Rupert Sheldrake in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre New Age idea".
)[2] Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook".
After referring skeptically to the "so-called scientific method", the article declared that "it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical 'reality'" is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct."
[2] In their defense, Social Text's editors said they believed that Sokal's essay "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.
Sokal found further humor in the idea that the article's absurdity was hard to spot: In the second paragraph I declare without the slightest evidence or argument, that "physical 'reality' (note the scare quotes) ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct."
[13] The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology.
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.
In the French, his citation from the original hoax article is said to be an "isolated" instance of abuse,[21] whereas the English text adds a parenthetical remark that Derrida's work contained "no systematic misuse (or indeed attention to) science".
[25] Sociologist Stephen Hilgartner, chairman of Cornell University's science and technology studies department, wrote "The Sokal Affair in Context" (1997),[26] 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.
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.
Hilgartner also argued that Sokal's hoax reinforced the views of well-known pundits such as George Will and Rush Limbaugh, so that his opinions were amplified by media outlets predisposed to agree with his argument.
[32] In October 2021, the scholarly journal Higher Education Quarterly published a bogus article "authored" by "Sage Owens" and "Kal Avers-Lynde III".
