Sokal affair

The Sokal affair (also Sokal's hoax) was an experiment by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of the postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press).

In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal's words: "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

The paper, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics.

The resulting debate focused on the relative scholarly merits or lack thereof of sociological commentary on the physical sciences and of postmodern-influenced sociological disciplines in general, as well as on academic ethics, including both whether it was appropriate for Sokal to deliberately mislead an academic journal, as well as whether Social Text took appropriate precautions in publishing the paper.

Background

In an interview with National Public Radio's All Things Considered Alan Sokal said that he was inspired to conduct his "experiment" after reading Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. The book discusses what the authors believed was a disturbing trend in university liberal arts departments, especially English, to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of postmodernist deconstructionist thought.

In the 1990s, according to Higher Superstition, the "academic left" was dominated by professors focusing on racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice. Science was among the targets of this critique, sparking what became known as the "science wars". According to Gross and Levitt, academic journals in the humanities were increasingly publishing articles in which authors were extremely critical of science, even though they demonstrated little or no knowledge of science. As Gross and Levitt state in their 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."

Higher Superstition selected a number of essays by members of the academic left who seemed not to understand the original scientific documents they were critiquing. The result, according to Gross and Levitt, was a series of non-sensical statements. What they found especially troubling was that academic journals were not judging scholarship by its intellectual quality, but instead by its political leanings. Gross and Levitt maintained that academic articles in the humanities needed only display the proper leftist thought and be written by, or quote, well-known leftist authors to be published.

Gross and Levitt's stated aim was not to critique postmodern thought itself, but to expose the particular brand of fuzzy-headed thinking that went unchallenged in the field. Furthermore, they wanted to expose the fact that the "science wars" were being waged primarily by non-scientists. The one-sided debate, in their view, was going largely unchallenged in spite of highly contentious claims.

Paper

Sokal's "experiment" directly tested Gross and Levitt's claims by attempting to get a paper published in a top deconstructionist journal. If they were correct, the content of the paper would not matter and could be filled with complete nonsense; what would matter would be fawning references to other deconstructionist authors and the proper amount of feminist and socialist thought.

Sokal produced a paper that argued that quantum gravity has progressive political implications, and that Rupert Sheldrake's New Age concept of the "morphogenetic field" could be a cutting-edge theory of quantum gravity. It concludes that, since "physical 'reality' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct", a "liberatory science" and "emancipatory mathematics" must be developed that spurn "the elite caste canon of 'high science'" for a "postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project".

Footnotes contain more obvious (to mathematicians) jokes, such as one that comments:

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 paper to the journal Social Text. Its editors were collecting papers for an upcoming issue dedicated to the science wars, and his was the only article submitted by a "real scientist". The editors later said they had a number of concerns about the quality of the writing, and requested changes which Sokal refused. They decided to publish it anyway, considering Sokal to be an example of a "difficult, uncooperative author," noting these were "well known to journal editors". The "Science Wars" issue was published in May 1996.

Fallout

In Lingua Franca, Sokal pointed out the absurdity of his paper, and concluded that the journal ignored intellectual rigor and "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject."

In their defense, the editors of Social Text stated that they believed that the article "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." After criticizing his writing, they charged Sokal with unethical behavior by trying to "trick" the editors.

Sokal argued that their response illustrated the problem he hoped to demonstrate; the journal published the article not on the basis of whether it was correct or made sense, but simply because of who wrote it and how it sounded. The editors admitted this in their response, stating that they thought it was a bad article, but published it anyway because they felt he was seeking affirmation from them.

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.

In 1998, Sokal co-authored Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (originally published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in English outside the U.S. as Intellectual Imposters) with Jean Bricmont. The book contains a long list of extracts of writings from well-known intellectuals containing what Sokal and Bricmont characterize as blatant abuses of scientific terminology. Finally, Sokal and Bricmont give a critical summary of postmodernism and finish by criticizing the strong program of social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Postmodern philosopher Fred Newman responded to the Sokal affair in his paper "Science Can Do Better than Sokal: A commentary on the So-called Science Wars," presented at a conference in Spring 1997 on Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, at the New School for Social Research, where Sokal was a participant. Newman calls for a coming together of science and postmodernism—arguing that postmodernism is not a critique of science, per se, but of the inappropriate application of the scientific paradigm to psychology.

The affair spilled out of academia and into the mainstream press, and commentators are divided on the level of its consequences. Anthropologist Bruno Latour, one of those singled out by Sokal in his later book, has described the whole affair as a "tempest in a tea cup." Mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg, however, has written a number of essays with the stated purpose of debunking the claims made by Sokal and his allies. He argues that Sokal and company do not possess a sufficient understanding of the philosophical positions that they criticize and that this lack of understanding renders their criticisms meaningless. Bricmont and Sokal replied to Stolzenberg in the journal Social Studies of Science, pointing out what they claimed were "tendentious misrepresentations" of their work and critiquing Stolzenberg's commentary on the strong program. Stolzenberg replied in the same issue, arguing that both the critique and the allegations of misrepresentation were based on misreadings. He advised readers to examine the arguments on each side slowly and skeptically, bearing in mind the dictum that the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true.

The controversy also had implications for peer review, at least as far as Social Text was concerned. At the time of Sokal's hoax, Social Text was not a peer-reviewed journal; its editors believed that a more open editorial policy would promote more original, less conventional research. Social Text's editors argue that, in this context, Sokal's work was a deliberate fraud and betrayal of that trust. They further note that scientific peer review does not necessarily detect fraud either, in light of the later Schön scandal, Bogdanov Affair, and other instances of poor science achieving publication.

In 2006 social scientist Harry Collins reported a quantitative experiment examining whether he could pass as a physicist. Based on short questions and answers, not all physicists were able to distinguish the social scientist's writings from those of real physicists.

Similar affairs

• SCIgen program: In an event which has been compared to the Sokal affair, a paper randomly generated by the SCIgen program was accepted as a non-peer-reviewed paper for presentation at the 2005 World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI). The conference announced the prank article's non-reviewed acceptance even though none of the article's three assigned reviewers had submitted a response. The three MIT graduate students responsible for the hoax said they were unaware of the Sokal affair until after they had submitted the article.
• Bogdanov Affair: an event in theoretical physics once called a reverse-Sokal controversy.
• Jan Hendrik Schön: published not one but 28 papers in Nature, Science and Physical Review that were pure frauds, although they were logical and consistent with the data he fabricated.
• Rosenhan experiment: involving the admission of healthy 'pseudopatients' to twelve psychiatric hospitals.
• The Report From Iron Mountain: a hoax report purportedly leaked from a government think tank.
• Project Alpha: hoax by James Randi on a psychic foundation.
• Atlanta Nights: a similar hoax by a group of pro authors on a vanity press.
• Ern Malley: a similar hoax involving modernist poetry.
• Disumbrationism: a similar hoax involving modern art.
• Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments: another hoax involving modernist poetry.
• Nat Tate: a hoax on the art world by William Boyd in 1998.
• At Face Value: a book by Donald Akenson suggesting that Canadian MP John White was actually Eliza McCormack White, John White's sister, and thus the first woman elected to the House of Commons. The book was a hoax and transparently based on Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.

See also

• Chomskybot, a computer program that generates text that has apparent similarity to Noam Chomsky's output and is similarly devoid of meaning.
• Continuity thesis
• False document
• Fashionable Nonsense - Sokal and Bricmont's book which demonstrated the (in their view) misuse of science and mathematics as used to give an authoritative gloss to otherwise empty postmodern writings, and devoted a chapter to explaining the hoax.
• Fictitious entry
• Journal club — a forum for peer review "after the ink is dry"
• Journal of Irreproducible Results
• Obscurantism
• Paradelle - Poet Billy Collins invented a poetic "form" and published it (along with bogus "historical" footnotes) in Phi Beta Kappa's journal The American Scholar, infuriating some scholars (and inspiring some poets to take up the paradelle as a form, whether or not they were in on the joke)
• Politics and the English Language — George Orwell's 1946 essay criticizing the use of bloated and verbose language in contemporary English writing
• Science wars — an entry with more information about the Sokal hoax
• Style over substance fallacy

References

Bibliography

• Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-8018-4766-4
• Ross, Andrew, ed. Science Wars. Duke University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-8223-1881-4.
• Sokal, Alan D. and Bricmont, Jean. Impostures Intellectuelles. Editions Odile Jacob, 1997.
• Sokal, Alan D. and Bricmont, Jean. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. Picador USA: New York, 1998. ISBN 0-312-19545-1
• Editors of Lingua Franca. The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. ISBN 0-8032-7995-7
• Callon, Michel 1999 "Whose Impostures? Physicists at War with the Third Person", Social Studies of Science 29(2): 261-86.

External links

• 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