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The Sokal Affair was a famous hoax played by physicist Alan Sokal on the postmodernist humanities academics world.
In 1996 Professor Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a deliberately pseudoscientific paper for publication in a post-modernist academic journal of cultural studies. The paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, was submitted to see if an academic journal 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."
On the precise day of publication in Social Text, Sokal announced in another journal that the article had, in fact, been a hoax. This caused an academic scandal, both at Duke University (where Social Text is published) and for Sokal himself, as charges of unethical behaviour were levelled.
The article contains a number of statements that Sokal stated were "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense." At one stage he asserts that "physical reality is at bottom nothing more than a social and linguistic construct," and at another he proposes that the New Age concept of the morphogenetic field actually constitutes a "cutting edge theory of quantum gravity." As further evidence of deliberate fabrications, Sokal also cited his proposition that "the axiom of equality in mathematical set theory is analogous to the homonymous concept in feminist politics," in other words, that a mathematical equality such as "2 + 3 = 5" is analogous to "equality" in the statement "men and women are equal."
By his use of parody in statements like "mathematics has 'nineteenth-century liberal origins'" and "the gravitational constant of Newton is mired in 'ineluctable historicity'", Sokal claimed to be demonstrating that some academics will gladly trade intellectual rigour for "what sounds good". He observed that the editors of Social Text "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." They also described their earlier dealings with Sokal when the article was first sent in: they said the article wasn't very good and that Sokal refused to make several changes they suggested, and they only accepted it because it was of relevance to a special issue they happened to be preparing. Many of Sokal's defenders, however, said that this was the whole point - that the journal accepted an article they knew wasn't very good simply because it flattered their preconceptions.
Social Text also examined the controversy in the context of academic editorial policies. Most academic journals submit prospective articles to an anonymous peer-review. This review is meant to ensure quality, but some critics have argued that it has stifled creativity, inhibited diversity, and led to mediocrity. Social Text was founded in part to provide an alternative to this system, by dispensing with peer-review. They hoped that this would promote more original, less conventional research, and trusted authors of prospective articles to guarantee the academic integrity of their work. Social Text's editors held that, in this context, Sokal's work constituted a deliberate fraud and betrayal of that trust.
Defenders of Social Text also argue that Sokal had great credentials as physicist, and that his physics could be expected to be accurate unless he was deliberately lying. They further note that scientific peer review does not necessarily detect fraud either, in light of the later Schön scandal.
The concluding sentences of their rebuttal, "Should non-experts have anything to say about scientific methodology and epistemology? After centuries of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific domination of nature one might have thought this was a pertinent question to ask," illustrate some of the concerns which inform the postmodernist attitude.
In his own counter-rebuttal, which was rejected by the editors of Social Text, Professor Sokal stated, "Robbins and Ross guess wrong when they say I feel 'threatened' by science-studies scholars. 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 an interview with National Public Radio's All Things Considered Alan Sokal said that he was prompted to conduct his hoax (which he called an experiment) after reading Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science.
In 1999, Alan Sokal co-authored Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (known outside the US as Intellectual Impostures) with Jean Bricmont. The book contains a long list of extracts of writings from well-known intellectuals containing what Sokal and Bricmont allege are blatant abuses of scientific terminology. Finally, Sokal and Bricmont give a (hostile) summary of postmodernism and finish by criticizing the sociology of scientific knowledge, especially in the form of its strong program.
Sokal's hoax and subsequent book have not led to any major shakeups in postmodernism. Postmodernists claim that although they are open to constructive criticism, Sokal lacks a basic understanding of their field, and so in their view many of his objections are incoherent and useless. His book has been criticized as revealing, they claim, Sokal's fundamental misunderstandings of their ideas. See Fashionable Nonsense for a detailed presentation of their objections.
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