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The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy

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The Sokal Hoax is one of those rare bits of mischief with a purpose that turns up the illumination thereby allowing all of us to clearly see that the emperor has no clothes, the emperor in this case being the intellectual left of postmodernist thought as exemplified in the persons of Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, the "victims" of this very clever and meticulously planned sting. That they were hoisted with their own petar, as it were, was particularly pleasing to those of us who cannot abide pseudobabblese and academic gibberish, ingredients that have unfortunately become a staple of New Age and postmodern expression. One hopes that the Sokal affair has opened the eyes of academia to the extent that intellectuals will now appreciate the importance of writing in a clear and communicative manner without fear that others can thereby discern the quality of their ideas.

Here the editors of Lingua Franca have put together the definitive collection of articles on the entire succès de scandale including the text of physicist Alan Sokal's article itself, Sokal's revelation article in Lingua Franca, and the reply of the Social Text editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, whose publication of Sokal's parody of social constructionist thought and expression brought about their academic embarrassment. These are followed by selected letters to the editors in response to the affair. I particularly enjoyed the insightful letters by Franco Moretti of Columbia University and Lee Smolin of Penn State. Next are reactions from the press, both domestic and foreign, including stories by Stanley Fish, George Will, Bruce Latour, and seventeen others, including another piece by Alan Sokal from Le Monde (Paris). Then we are treated to some longer essays, some with responses and counter responses, including some excellent work by Steven Weinberg and Barbara Epstein. The final chapter entitled "Colloquies" provides some post bellum reflections by Andrew Ross, Sokal and others. All of this is very entertaining.

In addition to being entertained by this entirely engaging and balanced account I was given a kind of postgraduate course in social constructionist and postmodern thought and its critics. I came away feeling that however one may feel about Sokal's hoax itself, one positive result has been to stimulate thought and discussion on postmodernism and bring those ideas to a wider public than had previously existed. Whether that is good for postmodernism is problematic.

Sokal's parody of postmodern thought is thoroughly witty and enjoyable, and especially so if you are moderately literate in math and science. If you have little tolerance for the fashionable jargon of postmodern criticism, you will delight in the way Sokal has put the screws on the pretensions of this pompous movement.

One of Sokal's important contributions is to quote liberally from the postmodern gurus of the French academic establishment. Reading Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattarri, and their colleagues for meaning is virtually impossible (the French, by the way, is no more lucid than the English translations), so the several quotes from their work in Sokal's essay are about as close as any rational reader will get to their work.

But what they say is indeed hilarious. Here is Derrida: "The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variablity--it is, finally, the concept of the game." This, of course, means absolutely nothing--even in context. But at least it is not wrong, as is the following from Lacan: "This diagram [the Mobius strip] can be considered the basis of a sort of essential inscription at the origin, in the knot which constitutes the subject...it explains many things about the structure of mental disease. If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease." Lacan is justly famous--here we see him taking silly to the heights of sublimity.

Here is Lacan again: "...human life could be defined as a calculus in which zero was irrational. When I say 'irrational' I'm referring not to some unfathomable emotional state but precisely to what is call ian imaginary number." How incredibly erudite-sounding to define human life as a "calculus" (whatever that is) in which zero is "irrational" and in which "irrational" means "imaginary." This is really rich!

There are some excellent essays in this book, besides that of Sokal. These include excellent pieces by Steven Weinberg (the physicist), Paul Boghossian (the philosopher), Meera Nanda (scientist/journalist), and Barbara Epstein. My favorite one-liner is Weinberg's tale of a physicist friend who, on his death bed, confesses to draw some consolation from the fact that at least he won't have to look up the meaning of 'hermeneutic' any more in the dictionary.

My favorite humor book is Woody Allen's Without Feathers. But this comes in a close second, and there's lots to learn, too.

If you're in a very specific crowd, the brouhaha covered here is a real riot. I am a current graduate student who went back to school after being out in the "real world" (i.e. business and industry), and have been subjected to the dense theory and nonsensical "culture wars" of the academy. I have found relatively few people in graduate education who have ever been out in the real world, where actual practical work is done. I was astonished to find that there are professors doing large research projects on the field I used to work in, because we rarely (if ever) saw these academic treatises, written by professors who have never worked in the field and assume they can effectively study it from a detached intellectual standpoint. But these guys don't seem to care if their writings never get even remotely close to the populations that they think they're helping, because in the university system it's publish or perish. It's better to have a few other professors tell you that you know what you're talking about, than to have any kind of effect on the lives of real people.

This kind of nonsense has been exposed by the Sokal hoax covered here, though in this case it's all within the academy. Sokal's fake paper, submitted to a trendy but gullible "cultural studies" journal, is an absolutely brilliant piece of parody in which he used a heap of big words, obtuse theory, and hip namedropping while saying absolutely nothing. This book presents Sokal's paper and then the defensive and whiny rebuttals of the journal's editors after they learned they were hoodwinked, followed by just about everything that was said in the international academic press about the whole affair. Unfortunately, this book really slows down as the academic commentaries become very repetitive, discussing the same aspects of the hoax again and again, while many of them devolve into the dense theoretical professor-speak that Sokal was trying to criticize in the first place. Also, in presenting never-ending arguments by defensive eggheads in the academy, we merely get a closed argument among people with no connection to the outside world whatsoever. The book fails to truly analyze the true issue behind this whole mess - the fact that real students from the real world are paying for an education made up of nonsensical theorizing about obtuse philosophical concepts that truly matter to nobody but a professor, who is trying to show off to another professor. This disconnection from reality in the modern university system is what has really been exposed by Sokal's hoax and the ensuing academic catfight. [~doomsdayer520~]

Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Unfortunately for the editors of that publication, Sokal had submitted the article as a parody, hoping thus to discredit certain antiscientific stances from the "faux Left", in an attempt to defend his vision of the true Left. Thus began a process which may culminate in this revealing book. After publishing the original parody, the revelation that it was a hoax and the editors' response to that, the book then covers multiple interpretations of the event, through reactions in U.S. and other foreign press, and then a series of longer essays. The work closes with a roundtable discussion of the issues. The work goes beyond the original controversy in free discussions of the scope and limits of both science and speculation, the importance of clear talk, and the future of 'the Left'. The work follows a general chronological progression within each section, although this was abandoned for the last few articles. The quality of discourse increases over time and throughout the book. I particularly enjoyed articles by Barbara Epstein and Ken Hirschkop. I recommend it to persons interested in science and culture.

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal confabulated an article on quantum gravity. He invented a fake physics based on genuine -- though mistaken -- statements about physics by such writers as Foucault, Lacan, and Irigaray. He submitted it to the journal Social Text. On the day of publication, Lingua Franca published Sokal's announcement of a hoax on writers and editors whose scientific statements are meaningless or just plain wrong. Some accused him of supporting the cultural agenda of the American right. Others called it a brilliant discourse on the emperor's new clothes.

Sokal himself has no interest in the cultural right wing. He is a Marxist who worked in Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas. Sokal argues that politics and social theory are irrelevant to the substantive content of subjects such as physics, chemistry, or mathematics. He makes a case against confusing social theory with natural science, and he asserts that counterfactual claims have no place in the refereed journals of serious research fields.

An extensive cross-section of the debate is published in this book. It offers perspective on issues we occasionally face in design research regarding the importance of distinctions between fact and interpretation, between evidence and argument from evidence.

Book review published in Design Research News, Volume 6, Number 6, June 2001

I didn't expect a book full of essays about postmodernism and academic politics to keep me up late at night. I was therefore amazed to find myself reading until 2:30 in the morning several nights in a row.

The book starts by printing the hoax article and Sokal's revelation. It then captures some of the immediate response, mostly by Social Text supporters. Then you see some newspaper articles from around the world, and finally some longer essays. Since each article originally came from a separate publication, each one starts with two paragraphs or so of synopsis, explaining the background of the hoax. That gets tedious, but if you read beyond the first couple of paragraphs, each article has something interesting to say.

Kudos to the editors of Lingua Franca for making such excellent choices.

This is highly entertaining stuff. For those of us tired out by the moralistic kulturkritiks on kampus, a little jostling of their heroic 'science studies' vanguard is most welcome and invigorating. What has been most amazing to me is the number of characters who have tried to rescue the editors at Social Text. There are characters here saying that it is dangerous for physicists to pronounce on the nature of science (even on the nature of physics) precisely because they are physicists! They actually print these kinds of fallacies in some places.

The editors of Lingua Franca have been most kind to our palates. They have included the old hippies with their hysteria and conspiracism right along with the sarcastic, the wise and the profound. The numerous newspaper stories about the hoax are a little tiresome, but the sheer number of them, from all around the world, gives the reader some sense of the world wide significance of what is at stake in the "science wars." You will not be sorry if you buy this. Barbara Epstein's essay on "Postmodernism and the Left" is worth the price of the book. The other essays are quite helpful as well. I have not seen another book of exchanges between pomos and other thinkers. It is remarkable at times how the pomos just go right on committing their fallacies and using their rhetoric, even after some other person has just pointed out the fallacy or exploded the rhetoric in question. The book reaffirmed my belief that most of us are not pomos at all. Rather, there are very few. In fact, it is difficult to be one, since you have to get used to thinking without evidence, and to arguing with nothing to support you except your strong conviction. Until they have some evidence, the science studies crowd will remain a laughing stock.

This isn't just a book about a brilliant hoax. It's also an introductory course on pomo (AKA postmodernism, poststructuralism, postconstructionism), a collection of heated newspaper and magazine editorials about ethics, philosophy, science, and college curriculum, and an expose of how the Emperor reacts when He is found to have no clothes.

Early in 1994, Alan Sokal, a physicist from NYU, read a book called "Higher Superstitions." This book by Gross & Levitt brought to a head Sokal's irritation at a certain postmodern faction within the academic community that he saw as challenging standards of logic, truth and intellectual inquiry. Could he possibly write an article bad enough to be obvious nonsense to any undergraduate physics student, yet good enough to get published in a leading pomo periodical? Unfortunately for the members of the screening committee for "Social Text," the answer was "yes."

The article itself is presented in chapter I. It caters to agendas of pomo authorities rather then relying on logic, drips with unreadable prose, and has mistaken claims about scientific theories. It includes an illogical train of thought but offers lots of apple-polishing to the gurus it parodies. Sokal says, "The fundamental silliness in my article lies in the dubiousness of its central thesis and in the 'reasoning' adduced to support it. Basically, I claim that quantum gravity has profound political implications." When Sokal realized his article was going to be published, he began writing his expose of the hoax. They were published in different magazines on the same day.

Ideally, perhaps "Social Text" would have admitted their error, issued a congratulatory statement to Sokal, and notified the public that they were immediately tightening up their article evaluation process. Instead, they whined about being sabotaged and called Sokal "poorly educated, too male, too nerdy, and naughty." They did the best they could but this turd was hard to polish.

After the publication of the "hoax of the decade," the press had a field day. The book continues with editorials from over 40 United States contributors and 9 from Europe and Brazil. The very first respondent was Alan Sokal, followed by Robbins and Ross, representing "Social Text." In the process of reading the reviews, I got an education on postmodernism and cultural studies, many of whose advocates roasted Sokal. The Scientist community, by and large, roasted "Social Text" and postmodernists. Physicist Steven Weinberg wrote a great essay where he discussed in detail each item of erroneous physics served up in Sokal's article.

For a nice read and a chance to see both sides presented on an important issue, I can highly recommend this excellent book.

Whether Alan Sokal pulled off either a 'brilliant statement' or a 'mean spirited hoax' is certainly a matter of opinion; THAT he did is relavent for anyone interested in the philosophy of science and/or cultural criticism's place therein.... Because of this alone, this book SHOULD be a worthwhile read for many people: for people tired of hearing of the patriarchies of science, of its historical biases toward the Western lines of thought following Cartesianism, toward Science becoming one of a goup of equally valid dialogues. Some of these might be applicable for history; they probably are certainly valid when discussing literature; Sokal's little trick PROVES that in at least this case, they should stay away from the hard science of physics....

And it's a fun read. You see one person bash people who come off sounding like smart little jerks; I liked this. Perhaps the case against one particular kind of anti-realism is overstated here; it doesn't hurt the smart people who are really good at it though....

This would not be a good read for people who think already that the smart little cultural studies people should have won.... that Sokal was being mean. Save your money....

It is probably worth noting that virtually no intelligent Sokal enthusiast has ever denigrated or denied the importance of critical science studies. Most of Sokal's supporters have gone out of their way in essays and publications to point up the importance of cultural studies, reasonable relativism, and criticism. Where they become concerned is when truth claims are all deemed to be left open to a hyper-relativism and subjective interpretation. While affirming a social critique of science has a quite valuable and definite place and thinking and writing about culture have a very important place within academic environs, scholars favorably inclined towards Sokal's hoax well understand a branch of pomo structuralism had been going off the rails for some time. (For an in depth overview of this extreme tendency and relativistic phenomenon, as well as countless examples see Bricmont and Sokal's "Fashionable Nonsense.") Yes, scientific developments in Newton's time - and obviously myriad technological developments since - have certainly been grounded in and developed from, to a good extent, the needs of capitalist imperial dictates. One can acknowledge this historical truth while criticizing some of the far out claims by those who have not one kind word for Sokal's attempt to re-emphasize the scientific method.

Often it seems for Sokal's detractors there is an either-or-world at work: either one is pro what Sokal did and therefore has little capability of appreciating and learning from sound cultural and scientific criticism and analysis, or on the other side, one finds Sokal's actions contemptible. Clearly this is an absurd mutually exclusive dynamic, yet it is displayed throughout "The Sokal Hoax" when one gets to the sections written by Social Text's apologists. The somewhat routine habit of Sokal's critics attacking via ad hominem and failing to recognize, or conveniently ignoring, that one can simultaneously agree wholeheartedly with Sokal's motives and intentions while appreciating and gaining valuable insight from incredibly interesting and well researched historical and relativistic cultural science studies is displayed throughout.

In Lingua Franca's fabulous "The Sokal Hoax" it does a fine job of presenting all sides of the con on "Social Text," a hoax that washed over all sorts of disciplines, ranging from philosophy, sociology, history, political science, the hard sciences, cultural studies and literary theory; all were touched in some fashion and all had respective intellectuals comment on the controversy. Lingua Franca gathers them together and addresses every facet of Sokal's outrageous treatise that left "Social Text" marching down the avenue with no clothes on. The two best pieces are by Paul Boghossian and Meera Nanda. Boghossian's essay is a marvelous display of a brilliant philosophical mind at work. He painstakingly lays out how and why Sokal's critics are misguided and how and why the folks who practice the extreme form of poststructuralist relativism fall short. Nanda's piece is remarkable in that it addresses how some religious fanatics in developing countries are expropriating the rhetoric and questionable logic of the targets of Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries" and using it as cover to meld much of their religious superstition into reactionary public policy. Definitely the worst essay of the bunch belongs to George Will who takes it as an opportunity to set up a straw man to lambaste the entire political left.

Lingua Franca's "Sokal Hoax" will be an insightful book for anyone who is mildly interested in any of the vast academic disciplines it no doubt left its mark on.