The Sokal Affair: a Humorous Hoax Shakes the Academia
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The Story
The Sokal affair was a 1996 academic hoax in which NYU physics professor Alan Sokal persuaded the cultural studies journal Social Text to publish a deliberately nonsensical paper, exposing editorial lapses in academic publishing.
Titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, the paper claimed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct and that physical reality itself is socially constructed, flattering the editors' postmodernist ideology.
Submitted in November 1994 and published in the journal's spring 1996 Science Wars issue, the piece never received peer review from a physicist, which the editors defended by arguing it was not offered as physics research.
Sokal revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca in June 1996, famously inviting anyone who believes the laws of physics are mere social conventions to try transgressing them from his apartment window on the twenty first floor.
Social Text's editors branded him a difficult, uncooperative author, Jacques Derrida dismissed the stunt as sad, and sociologist Stephen Hilgartner argued the hoax benefited from confirmatory bias against already disfavored targets.
Sokal pressed his case in the 1997 book Fashionable Nonsense, written with Jean Bricmont, which analyzed postmodern misuse of scientific terminology.
Decades later the affair remains a touchstone in debates over academic rigor, obscure jargon, and the standards of peer review.
Titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, the paper claimed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct and that physical reality itself is socially constructed, flattering the editors' postmodernist ideology.
Submitted in November 1994 and published in the journal's spring 1996 Science Wars issue, the piece never received peer review from a physicist, which the editors defended by arguing it was not offered as physics research.
Sokal revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca in June 1996, famously inviting anyone who believes the laws of physics are mere social conventions to try transgressing them from his apartment window on the twenty first floor.
Social Text's editors branded him a difficult, uncooperative author, Jacques Derrida dismissed the stunt as sad, and sociologist Stephen Hilgartner argued the hoax benefited from confirmatory bias against already disfavored targets.
Sokal pressed his case in the 1997 book Fashionable Nonsense, written with Jean Bricmont, which analyzed postmodern misuse of scientific terminology.
Decades later the affair remains a touchstone in debates over academic rigor, obscure jargon, and the standards of peer review.
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