Sokal affair

Based on Wikipedia: Sokal affair

The Physics Professor Who Pranked Academia

In 1996, a physics professor named Alan Sokal pulled off one of the most delicious intellectual pranks in academic history. He submitted a paper to a prestigious cultural studies journal arguing that gravity—the force that keeps your feet on the ground and planets in orbit—is merely a "social and linguistic construct." The paper was complete nonsense. And they published it anyway.

The title alone should have been a warning sign: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." That word salad translates roughly to: "Breaking the Rules: A New Way of Interpreting the Meaning of Gravity at the Subatomic Level." Except it doesn't really mean anything at all. Sokal had deliberately written gibberish dressed up in fashionable academic language to see if a journal would publish it simply because it sounded impressive and aligned with certain political viewpoints.

They did.

Why a Physicist Decided to Troll Humanists

Sokal wasn't just being mischievous. He had read a 1994 book called "Higher Superstition" by biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt, which argued that certain humanities journals had become so ideologically driven that they would publish anything—as long as it contained the right political buzzwords and quoted the right thinkers.

This was a serious accusation. The claim wasn't just that some academic writing was bad or unclear. It was that entire fields had abandoned intellectual rigor in favor of political orthodoxy. If something sounded appropriately leftist and name-dropped fashionable French theorists, it would sail through editorial review regardless of whether it made any actual sense.

Sokal decided to test this hypothesis experimentally. He was, after all, a scientist.

His target was Social Text, a journal of cultural studies published by Duke University Press. The journal was preparing a special issue on the "Science Wars"—an ongoing debate about whether scientific knowledge was objective truth or merely one perspective among many, shaped by culture, politics, and power structures. Sokal crafted his hoax article specifically for this issue.

What the Fake Paper Actually Said

The paper argued, with a straight face, that quantum gravity—one of the most mathematically rigorous areas of theoretical physics—supports progressive political goals. Sokal threw in references to something called the "morphogenetic field," a concept borrowed from Rupert Sheldrake that mainstream scientists consider pseudoscience. He described it charitably as "a bizarre New Age idea."

The paper declared that the notion of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was merely a "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook." In plain English: Sokal was pretending to argue that the physical world isn't actually real, but is instead created by our thoughts and language—a position no working physicist would take seriously for a moment.

After dismissing "the so-called scientific method" (note the contemptuous phrasing), the paper announced that physical "reality"—Sokal made sure to put that word in scare quotes—is "fundamentally a social and linguistic construct."

Here's where it gets particularly absurd. The paper argued that because scientific research is "inherently theory-laden and self-referential," science cannot claim any special authority over "counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities." Translation: if a marginalized group believes something different about physics than physicists do, their view is equally valid.

Sokal even managed to work in a joke comparing feminist politics to mathematical set theory. In a footnote, he wrote that just as "liberal feminists" settle for legal equality rather than more radical goals, "liberal mathematicians" are content to work within the Zermelo-Fraenkel framework—a foundational system in mathematics—which "already incorporates the axiom of equality" and merely supplements it with "the axiom of choice."

This is genuinely funny if you know mathematics. The "axiom of equality" and "axiom of choice" are actual technical terms in set theory that have absolutely nothing to do with social equality or political choice. Sokal was satirizing how easily political interpretations can be projected onto completely unrelated technical concepts.

The Journal Takes the Bait

Social Text did not send the paper out for peer review—the standard practice where experts in a field evaluate a submission before publication. The editors later defended this by explaining that Social Text was a journal of "open intellectual inquiry" and that Sokal's article "was not offered as a contribution to physics."

But this defense misses the point. Even if the journal wasn't a physics journal, the paper made claims about physics. Surely someone should have checked whether those claims were remotely accurate?

The editors did have concerns. They found the writing unclear and asked Sokal to cut some of the "philosophical speculation" and most of the footnotes. Sokal refused. They published it anyway, describing him later as a "difficult, uncooperative author"—something they said was "well known to journal editors."

Think about what this means. The editors found the paper confusing. They requested changes that Sokal wouldn't make. And they published it regardless, apparently because a professor at New York University had written it and they wanted a natural scientist's contribution to their special issue.

The Reveal

Three weeks after the paper appeared in Social Text's spring/summer 1996 issue, Sokal published a confession in Lingua Franca, a magazine about academic life. The article was titled "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies."

His conclusion was devastating: Social Text "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject" because of its "ideological proclivities and editorial bias."

Sokal offered a particularly memorable illustration of the paper's absurdity:

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." Not our theories of physical reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor.

The Fallout

The response from Social Text's editors was telling. They claimed they had believed 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."

Even more remarkably, they argued that "its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document." In other words: even knowing it was fake, they still found it interesting.

When Sokal revealed the hoax, the editors speculated that perhaps his admission "represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve." They seemed unable to accept that the paper had been nonsense from the start.

The editors also accused Sokal of behaving unethically by deceiving them. This is worth pausing on. Academic publishing relies on trust—authors are expected to submit genuine work. By lying about his paper's sincerity, Sokal had violated that trust.

But Sokal had a response ready. His goal, he said, "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." He was politically sympathetic to many of the journal's goals but believed that sloppy thinking undermined those goals.

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.

The Derrida Controversy

One figure who got caught in the crossfire was Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher most associated with "deconstruction"—a method of analyzing texts that emphasizes how meaning is unstable and always depends on context.

Sokal's original hoax paper had quoted a 1966 statement Derrida made about Einstein's theory of relativity. When the scandal broke, American newspapers seized on Derrida as a symbol of everything wrong with postmodern thought. One magazine ran both a photograph and a caricature of him alongside coverage of the affair.

This was arguably unfair. Scholar Arkady Plotnitsky pointed out the absurdity: out of thousands of pages of Derrida's published work, a single offhand remark about relativity made thirty years earlier—before Derrida was famous—had been made to represent "nearly all of deconstructive or even postmodernist treatments of science."

Derrida eventually responded in the French newspaper Le Monde with an article whose title translates as "Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious." He called Sokal's hoax "sad" for having "trivialized Sokal's mathematical work" and "ruining the chance to carefully examine controversies" about scientific objectivity.

But Derrida's main complaint was about something subtler. In 1997, Sokal and physicist Jean Bricmont published a follow-up book called "Fashionable Nonsense" (titled "Intellectual Impostures" in Britain and "Impostures intellectuelles" in the original French). When promoting the book, they published nearly identical articles in English and French newspapers—with one curious difference.

The English article mentioned that well-known thinkers like Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault "appear in our book only in a minor role, as cheerleaders for the texts we criticize." But the French version of the same sentence added Derrida to this list.

Why hide Derrida's name from French readers while revealing it to English ones? The French version also described Derrida's citation in the hoax as an "isolated" instance, while the English added a parenthetical jab noting that Derrida's work showed "no systematic misuse (or indeed attention to) science."

Sokal and Bricmont insisted these differences were "banal." Derrida was unconvinced. He concluded that Sokal wasn't genuinely interested in serious scholarly debate but had used "the spectacle of a quick practical joke" instead of engaging with the real issues.

A Comparison That Changes Everything

Was Sokal's hoax actually a rigorous experiment? Sociologist Stephen Hilgartner of Cornell University raised some uncomfortable questions by comparing it to an earlier, more systematic study.

In 1990, a researcher named William Epstein had published an article in Science, Technology, and Human Values describing a similar experiment. Epstein had submitted fictitious articles to real academic journals in social work to measure how they responded. His methodology was far more rigorous than Sokal's—he submitted multiple papers with controlled variations to measure which factors influenced acceptance.

Epstein's experiment received almost no media attention. Sokal's became a cultural sensation.

Hilgartner argued this "asymmetric" response couldn't be explained by the quality of the work—Epstein's was actually better designed as an experiment. Instead, Hilgartner suggested something like confirmation bias was at play. Audiences "apply less stringent standards of evidence and ethics to attacks on targets that they are predisposed to regard unfavorably."

Cultural studies was already viewed with suspicion by many journalists and commentators. Social work was not. So Sokal's less rigorous attack became famous while Epstein's more careful study was ignored.

Hilgartner also noted that Sokal's hoax "reinforced the views of well-known pundits such as George Will and Rush Limbaugh." Conservative commentators who had long criticized academia seized on the affair as vindication. Whether Sokal intended it or not, his prank had political effects beyond what any careful scholarly debate could have achieved.

The Lasting Questions

The Sokal affair raised questions that still resonate today. Is obscure academic writing a sign of deep thinking or intellectual fraud? Can fields that study science from the outside make valid criticisms without understanding the technical details? When experts in one field comment on another, how should we evaluate their claims?

Anthropologist Bruno Latour, who was criticized in Sokal's follow-up book, dismissed the whole scandal as "a tempest in a teacup." Mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg wrote essays arguing that Sokal and his allies "insufficiently grasped the philosophy they criticized, rendering their criticism meaningless." When Sokal and Bricmont responded by "denouncing his representations of their work," Stolzenberg replied that their critique was "based on misreadings."

This kind of dispute—where each side accuses the other of not understanding what they're saying—is surprisingly hard to resolve. Stolzenberg advised readers to "slowly and skeptically examine the arguments of each party, bearing in mind that 'the obvious is sometimes the enemy of the true.'"

Perhaps the most interesting reflection came from philosopher of science Mara Beller. She noted that physicists themselves often speak with "awe" about the obscurity of Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Bohr's writing is famously difficult to parse, full of paradoxes and seemingly contradictory statements. Yet physicists treat this as profundity rather than confusion.

If physicists grant their own heroes the benefit of the doubt when they write unclearly, should they be so quick to condemn the same pattern in other fields?

What We Can Learn

The Sokal affair is often cited as proof that postmodern humanities scholarship is worthless. But that conclusion goes further than the evidence supports. What Sokal actually demonstrated was narrower: one journal, at one moment in time, published one nonsensical paper without checking whether its scientific claims were accurate.

That's genuinely concerning. But it doesn't tell us whether the entire field of cultural studies is intellectually bankrupt, any more than a single case of fraud in physics would prove that physics is worthless.

What the affair does demonstrate, more reliably, is how seductive it can be to accept arguments that flatter our existing beliefs. The Social Text editors published Sokal's paper partly because it told them what they wanted to hear—that cutting-edge physics supported their political views. But the pundits who celebrated Sokal's hoax were doing something similar, accepting his conclusions with little scrutiny because those conclusions confirmed their suspicion of academia.

The deeper lesson may be about intellectual humility. When someone from outside your field makes claims about your specialty, it's worth checking whether they actually know what they're talking about. And when someone from your field makes claims about another specialty, the same caution applies.

Sokal, to his credit, understood this. He didn't claim to have refuted postmodernism or cultural studies in general. He claimed to have exposed intellectual laziness in one corner of academia. Whether that laziness is widespread or localized, whether it's worse in humanities than in sciences, whether it has gotten better or worse since 1996—these remain open questions that a single hoax, however clever, cannot answer.

But whenever you encounter writing that sounds impressive but leaves you confused, it's worth asking: Is this profound, or is it just obscure? Is the difficulty inherent in the subject matter, or is it a sign that the writer doesn't really know what they're saying?

Sometimes the emperor has no clothes. Sokal's contribution was to remind us that it's okay to say so.