Alan Sokal's famous academic hoax
The Mathematician-Physicist Who Exposed Postmodernism’s Flaws
Alan Sokal, a physics and mathematics professor at New York University and University College London, is best known for the infamous Sokal Affair, a provocative hoax that exposed the intellectual weaknesses in postmodernist and poststructuralist thought.
In 1996, Sokal carried out an audacious experiment designed to test the intellectual rigor of certain branches of the humanities. Prominent academics such as Sokal, linguist Noam Chomsky, biologist Richard Dawkins, philosophers John Searle and Larry Laudin, and psychologists Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson have harshly criticized academic postmodernism, including calling it meaningless, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-reason, pretentious, linguistically nonsensical, and even politically and socially dangerous.
Sokal submitted a paper titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to the cultural studies journal Social Text. The article was deliberately crafted as a parody, filled with dense, postmodernist jargon-laden prose, "liberally salted with nonsense," and that misused concepts from physics and mathematics while making grandiose and absurd claims about the supposed ideological implications of quantum mechanics.
The editors of the postmodernist cultural studies journal Social Text published the paper in a special issue on the "Science Wars," without realizing it was a hoax.
Shortly after publication, Sokal revealed that the article was a deliberate spoof meant to demonstrate the lack of intellectual rigor in certain strains of postmodernist thought. He argued that some scholars in the humanities were so eager to embrace scientific-sounding ideas that they failed to critically evaluate whether those ideas were being applied correctly or even coherently. He wrote that his paper had been accepted only because "(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
The Sokal Affair became a flashpoint in debates over academic standards, postmodernist relativism, and the role of science in the humanities. While some defended Social Text, arguing that Sokal’s hoax was a bad-faith attack, many others—including scholars in the humanities—acknowledged the need for greater intellectual discipline in cultural studies and critical theory. Decades later, it continues to resonate and be talked about.
A Related Hoax: The Grievence Studies Affair
The Grievance Studies Hoax, also known as the Sokal Squared Hoax, was a project conducted between 2017 and 2018 by three academics—James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose—who sought to expose what they saw as a lack of intellectual rigor in certain academic fields, particularly those focused on identity politics, gender studies, and critical theory.
The highly entertaining video below tells the hoax’s story,
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References:
Sokal’s Hoax by Steven Weinberg, NYU Physics Department
The only one who paid a price is Peter Boghossian. He was hauled up on fake charges that he failed to get IRB clearance for these studies. He is no longer at Portland State, but is associated with the University of Austin, a new university dedicated to free and unrestricted academic inquiry. His salary is probably lower.
Too bad that truth is no longer accepted.We are in a Stalinist era . Orwell was a prophet.