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The Sokal affair, additionally known as the Sokal hoax, [1] was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies.
Alan David Sokal (/ ˈsoʊkəl / SOH-kəl; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works with statistical mechanics and combinatorics.
The Sokal hoax shares with other controversies of our time the typical feature of erupting suddenly with the threat of dire consequence, only to disappear quickly and nearly completely from public consciousness.
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Follow-up between Sokal and the editors
In the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies", Sokal revealed that "Transgressing the Boundaries" was a hoax and concluded that 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. In their defense, Social Text's editors said they believed that Sokal's essay "was the earnest attempt of a professi...
Book by Sokal and Bricmont
In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science; UK: Intellectual Impostures, 1998). The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology. It closed with a critical summary of postmodernism and criticism of the strong program of social constructionismin the sociology of scientific knowledge. In 2008, Sokal publishe...
Jacques Derrida
As Sokal revealed the hoax, French philosopher Jacques Derrida was initially one of the discredited targets in the United States, particularly in newspaper coverage. A U.S. weekly magazine used two images of him, a photo and a caricature, to illustrate a "dossier" on the Sokal article. Derrida responded to the hoax in "Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux" ("Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious"), first published on November 20, 1997 in Le Monde.He called Sokal's action "sad" for having trivial...
Sociological follow-up study
In 2009, Cornell sociologist Robb Willer performed an experiment in which undergraduate students read Sokal's paper and were told either that it was written by another student or that it was by a famous academic. He found that students who believed the paper's author was a high-status intellectual rated it better in quality and intelligibility.
The "Sokal Squared" scandal
In 2017, James A. Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose initiated "The Grievance Studies affair," a project to create bogus academic papers on cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies and submit them to academic journals. Their intent was to expose problems in "grievance studies," a term they apply to a subcategory of these academic topics in which "poor science is undermining the real and important work being done elsewhere." The hoax began in 2017 and continued int...
Sokal III
In October 2021, the scholarly journal Higher Education Quarterly published a bogus article "authored" by "Sage Owens" and "Kal Avers-Lynde III". The initials stand for "Sokal III". The Quarterlyretracted the article.
Demers, David. The Ivory Tower of Babel: Why the Social Sciences are Failing to Live Up to Their Promises. New York, NY: Algora Publishing, 2011. ISBN 0875868800Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0804746206Editors of Lingua Franca (magazine). The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. ISBN 0803279957Gross, John. The Oxford Book of Parodies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0199548828Bouveresse, Jacques. Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie. De l'abus des belles-lettres dans la pensée. Paris, France: Éditions Liber-Raisons d'Agir, 1999. ISBN 978-2912107084Brown, James Robert. Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 (original 2001). ISBN 978-0674013643Callon, Michel, "Whose Impostures? Physicists at War with the Third Person," Social Studies of Science29(2) (1999): 261–286.Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. ISBN 0631203230Links retrieved April 4, 2022. 1. Alan Sokal Articles on the Social Text AffairAlan Sokal's own page with very extensive links; includes the original article 2. Original hoax article (HTML)
Jul 2, 2020 · The publication of NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s 1996 hoax essay in the cultural studies journal Social Text proved the perfect vehicle to reinforce this long-held claim. Despite the presence of numerous false claims and nonsensical argumentation, Sokal’s (1996a) essay, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of ...
Oct 4, 2017 · What is at the center of the furor is not Alan Sokal himself, who in subsequent articles and in the book Impostures intellectuelles has focused on the misuse of science by certain French theorists, while giving the impres-
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Why did Sokal submit an article to Social Text?
The squabbles ignited by Higher Superstition alerted Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, to the controversy. Further research nullified his initial suspicions that the book might merely be yet another "culture wars" diatribe from the right.
