Sokal Affair

From ArticleWorld

The Sokal Affair is about Alan Sokal asking a simple question: will the humanities journal editors in question publish unsubstantiated pseudoscience? And he obtained answers that made the journal editors and fact-checkers sit up and pay attention. (Three grad students from MIT did something very similar in 2005.) A mathematician and a physicist, this professor from NYU, always cut to the chase when it came to his publications. Seeing how Duke University had a penchant for not being able to detect pseudoscience, he decided to test his theory by sending in his paper to Social Text, a journal run by the Duke University. On the same day that this paper was published, he proceeded to unveil the hoax in another publication, Lingua Franca quoting Noam Chomsky among others.

Sokal’s claims

This paper, replete with words and phrases like emancipatory mathematics and liberatory science, went on to state that what we know to be ‘physical “reality” is a mere construct: social and linguistic. What will emancipate us from the shackles of these constructs? Emancipatory science, of course, which would help the society spurn the elitist’s view of high science and, make way for a science that is conducive to “postmodern science”. The footnotes in Sokal’s paper are a give away : they are more obvious in their irreverence and ridicule of the humanities editor’s methods.

The upshot

Sokal maintained that the journal’s editors had a moral duty towards their readers: to verify all material submitted to them and that the journal had ignored intellectual rigor. He further noted that such concepts are outright ridiculous. Sokal expressed his chagrin at the journals not taking the time to consult an authority in the field of quantum physics before publishing this paper.

The editors at Social text defended themselves by saying that they believed this paper to be a sincere attempt by a quantum physicist to gain validation from postmodern philosophy for the latest advances made in his field. They charged Sokal with unethical behavior , to which Sokal responded by saying that that was the whole point: the lit-crit today is doing more damage by pandering to scientists who merely flatter the editors agenda, but do not seek to bring real science and sociology of science to the reader. While Sokal was criticized by the postmodernists for his lack of, according to them, a basic understanding of their principles, Sokal did make his point to Social Text and similar journals that did away with peer review. Social Text did away with peer review to promote original work.

Later, in 1998, Sokal came up with a book that is known outside of theUS as Intellectual Impostures. However, the Schon Scandal is proof of the fact that peer review is not always the best method to detect fraud. One of the people singled out by Sokal in his book, Bruno Latour , responded to this criticism by saying that all this was a mere storm in teacup and Gabrielle Stolzenburg observed that had Sokal comprehended certain views held by the postmodernists, this would not have happened. This mathematician, in fact took it upon himself to write several essays “debunking” Sokal and his views. Sokal did prove, one must stress, that the editors could not detect nonsense or differentiate it from actual science.