Sokal Hoax and academic boundaries in the contemporary university.

Economic and Political Weekly, 1997

Though apparently an attack on a specific genre of writing in the social sciences, i e, the post-modernist one, the focus of Alan Sokal's hoax extends over the entire methodological debate in science, natural and social It also extends over the entire range of science critiques that seek to reinterpret the canons of mainstream modern science. However, these critiques of science, it is argued here, cannot simply be pushed into the political left or right nor can they be interpreted as pro-or anti-science-which is what Sokal's position finally amounts to.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2001

In May 1996, New York University physicist Alan Sokal created a scandal when he revealed in the academic trade journal Lingua Franca that an article he had published in the cultural studies journal Social Text, purportedly a critique of scientific epistemology, was a hoax designed to reveal the postmodern critique of the scientific enterprise as a fraud, and its proponents scientific illiterates with no more knowledge than needed to push a hazy ideological agenda. In "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Sokal strung together a number of quotes from "postmodern" critiques of science, threw in some hokey scientific links, and sprinkled the article with inherently contradictory claims. When the article was published and then revealed to be a hoax, what have been called "the Science Wars" broke out on the Internet, with the proponents of postmodern scholarship, it would seem, fighting a retreating battle, and the scientists gleefully announcing that the humanities and science studies communities had egg on their faces. Sokal himself claimed to have performed an "empirical demonstration" that postmodern peer review lacked rigor, and he posited that real postmodern attacks on objectivity and truth originate in a community whose methods were too far adrift of scientific method to be useful. The aftermath of Sokal's prank is difficult to overestimate even four years hence. His ploy, however amusing, has caused many in the general media, and in the public, to become even more critical about interdisciplinary critique of the sciences. Nonetheless, the scandal may serve

Written Communication, 2004

In 1996, New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal wrote a parody of an academic article he titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." This parody escaped detection by the editors and was published in the journal Social Text. Sokal outed his own hoax in the academic magazine LinguaFranca, after which prolonged discussion about the hoax took place in both academic and popular venues. This article explores the rhetorical dimensions of Sokal's hoax, defining the hoax as a rhetorical genre, relating the Sokal hoax to some 19thcentury American scientific hoaxes, explaining why this hoax inspired such intense reactions, and identifying some of the stylistic and the generic exaggerations. The impassioned discussion of this hoax may be explained by the dynamics of its rhetorical context, which drew in Social Text's editors as it flattered their professional vanity and revived the debate over the culture wars. But the textual dynamics of Sokal's hoax have been largely ignored, even though closer attention to genre, style, and argument might have prevented the hoax. Rhetorical understanding thus requires attention to both texts and contexts.

Source: SubStance, Vol. 28, No. 1, Issue 88: Special Issue: Literary History (1999), pp. 105-119 , 1999

IT WOULD BE AMUSING BUT RATHER FRUITLESS to trot out once again the details of the Sokal Hoax, and to savor one more time the stances assumed by the wide range of persons who have made pronouncements upon it. Any good search engine will lead the reader to dozens of internet sites devoted to the affair, and a quick look at the tables of contents of journals in a variety of fields will confirm the obvious: the hoax was a hit. Ever since the truth about "Transforming the boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (Social Text 46/47) was revealed in Lingua Franca in spring of 1996, there has been a veritable explosion of articles and debates involving scientists (including a Nobel recipient), internationally-known scholars in the humanities and social sciences, writers, editors, and students in a range of fields. And things are heating up again now that Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Impostures intellectuelles (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997) has been published in translation in the US by St. Martin's Press. (The British edition was published by Profile Books in July, 1998.)

Times Literary Supplement, 1996

The New Statesman, 2022

Journal of Sociology, 2012

In early 2009 Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian and editor of the conservative journal Quadrant, was caught out having accepted for publication a fraudulent piece of academic research, a hoax which aimed to reveal the hypocrisy of Windschuttle's public stance on standards of scholarship. Over 10 years after the Sokal affair, the Windschuttle hoax raises in a new way the question of the relationship of social science to the problem of truth. We argue that, through its transgression of the rules and norms of social scientific practice, the hoax can draw our attention to those very rules and norms, affirming our commitment to them. In pursuing this argument, we consider what it means for social science to play its particular 'language game', highlighting the similarities and differences between the hoax's and social sciences' efforts to 'seem true'.