The Sokal Affair

Defending evidence – and the left

Sokal argued that the hoax exposed a decline of intellectual rigour in parts of the humanities: the editors had published an article on quantum physics without consulting anyone competent, because they liked its conclusion. He insisted that a real world exists, that its properties cannot be reduced to social constructions, and that facts and evidence count. He presented the parody as a defence of the left’s own tradition of reason against epistemic relativism: he was a leftist (and feminist), he explained, thanks to evidence and logic rather than in spite of them. In their book Sokal and Bricmont state that their target is not philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences as a whole, but specific abuses – scientific terms used without understanding or justification – and the confusions of epistemic relativism.

A breach of trust and a caricature of science studies

The Social Text editors Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross called the deception a “breach of ethics” casting suspicion on unknown authors, and wrote that to construe their decision as “proof of the bankruptcy of cultural studies is absurd”. Stanley Fish, executive director of Duke University Press, which published Social Text, argued in the New York Times that what is socially constructed is not the world but our ways of knowing it – as balls and strikes in baseball are both constructed and real. Latour saw a transatlantic war casting France as a kind of Colombia exporting intellectual drugs. Derrida replied in Le Monde (“Sokal et Bricmont ne sont pas sérieux”, 1997) that a serious study of scientific metaphors would have required careful reading, which was lacking.

Held by

• Jacques Derrida1930–2004
• Bruno Latour1947–2022

What a hoax can and cannot prove

A third reading locates the main lesson in editorial practice and the conditions of interdisciplinary work. Social Text, as its editors stressed, was a non-refereed journal run by an editorial collective in the “little magazine” tradition of the independent left. The journalism scholar Jay Rosen argued in Tikkun (1996) that the editors should have admitted the mistake at once and examined in public which standards they had diluted to accept an article they neither understood nor respected. Sokal himself conceded (1998) that the mere fact of publication tells us little: it did not show that cultural studies or the sociology of science were nonsense, only that one journal’s editors had published physics they could not judge without asking anyone competent.