The editors of Social Text are smarting after an article in the current “Science Wars” issue was revealed to be a hoax.
The piece, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” is ostensibly an attempt by Alan D. Sokal, a physicist at New York University, to develop a “liberatory science” by applying postmodern theory to the study of quantum gravity. It tosses around such terms as “privileged epistemological status” and “oppositional discourses,” cites theorists Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray, and posits that physical reality is at bottom “a social and linguistic construct.”
In the May/June issue of Lingua Franca, Mr. Sokal revealed that the piece was a spoof, one that should have been spotted by any undergraduate physics or mathematics major. He wrote that the piece’s acceptance was evidence of both the arrogance of postmodern theory and the intellectual laziness of the left.
This was news to Andrew Ross, co-editor of Social Text and special editor of the “Science Wars” issue, who learned about the hoax from Lingua Franca just before it went to press. Shortly after the Lingua Franca piece came out, he and Bruce Robbins, the journal’s other co-editor and a professor of English at Rutgers University, drafted a statement in response.
The journal’s editors had never heard of Mr. Sokal before he submitted his unsolicited piece, which, they said, seemed to be an honest effort by a scientist to come to grips with some of the issues raised by the cultural critique of science. “We read it more as an act of good faith of the sort that might be worth encouraging than as a set of arguments with which we agreed,” Mr. Ross and Mr. Robbins wrote in their statement.
Still, Mr. Ross and other editors of Social Text are annoyed by Mr. Sokal’s deception, which according to the statement, “smacked of a temper often attributed to ‘unreconstructed male leftists.’” “It’s a very dubious thing for a professional scientist to do, given the strong feeling that is attached to hoaxes in that community,” Mr. Ross said in an interview. “It seems slightly geeky to pull this thing.”
Mr. Ross said he asked Mr. Sokal to participate in a debate for publication in Social Text but was turned down. He also said that he spoke to Mr. Sokal after the hoax was revealed and that the author appeared to be a “blithe spirit” about the whole matter. “He called me up and asked me out for dinner,” Mr. Ross said. “He said we could go out for margaritas. It seemed a slightly bizarre request.”
According to Mr. Robbins, several scientists told the journal’s editors that if they had reviewed the piece, they would not have seen anything in the physics discussed by Mr. Sokal to lead them to discourage its publication. “The real shame here is that Sokal’s stunt distracts attention from the real interest of our ‘Science Wars’ issue, which has to do not with epistemology (‘is there a real world?’) but with the social organization and social consequence of science,” he said.
Reached last week, Mr. Sokal said that he had not intended to single out Social Text, but that the journal fit the bill because it was “trendy, somewhat leftist, and somewhat postmodern.” His method was to find the silliest things said by the most prominent people and to use a nonsensical argument to link them. “I was a little surprised that it flew.”
He said he was prompted to write the parody after reading Higher Superstition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), a controversial attack by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt on the cultural study of science. “I had heard rumors of weird things happening in English departments, but I wasn’t aware that they were using deconstruction not only to write about Jane Austen, but quantum mechanics, too,” he said. He characterized much of what he read in the field as “vaguely social constructivist and not terribly well thought through.”
Although rumors have circulated that Mr. Levitt encouraged him to write the piece, Mr. Sokal denied this, although he did say he had sent a copy of the piece to Mr. Levitt before it ran in Social Text. “This parody was my idea. He did not put me up to it in any way.
“My feeling is that this has gotten so bad that not only was the intellectual atmosphere polluted but careers were at stake,” he said. “I decided public exposure was important.”