The Sokal affair
A physicist submitted a paper arguing that quantum gravity is a social construct. A leading cultural-studies journal published it. He announced the same day that every scientific claim in it was invented.
Why this verdict
Debunked by its own author on the day it appeared: Alan Sokal published a second article revealing that the paper *Social Text* had just printed was deliberate nonsense, written to test whether a journal would publish flattery of its own positions without checking the physics.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', published in the spring/summer 1996 'Science Wars' issue of Social Text, was a genuine piece of scholarship — and, at one remove, that the physics it invoked (quantum gravity as a socially contingent construct, the axiom of equality in set theory as a political proposition) bore the meanings it assigned them.
02Where it came from
Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, had been reading science studies literature and concluded that a strand of it was making confident assertions about physics that were simply wrong. Rather than argue the point, he ran the experiment. He assembled a paper out of genuine quotations from prominent theorists, real physics terminology used incorrectly, and conclusions that flattered the journal's editorial politics, and submitted it. Social Text did not send papers out for peer review at the time. It published.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
There is no dispute about the facts. On the day the issue appeared, Sokal published 'A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies' in Lingua Franca, stating that the article was a parody and that its argument was, in his words, nonsense sustained by nothing but appeals to authority.
The editors, Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, replied that they had taken the piece as an earnest if amateurish attempt by a scientist to engage with their field, had asked for revisions that Sokal declined to make, and had published it partly as a document of that engagement. That reply is itself evidence for Sokal's point: the paper was accepted for who appeared to be saying it rather than for what it said.
What the affair does not establish has been argued over ever since. Sokal's own claim was narrow — that a specific editorial culture would not check physics it could not evaluate. Stephen Hilgartner and others noted at the time that a single submission, unreviewed, to a journal that did not practise peer review cannot support the broader charge that the humanities are epistemically bankrupt, and that the design has no control condition. Sokal and Jean Bricmont pressed the wider case separately in Fashionable Nonsense (1997), where they worked through the physics abuses in the source texts directly rather than by demonstration.
04What it cost
The affair became the standard reference point of the 'science wars' and is still the model that later academic hoaxes copy, including the grievance studies affair twenty-two years on. Its narrow finding has held up: Social Text instituted peer review afterwards. Its broad reception has not been so careful — the paper is routinely cited as proving things about entire disciplines that one unreviewed submission cannot prove, which is a failure of inference of exactly the kind Sokal was complaining about.
05Connections
06Sources
Primary document · 1996
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
Primary document · 1996
A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies
Academic · 1996
Mystery Science Theater — the editors' reply
Academic · 1997
The Sokal Affair in Context
Encyclopedia
Sokal affair