Its worth reading the editorial response[1] to the hoax. There's some context that tends to be ignored when this hoax is discussed online. For example, that the journal is non-refereed; that they deliberately publish non-scientific articles including fiction; and that the paper was initially rejected and only reconsidered for a special issue that sought to present the heterogeneous voices of the "science wars".<p>[1] <a href="https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf</a>
The more recent unofficial sequel to the Sokal Hoax: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair</a>
If you think this could not happen in physics:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair</a><p>(Yes, I'm aware it's different from Sokal, in that the Bogdanov twins were convinced of the validity of their research.)
Although this was an interesting exercise, I'm not sure if you can use it to make any strong claims about the rest of the journal (or field). They put the editors in a unique position of receiving a manuscript from known physicists, on a topic they did not know anything about. It doesn't seem right to extrapolate that the entire journal lacks intellectual rigour.
Reminds me of "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct", my favorite hoax paper.<p><a href="https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.skeptic.com/downloads/conceptual-penis/23311886....</a> [pdf]<p>And the breakdown of the hoax:<p><a href="https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social...</a><p>An excerpt:<p>> We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women and other gender-marginalized groups and individuals, is the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.
From an article of his published a few days ago:<p><pre><code> In my parody article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” (Sokal 1996), I wrote as part of my conclusion:
[P]ostmodern science provides a powerful refutation of the authoritarianism and elitism inherent in traditional science, as well as an empirical basis for a democratic approach to scientific work. For, as Bohr noted, “a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description” – this is quite simply a fact about the world, much as the selfproclaimed empiricists of modernist science might prefer to deny it. In such a situation, how can a selfperpetuating secular priesthood of credentialed “scientists” purport to maintain a monopoly on the production of scientific knowledge? (Sokal 1996, 229)
[...]
Alas, PrescodWeinstein makes a similar bald leap at the beginning of her article – albeit this time, apparently, in all seriousness. Her claim is based on general relativity rather than quantum mechanics, but the structure of the logic is almost identical:
Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent. The gender imbalance between Black women and Black men is less severe than in many professions, but the disparity remains. ... Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression ... (PrescodWeinstein 2020, 422–423, references omitted)
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“White Empiricism” and “The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics”: A Critical Analysis
<a href="https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/260" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/3/2/260</a>
To my completely untrained mind (in either physics or social studies) it is obvious social studies can not have the rigor of Newtonian physics simply by the difference in running experiments for each discipline. Think about how difficult it is to run, observe, constrict, isolate, etc experiments in social studies by comparison. Ethics limitations too. You really can't take a thousand babies, isolate them and run experiments to see what is a social construct and what is not.
The funnier thing that Quantum Gravity does seem to be a social construct.<p>Some people are confident it exists even though it is impossible to observe (as of yet)
I would argue his article was valid despite his intentions, philosophy does not concern itself with the scientifically correct opinion but explores ideas and their consequences and connections. So he poses a nonsense scientific thesis and explores it, this is the majority case of all past philosophy because scientific theses don't age well, but philosophical theses turn out to be less dependent on science, and a few abstractions removed from it.
It seems sad to me that someone who could have spent his time doing, you know, actual physics, instead has frittered away his life shooting social-scientists in a barrel. How many books on this now? Yeah yeah, we'll all agree that social scientists aren't proper scientists, now will you move on already?
The hoax proofed a lack of scientific on the side of the social sciences.<p>As a result, projects who's funding was based upon publishing with the magazine should have to hand that funding to the creator of the hoax. Make science grant hunts real hunts, make hunting down fakes profitable for the scientific minded project.
It's well-known that the hard sciences are awash with fake papers, but apparently when a hard science journal gets fooled, it proves nothing.<p>Honestly, I hate this. It's a stunt and bad manners. All the extenuating circumstances are known at this point. Philosophical inquiry is of course by its nature susceptible to charlatans, that's unavoidable.