The Sokal affair

JUN 1996

Physicist Alan Sokal submitted 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' to the cultural-studies journal Social Text, which published it in its Spring/Summer 1996 'Science Wars' issue. The paper argued that physical reality is at bottom a social and linguistic construct, and larded fashionable theory with claims Sokal knew to be nonsense. Three weeks later he revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, igniting a decade of argument about rigour in the humanities. Often told as a failure of peer review, but Social Text did not practise academic peer review at the time and defended that policy. The target was a specific strand of cultural studies, not the humanities as a whole.