The Hoax That Proved Whatever Its Readers Already Believed

In the spring of 1996 the cultural studies journal Social Text published an article by Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, which argued that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct whose political meaning mattered more than its mathematics. Within weeks, in the magazine Lingua Franca, Sokal announced that the article was a parody, stuffed with nonsense and flattery, written to see whether the journal would print it. It had.

The reaction divided along lines that were already drawn. To Sokal's defenders the hoax exposed a field in which fashionable jargon had replaced standards of evidence, and Sokal and the physicist Jean Bricmont developed that charge in a book that appeared in French in 1997. They accused several celebrated thinkers of borrowing scientific terms they did not understand.

To the editors the episode showed something else. They later said that they had found the essay's arguments weak but published it in good faith because a scientist seemed to be moving toward their concerns, and that his deception breached the trust on which any journal depends. The journal, it has been reported, relied on its editorial collective rather than on outside referees at the time.

Sokal himself has acknowledged that a single hoax cannot condemn an entire field. The sciences have their own forgeries, among them the Piltdown skull, which experts accepted for about four decades. A hoax tests the gullibility of one editor on one day, and a field is more than that.

A hoax tests the gullibility of one editor on one day, and a field is more than that.

Yet the defence has a gap of its own. Piltdown was exposed by scientists using methods their discipline already owned, such as fluorine testing and careful comparison of bone, and that is the point. A field can survive fraud if it carries procedures that make fraud detectable. Whether the humanities carry such procedures, and whether they should resemble the tests of a laboratory, was the real argument beneath the scandal, and neither camp asked the other what evidence would count.

The strange afterlife of the affair is that both camps still cite it as proof. A hoax can show that a gate was once left open. It cannot show which gates ought to exist, and what the article proved depended entirely on what each reader already believed, which may be the oddest result of an experiment designed to measure belief.