The Sokal Affair And Everything Since
How Hoax Papers Got Published In Reputed Journals And What They Mean
How many times do you read a paper and think about what the author must have been thinking while writing it? According to my Instagram followers, everyone has felt that at some point. I remember feeling like this when reading Jacques Derrida’s work on animals and their apparent ‘nudity’ during my Master’s course. There was so much jargon in there, I was not sure if even the author knew what he was talking about.
The funny thing is, apparently, another person shared the same feelings. This man was Alan Sokal, a professor of Physics at the New York University. You must understand what a teacher of physics (a subject known for its objectivity, rigour and certainty) would feel when he reads something from a post-modern thinker such as Foucault or Derrida (who insist that there is very little that is a universal, objective truth) Especially if these thinkers attack the hard sciences such as biology or physics.
Sokal wanted to try something out. He wanted to see if the editors of a reputed journal of post-modern philosophy would be able to differentiate between an actual research paper and gibberish nonsense that confirmed their biases.
The Sokal Affair
In 1996, Sokal submitted the manuscript for a paper titled “Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Gravity” to a journal called Social Text, a mid-level reputed journal.
You can read the paper in full here, I am sharing some of the funnier quotes from it.
“postmodern 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.”
“And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly pointed out, in the present culture this contamination [ of mathematics] is overwhelmingly capitalist, patriarchal and militaristic”
The paper was full of completely made up theories of quantum physics and was filled liberally with words that would be fitting in post-modern work. The paper was duly published and that’s when Sokal revealed that he had created a hoax paper to expose that editors would let anything get published if it agreed with their preconceived notions.
The paper was never even reviewed by an actual physicist from another university. Obviously, the journal lost a lot of respect and efforts were made to ensure that better practices were used to publish research work. But that was pretty much the end of it.
Sokal did not want post-modern philosophy to stop altogether, he just wanted its thinkers to be put under better scrutiny. He wanted people who understood a subject to be the ones criticizing it, not someone who couldn’t tell a concept apart from nonsense. Sokal was measured in his response and encouraged a better scientific process.
But his copycats did not.
Sokal Squared
In the period between 2017and 2019, a group of three researchers wrote and submitted 20 papers for publishing in the disciplines of Gender studies, Fat studies and Sexuality studies, sociology, psychology and so on. These papers, the authors claimed were based on absurd ideas and written with the explicit purpose of not making any sense. Here are some of the papers, their titles and a short summary of the research.
Paper 1: Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon
An experiment was ‘conducted’ at a dog park to see if male dogs forcibly hump female dogs there and how it might affect the outlook of human attendees about sexual violence and bigotry.
This research paper was published.
Paper 2: Feminist Mein Kampf
Some paragraphs from the Hitler autobiography were edited with feminist sounding words. Some sentences were omitted and others were added to see if Hitler’s words would be published if they had feminist overtones
This paper was rejected for publication.
So you get a general idea. They came up with some ideas that were really ridiculous on their part and were surprised when some of these ideas got published or at least got words of encouragement from the editors. Of the 20 papers they submitted, 4 were published and others had suggested changes and calls for resubmission.
But there is a problem.
While Sokal may have managed to prove that the peer review process was rather lax in some journals, the Sokal Squared activists wanted to prove that gender studies, fat studies, sexuality studies and other such disciplines were invalid and did not provide any valuable knowledge.
The claims the two were making were widely different. The Sokal Squared studies were picked up by right-wing outlets to prove that academia had been overtaken by the PC left-wing brigade and they would publish anything if it sounded cool enough.
There were some problems with these new hoaxes though.
Problems with Sokal Squared
A few weeks back I had shared the story of Diederik Stapel, a conman who had claimed to perform multiple experiments and had made his way to the top of psychology academia. He was faking all these experiments and getting them published.
The people involved with Sokal Squared papers were doing the same thing though, weren’t they?
In the Dog Park paper above, they had claimed to perform an experiment and had faked an entire dataset showcasing the results of their experiment. If you are from psychology, you know that experiments are the gold standard of evidence. Can we really blame an editor for believing that the data he had been given was genuine?
In the other papers, like the Feminist Mein Kampf, they had pretty much changed the whole chapter and written something completely new. There was very little in common between Hitler’s words and the submitted paper. Any text can be turned into anything if you change the words, add some and remove some. That is the whole point of language.
In other papers still, the concerns of the reviewers were simply not reported by the researchers in their final report of the hoax. They had been constantly told that their ideas were not very well thought-out and needed more work. These words of encouragement were mistaken for an implicit agreement with the idea, that is simply not true.
You can go through all the papers and their reviews in full on this google drive link but I will encourage you to do your own reading, instead of the report that is shared there.
Holes and Hoaxes
Have you ever heard of the study by Wakefield which linked MMR vaccines and autism? It was a fraudulent study that was retracted once exposed but it still got published. Would it mean that biological sciences are built on shaky ground and not scientific?
Of course not.
There is a very thin line between a good hoax study and bad ones. Good ones, similar to Sokal, make an obvious gap in the publication process clear while the bad ones simply lie, and are surprised when the lie is not caught.
That said, I do agree that there is a serious problem in the publication process of major journals where absolute garbage of a paper gets published. You don’t even need to write a hoax study to see the nonsense that can get published but the thing is, it happens in almost every field. To doubt the legitimacy of a field, maybe due to ideological bias or motivated reasoning is simply short-sighted.
But that is just my opinion, you are free to make of these results, whatever you want :)
Question of The Week
Where do you stand on this issue? Do social sciences have a very low bar for publication or are these hoax studies unfairly targeting these disciplines?
You can let me know by replying to this email or in the comments :)
Until next time,
Arjun