Future historians will marvel at the significance of the so-called Sokal hoax of 1996, whose implications for the science studies disciplines continue to reverberate through academic life around the world. Alan Sokal is nowadays credited with having revealed the ‘impostures’ of French intellectuals – and their American admirers – who claimed to see a vindication of postmodernism in post-classical physics and mathematics. That even the French have taken this verdict to heart is reflected in the pocketbook compiled by Sophie Roux, herself a respected historian of early modern science.
As for Sokal's own latest offering, the sheer materiality of Beyond the Hoax speaks volumes. It is an inexpensive hardback coffee table book but without the artful fonts and graphics one normally expects of such books. Indeed, the book is merely a collection of Sokal's post-hoax essays presented in what might be mistaken for camera-ready copy. Indicative of Oxford University Press's belief in the hoax's intrinsic significance is that it would publish such a book with low production values.
So what exactly is the Sokal hoax's significance? In 1996 Sokal, an obscure physicist at New York University, published an article in Social Text, then the leading cultural-studies journal in the United States, entitled ‘Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’. Sokal had it all planned. He had mastered the jargon and genuflected to all the right authorities, and even declared (genuine) leftist credentials as a former maths instructor to the Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. But he also planted errors that only specialists in the relevant branches of physics and mathematics would easily spot. The New York Times, somehow primed of the hoax's appearance, featured it as a front-page story shortly after publication.
A predictable level of denial, backpedalling and rebuttal followed, typically turning on Sokal's deceptiveness. At the time I was surprised that the editorial decision of Social Text had not been defended on principled constructivist grounds – namely that the meaning of Sokal's text is defined not by his intentions but by the text's reception (see my letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 26 December 1996). More than a dozen years later, I still believe that the tacit acceptance of Sokal's authorial privilege in defining his text as a ‘hoax’ was the biggest mistake made by his opponents. In effect, they behaved just as Sokal had imagined them – namely as constructivists merely in theory but not in practice.
Sokal's critics conceded that one should not discuss the cultural implications of science before understanding the science properly. Sokal was faulted not for what he showed but for how he showed it – his ethics, not his epistemology. Certainly this is the lesson learned by science studies. Thus Harry Collins nowadays rates his sociological expertise by his ability to pass as an expert among physicists, while Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway admit that previous excesses in their own work may have fuelled the (allegedly) anti- and pseudoscience tendencies in contemporary culture that motivated the hoax. Sokal registers and relishes these changes of heart in the preface of Beyond the Hoax, which sets a triumphalist tone for what follows.
The book consists of writings of two types. First, we find virtually all of Sokal's reflections on the hoax, itself reproduced with sufficiently copious annotation to demonstrate the considerable technical expertise needed to see its funny side. Second, we have extensions and applications of the hoax's purported lesson, namely the deleterious effects of relativism, constructivism and postmodernism – taken interchangeably and collectively – on, well, just about everything from the practice of nursing to the political stability of India. It appears that over the years Sokal has been invited to review books in the spirit of immunizing their readers from the intellectual corruption they might spread.
Sokal's rhetoric is that of the Puritan fretting endlessly about sloppiness and laziness, if not outright ignorance and prevarication, on the part of postmodernists. Yet Sokal's own legacy to public philosophy of science, what he calls ‘modest realism’, is, as Karl Kraus said of psychoanalysis, worse than the disease it would cure. Sokal has made it fashionable – even among analytic philosophers who should know better – to blame an epistemological position like relativism for, say, people opting for non-standard health care on a discretionary basis or countenancing a wider range of accounts of the origins of life than the scientific orthodoxy would allow. If this is indicative of vicious relativism, then Sokal should be scandalized by the growth of democracy in the modern era. As a self-avowed ‘man of the left’, Sokal might have recognized the potential collective value of individuals adopting an experimental approach to knowledge vis-à-vis their own life prospects. Instead he presumes that the refusal to submit to epistemic authority marks a casual attitude to the truth.
But even if there is some merit to Sokal's charge that most people are scientifically ignorant, it does not apply very straightforwardly to the world's most scientifically advanced country, the United States, or to the most scientifically advanced Muslim nations, Turkey and Iran. In these rather religious societies, to know and to resist the scientific orthodoxy go hand in hand. Matters of explanation are bound up with normative questions about the sort of life one should lead in light of the facts. Thus one may know neo-Darwinian biology and yet reject it because of the unsavoury consequences it is perceived to have as a guide to life. Sokal may quickly respond that the theory itself is morally neutral, but his real challenge – one that he does not seem even to recognize – is to make that ‘not’ sound like ‘morally indifferent’.
Roux's book consists of four essays that chronicle in quite good detail the aftermath of the Sokal hoax in both the English- and French-speaking worlds. That the French themselves should have taken the hoax so seriously perhaps shatters certain anglophone stereotypes of French intellectual hauteur. But perhaps the most interesting feature of the book is the comparison that a couple of the essays draw between the hoax and Jacques Bouveresse's much more open attack on Régis Debray. Bouveresse and Debray are the ultimate chalk and cheese of French intellectual life – the former responsible for introducing the French to both Wittgenstein and Popper, the latter a student of Louis Althusser and confidant of Ché Guevara.
Bouveresse accused Debray of overextending many of the same concepts from twentieth-century physics and mathematics that had troubled Sokal. Also like Sokal, Bouveresse believed that Debray was simply trying to claim an air of a priori authority for claims he could not prove empirically. However, the fact that Debray was so easily caught in his ‘sophism’ suggests that he might have been, at least in part, trying to dilute the authority of these concepts by drawing upon them in non-technical contexts. They become more usable – and indeed more influential – once they lose their absolute epistemic status. What both Bouveresse and Sokal appear afraid to countenance is that these violations of scientific puritanism, including their attendant misunderstandings, may be the most direct means by which science has impact on public culture.
