The Sokal Affair: How Physicists Experiment with the Social Sciences

I have my own Telegram channel where I write about scientists and science in Russian, and I want to start translating some of those posts that still seem relevant. Together with a colleague, I also run another Telegram channel, formerly Cognitive Psychometrics and now Psychometrics and Psychoskepticism. Every couple of weeks I write short posts there—usually summaries of recent papers. I’ll translate some of those as well, since there is material worth sharing. For today I’m reposting a piece from my channel “Myths and Facts about Science and Scientists” about the Sokal Affair. It’s a well-known and much-discussed episode, but to me it still raises important questions about how the natural sciences view the social sciences, and how social scientists, in turn, respond to that view. So I think it’s worth returning to this story once more.

Parallel Worlds, Unequal Standing

Most of the time, the social sciences and the "hard" natural sciences operate in parallel worlds with relatively little overlap. But occasionally someone from physics or mathematics turns their attention to the social sciences, reacts with surprise or irritation, and then tries to explain how social scientists should be doing research. It is often unclear whether this comes from genuine curiosity, a sense of superiority, or simply the desire to entertain themselves.

There are many examples of this dynamic. Richard Feynman’s remarks about the social sciences are among the most widely quoted. In The Meaning of It All, he recalls reading a sociologist’s paper:

“At the sociology conference, there was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read — he had written it ahead of time. I started to read this thing, and my eyes were coming out; I couldn't make head nor tail of it. I thought the reason was that I hadn't read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of my own incompetence until I finally said, ‘Wait a minute. I am going to stop and read one sentence carefully, to see what the hell it means.’ So I stopped — at random — and read the next sentence very carefully. It said something like, ‘The individual member of the social community often receives information via visual, symbolic channels.’ I looked at it for a while and translated it. You know what it means? People read.”

Another passage reflects similar skepticism:

“But in the social sciences, as in other areas, there is so much uncertainty that we have experts on everything, but none of them agree with each other. Much of it is not a science. It is a kind of pseudo-science.”

A classic example of this dismissive stance from the natural sciences toward the social sciences, in my view, is the Sokal Affair. It happened nearly three decades ago, but I learned about it only recently, and it still feels relevant.

The Sokal Affair

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal pulled off one of the most famous academic hoaxes of the 20th century. He wrote an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and submitted it to the cultural studies journal Social Text. The article was accepted and published.

Had that been the end of it, the publication might have passed unnoticed. But shortly afterward, Sokal published a second article in Lingua Franca titled “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies.”  In it, he revealed that his original paper had been deliberately meaningless and designed to test two hypotheses:

“Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies, whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross, publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?”

He wrote that the Social Text article contained statements claiming that physical reality is merely a social and linguistic construct, or that Lacanian psychoanalysis is confirmed by quantum field theory:

“I claim that Lacan’s psychoanalytic speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field theory… Of course, my article gives no sensible argument to justify such a connection.”

The article itself included passages such as:

“Moreover, as Lacan suggests, there exists a profound correlation between the exterior physical world and the inner psychological world, in terms of knot theory: a hypothesis recently confirmed by Witten’s derivation of knot invariants (particularly the Jones polynomial) from Chern-Simons quantum field theory.”

When explaining his motives, Sokal commented:

“In the second paragraph I assert, without the slightest evidence or argument, that ‘physical “reality” … is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.’ Note: not our theories of physical reality, but physical reality itself. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions can try to transcend them by leaping out the window of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

He also described his intention quite directly:

“I deliberately wrote the article so that any competent physicist or mathematician, or even a physics undergraduate, would realize that it was a parody. The editors of Social Text felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without consulting anyone knowledgeable in the subject.”

The hoax generated a wide reaction. Stanley Fish, writing in The New York Times (“Professor Sokal’s Bad Joke”), argued that the deception itself undermined any evidentiary value of the experiment, since the editors had published a cultural critique, not a physics paper, and were under no obligation to verify scientific accuracy.

Others, including Noam Chomsky and the historian and philosopher of science Allan Franklin, praised Sokal’s critique.

Sokal later wrote several books, including Fashionable Nonsense (1997, with Jean Bricmont), criticizing what he saw as the misuse of scientific terminology by French intellectuals such as Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, and Baudrillard. Another book, Beyond the Hoax, appeared in 2005.

He also wrote about scientific methodology. For example, in What Is Science and Why Should We Care? he argued:

“We live in one real world; administrative boundaries created for convenience in universities do not correspond to any natural philosophical divisions. There is no sense in applying one set of evidentiary standards in physics, chemistry and biology, and then suddenly relaxing them when it comes to medicine, religion or politics.”

Over time, it became clear that Sokal’s critique was directed not at the social sciences as a whole but at particular strands of postmodernism and social constructivism.

Still, returning to his “experiment”…

Strategy and Tactics

As someone working in the social sciences, I share some, perhaps quite a significant portion, of the criticism that natural scientists direct at our fields. I would also like the social sciences to be more rigorous, more theory-driven, less vulnerable to trends or political narratives, and more consistent in producing replicable results.

But even in an ideal scenario, the social sciences will never become physics, mathematics, or even biology. They study fundamentally different kinds of systems. So statements like “let psychology (or sociology, or political science) become a real science like physics” remind me of the old joke about the owl advising the mice to become hedgehogs. It is a strategic recommendation with no actionable tactics.

Saying that the social sciences should be more precise is easy. What, exactly, are we supposed to do?

Authority and Trust

The second thing that struck me is the question of trust toward scientists from different fields. Sokal submitted his article explicitly as a quantum physicist. The biographical note in the journal read:

The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University. He has lectured widely in Europe and Latin America, including at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza” and, during the Sandinista government, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua. He is co-author with Roberto Fernández and Jürg Fröhlich of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory (Springer, 1992).

In other words, he appeared as a respected physicist with an international profile. There was no obvious reason for the editors to distrust him. And many social scientists, consciously or not, treat physicists with a certain reverence, since that is seen as the “real science,” the gold standard, and our own disciplines can feel soft by comparison.

I would not be surprised if the editors were genuinely pleased that a well-known physicist had taken interest in cultural theory. Something like: “This is the breakthrough. This is how the natural sciences and cultural studies can collaborate.”Their official response after the hoax confirmed this. They wrote that the article was “somewhat unusual,” but interpreted it as “a sincere attempt by a physicist to engage with postmodern philosophy.”

More broadly, claims made by physicists tend to receive more trust than identical claims made by psychologists or sociologists.

A 2024 study by Gligorić et al. (The hierarchy of trust in scientists) confirmed this pattern. People trust medical scientists most, followed by physicists, chemists, neuroscientists, astronomers, geneticists, and ecologists. Less trust is given to psychologists, zoologists, and botanists, even less to sociologists, political scientists, and economists, and the lowest trust to gender studies scholars and philosophers.

The strongest predictor of trust was perceived competence. Physicists were rated, on average, as more competent than psychologists or sociologists.

So physicists have a certain “trust credit.” Sokal used it fully.

Problems with the “Experiment”

From a methodological point of view, Sokal’s experiment was anything but clean. He asked whether Social Text would publish a nonsensical article if it sounded convincing and aligned with the editors’ ideology. But since he submitted it under the name of a prominent physicist, the result proves very little.

The fact that the article was accepted does not show that it was accepted for the reasons he proposed. My own alternative explanation is simple: the paper was accepted because it was written by a respected physicist. With only one published article, neither hypothesis can be evaluated properly.

A valid design would have required at least four papers:

1. A nonsense article written “by” a famous physicist.

2. The same nonsense article submitted by a social scientist.

3. A formally similar article written from an anti-postmodernist perspective but decorated with formulas and submitted by a physicist.

4. The same article submitted by a social scientist.

As it stands, Sokal behaved much like the “sloppy social scientists” he criticized. He drew strong conclusions from a single, confounded observation. If he had managed to publish such a paper while posing as a social scientist, I would have genuinely admired the result. But under these conditions, the experiment proves very little.

No one criticizes the social sciences more consistently than social scientists themselves. But there is a difference between critique from a position of equality and critique delivered from above. The Sokal Affair belongs to the latter category.

PS

Another case sometimes referred to as “Sokal Squared” occurred in 2017–2018. Three authors: James Lindsay (a mathematician and writer), Helen Pluckrose (a literary scholar), and Peter Boghossian (a philosopher) - conducted a larger experiment to test whether deliberately absurd but ideologically aligned papers could be published in reputable humanities journals, especially those focused on gender, race, and cultural studies.

Over ten months they wrote twenty such papers and submitted them to various journals; some were rejected, some went through peer review, and several were accepted. Despite the similarity to the Sokal Affair, I see this as a somewhat different case with its own dynamics. Maybe I’ll write about it another time.