Question is, should magazine editors be allowed to assume that contributors are sincere? Can we defend the editors of Social Text in the Sokal Affair in 1996?
Say an editor gets a submitted article and he can’t make head nor tail of it. He can tell the writer that, or he can just toss it, but likely he’s humble enough to say: maybe it’s my fault. Maybe this is an advance in human knowledge that’s too deep for me, but if we publish it, someday someone will come along to build on this for a breakthrough.
Even if he passes the submission around and everyone agrees it’s drivel, he still hates to toss it. How many geniuses have received unanimous contempt?
Much more fun for us to say, what a bunch of clucks. Think that’s fair?
Your asking if a magazine’s editors should be angry that a credible academic submitted a nonsense article to make the editors look like idiots?
If I were an editor (and I have been an editor) I probably would have rejected it on the grounds that if I couldn’t understand it, my readers probably couldn’t either. But I wouldn’t have thought that if I didn’t understand it, then it must be a hoax.
I remember something similar that was about dogs aligning with the magnetic poles or something and the gotcha was that the journal didn’t replicate the experiment to find out it was all fake. I wouldn’t put that one on the editors because of course they’re not going to re-do people’s experiments.
If they publish the manual for the turbo encabulator, that’s on them a bit. Publishing a nonsense paper under your own name to make a point no one is going to care about is more stupid though.
Then you shouldn’t be in that job. If you are an editor of an academic journal you should have sufficient knowledge of the subject that journal specializes in to tell the difference between a nonsense article and a real one.
I mean I wouldn’t be able to, but I wouldn’t take a job as an editor for an academic journal of cultural studies
There are a lot of factors involved here, most notably that the journal in question was not peer-reviewed. As this 2023 analysis pointed out,
ISTM a bit disingenuous to say that editors of a non-peer-reviewed journal should have a sufficiently encyclopedic knowledge of their subject to be able to detect a skilled hoaxer deliberately trying to fool them. Academic publication is just not set up to do that level of self-policing on a routine basis: all journals rely to some extent on collegial trust and scholarly reputation.
Indeed, we are finding out from recent studies of the pervasiveness of fraudulent publications in scientific fields that it’s a lot easier to get fraudulent results into scientific publication than most scientists might like to believe. A lot of scientific researchers who snickered at “postmodernist gullibiliity” in the Sokal-hoax incident have since found out that they’ve been conned themselves at some point or other by a fraudulent publication in their own disciplines.
Should scholarly publication in general develop better safeguards against fraud and hoax? Yes, that’s looking more and more necessary. Do editors who accepted a fraudulent or hoaxing paper in good faith nonetheless have a right to complain about the author deliberately trading on their reputation and abusing collegial trust to try to get the fake results published? Yes, I think they do.
Sokal wasn’t publishing fake or fraudulent results, he was demonstrating that woo is dangerous nonsense. Good point about abusing collegial trust though.
Well yeah, he was, although with the non-fraudulent intention (subsequently realized) of exposing them himself after publication, rather than maintaining the deception. It’s the planned post-publication reveal that makes “hoax” different from “fraud”, although the deceptive content is equally fake in both cases.
Sokal didn’t really do anything of the sort, though. He simply demonstrated that technical details of a very technical subject such as quantum physics can easily be faked well enough to deceive a nonspecialist who doesn’t know the subject.
(It might even be argued that instead it’s the scientific technicalities themselves that are “dangerous”, because their prestige as highly verified esoteric findings of authoritative STEM disciplines makes it easy for knowledgeable fakers to deceive nonspecialists about them.)
The Social Text editors during the publication process were pretty candid about the fact that they didn’t understand the technical exposition, and accepted the paper on the assumption that such a recognized physics researcher knew what he was talking about, even if the specialist technicalities of his paper were beyond their comprehension. And, of course, in accordance with the usual ethical standards of academic publication, they expected him not to be deliberately trying to trick them.
If the editors of a sociology journal get a submission about quantum gravity, they should at least conclude that they’re the wrong journal for that paper. I don’t expect them to know enough about quantum gravity to see the nonsense, but I do expect them to know that they don’t know enough about quantum gravity.
Any discussion of the Sokal Hoax today should acknowledge that the postmodern theory Sokal was lampooning has largely fallen out of favor except in certain esoteric corners of academia. It’s certainly not something the average undergraduate ever encounters, and surprisingly easy to avoid as a humanities grad student.
Like I said, the editors of Social Text were not claiming to be competent to evaluate the technical statements made about quantum gravity in Sokal’s article.
The article purported to be a good-faith attempt to develop a social theory of Sokal’s research area and related fields in physics. He sold it to the editors as a STEM specialist researcher’s efforts to put a specialized technical discipline into the context of cultural studies.
If you feel that no academic discipline or publication should ever attempt an interdisciplinary study of that nature, then fine. But if you consider these sorts of issues in any way a legitimate subject for academic discourse, then there are bound to be situations where similar mismatches of technical expertise will arise in evaluating research.
Yeah, popular perceptions of “postmodernism” strongly resemble conservative caricatures of “Critical Race Theory”.
In both cases, the caricature is presented as a totally pernicious attempt to overthrow all standards of common sense and academic rigor, thus destroying whole valuable fields of study in the process. In reality, what the fearmongers are ranting about is a fairly specialized theoretical perspective on particular aspects of methodology.
And in both cases, the implied message that is really provoking the insecurity and resentment of the denouncers is something along the lines of “People tend to be overconfident in the social structures that purport to produce ethical impartiality and fairness, scientific objectivity and authority, etc., when in fact those structures are often systemically influenced by bias and preconceptions of various kinds.” Destructive! Dangerous woo! Revisionism! Nonsense! Unscientific! Unpatriotic! Etc. etc. etc.
No publication should ever publish anything that they can’t evaluate. If a paper involves two disciplines sufficiently separated that no one person can evaluate all of it, then the publishers need to form a team of reviewers including experts in all of those fields.
But in this case, the editors had, in fact, overthrown all standards of common sense and academic rigor. Maybe there were other postmodern journals that didn’t do that, but in this specific case, the criticism is absolutely justified.
Ok so that is not how I understood the hoax. That does seem less fair to the editors. I thought it just a content-free word salad that got through purely because it had a well known author. That should have been caught by the editors. Instead it was a apparently genuinely believed claim, that was just utter bullshit. That’s different, it’s not an editors job to make that distinction, if this was a “hard science” journal they could evaluate the scientific procedure used (as well assigning a peer to review who was an expert in that specific area and could say “yes, this is bullshit”). But none of that (I would assume) would apply to social sciences.
But equally this isnt true either:
This wasn’t the editor just accepting it because it was too deep for them. It was was the editor assuming this article and it’s claim, despite sounding a bit dubious, was a genuinely held opinion that deserved airing in the social sciences community.
You could argue that they probably wouldn’t have accepted it from an unknown phd student, but that’s life.
Okay, that’s a not unreasonable take, in and of itself. That’s basically saying that no academic publishing of any kind should ever be anything less than rigorously peer reviewed.
Well, are you sure that you’re not maybe making some over-sweeping judgements based on insufficient knowledge of the circumstances? The editors themselves pointed out that top-research-journal levels of academic rigor were never actually part of their publication model. (Which is why they weren’t, you know, peer reviewed in the first place.)
In other words, this publication was a non-peer-reviewed hybrid of essay, opinion, fiction, social theory and academic analysis, which decided to put together a special issue on scholars’ reactions to the “Science Wars” phenomenon. There appears to have been no intention to limit submissions to rigorously reviewed research findings. You may choose to argue that no academic publication should ever even contemplate producing any output with such low standards of rigor. But I think that might be a bit too draconian for the ultimate health of scholarly discourse?
No, I think mostly what happened here is that Alan Sokal deliberately chose a low-rigor type of publication that would trigger the anti-“postmodernism” reflexes of his intended audience (“Social Text”! “The left”! “Anti-colonialism”! “Cultural analysis”! “Social theory!”). And he fooled them into believing he was trying to make a good-faith contribution to their conversation. And then he spun the outcome to his audience as though he had heroically breached the rotting defenses of the very citadel of academic humanities research. Uh-huh.
So it’s OK that they gave up on any pretense of rigor, because they were already unrigorous in the first place? An academic journal that will accept any nonsense that they don’t understand shouldn’t be calling itself an academic journal in the first place. If you want to be a casual blog, then call yourself that.
?? I’m not sure I quite understand your question. Do I think that a publication ought not to be making any “pretense” of being more rigorous in its publication standards than it actually is? Um, yes I do? Don’t you?
Well, it appears that what Social Text called itself was “a non-refereed journal of political opinion and cultural analysis”. That sounds to me like a sufficiently informative indication of their approach to rigor in contribution screening, particularly the “non-refereed” part.
And remember, Sokal’s article wasn’t in fact just some “any nonsense” “content-free word salad” such as @griffin1977 had initially believed it to be. Sokal had carefully crafted it to sound like a plausible attempt by a research physicist to engage with social theory as a perspective on his own field, with the bullshittery in the technical details of the physics deliberately incomprehensible to nonphysicists.
Honestly, it sounds like you’re possibly just kind of miffed to discover that Sokal’s purported triumphant exposé of alleged catastrophic intellectual corruption in humanities “research” turned out to involve such trivially low-hanging fruit. Wow, a physicist willing to exploit his own reputation as a respected physics researcher to lie about the technical details of his own discipline can fool non-physicists into believing him. Imagine my astonishment.
It’s not entirely clear who has read the paper and who hasn’t, nor who has the best grip on the context. I have read Sokal’s book about the subject, which includes the text of the paper, but it was many years ago. As I recall, Sokal was incensed by the pseudo-physical drivel being published by respected names in philosophy and the social sciences. In particular he was exercised by the adoption and abuse of language and concepts from quantum physics to discuss wholly incongruous subjects. If I recall correctly, he selected Social Text because it had published some of the offending work. I’ll try to locate the book tonight if I don’t forget.
I remember the controversy, but I don’t recall having heard that the “journal” was not peer reviewed or one that had no standards of rigor. I suspect I’m not alone, since it shouldn’t be shocking that you can get crap into publications that don’t audit for crap. There are conferences that accept anything. A long time ago some people from MIT created a paper generator (long before LLMs) and got a paper accepted into one of these. Not at all surprising.
I write a column in an IEEE magazine which is not peer reviewed (to put it mildly.) I have written parodies, and if anyone treats my parody as a paper they deserve what they get.
I wonder what the rating of this journal is in terms of citation counts and importance for tenure.
Suppose a famous poet convinced the New England Journal of Medicine to print his poem (in the letters page, say) and then he said “Surprise! You printed a terrible poem.” Would that prove that the NEJM has no standards?
Destructive! Dangerous woo! Revisionism! Nonsense! Unscientific! Unpatriotic! Etc. etc. etc.