Well, it would arguably prove that the NEJM has no business publishing poetry.
But I think the analogy doesn’t really work. A physicist will naturally expect some form of objective evaluation criteria, some standard of objective truth which has to be upheld, and whatever is publishable needs to confirm to that standard to the best degree achievable (although one might argue how much modern journals conform to this ideal). But part of the foundational assumptions of a journal like Social Text is that any such standard is going to be inherently dodgy, ideological, or arbitrary, so that publication there is not a stamp of approval for conforming to such standards. It’s a bit like the difference between contributing to a debate and playing a game of twenty questions: in the former, goals and endpoint are open, while in the latter, there’s a ground truth you can either approach, or fail to.
So an article in Social Text should rather be thought of as a contribution to debate than as an attempt at approaching some ground truth, and on this basis, it’s indeed on the debater whether they approach the debate honestly. So Sokal’s complaint is a bit of a category error, expecting a certain set of standards where it’s explicitly not applied. You can validly not care for these standards, but you can’t fault the journal for not conforming to the standards you deem appropriate. While it’s fine for Sokal to say that he considers the whole enterprise nonsense, trying to ‘expose’ that nonsense by showing a failure to follow standards the journal never claimed backfires, since that just means that he considers those standards universal, while such universality is exactly what is questioned by the project in which Social Text is engaged.
I think that might be overstating it a bit. Even a cultural studies journal like Social Text recognizes that there are established methodological protocols in the physical sciences that conform to standard theoretical models in those sciences, and provide empirically reliable strategies for testing or modifying specific features of the models. The fact that such protocols are also somewhat influenced by systemic biases in some form and to some extent doesn’t mean they’re ineffective.
If the editors of Social Text had really been absolute relativists, so to speak, on the issue of standards of objective truth in quantum physics being “inherently dodgy, ideological, or arbitrary”, they would have maintained that their evaluation of the quantum physics in Sokal’s paper was just as valid as Sokal’s own, because it’s all just subjective anyway. But they didn’t: they acknowledged that there exist accepted evaluation criteria in quantum physics for assessing publishable work, and that they themselves were not competent to assess the physics part of Sokal’s paper in accordance with those criteria.
So they relied instead on Sokal’s reputation as a competent physics researcher and his good faith as a participant in academic discourse to validate the physics content of his submission. Which, of course, is where they made their error.
Yup, on this I completely agree with you: well put.
The whole “Science Wars” controversy was/is something of a “two cultures” clash, in the C.P. Snow sense, where a lot of scientists were indignant that nonscientists were venturing to make any claims at all about the epistemic foundations of sciences whose technical details they didn’t understand. (Which is different from the more justifiable indignation that a lot of scientists also felt when some nonscientists overconfidently made inferences about the technical details themselves. It’s one thing to investigate scientific practices as social phenomena, but it’s another thing to assume that your social-theory model of science gives you some kind of automatic insight into the correctness of, say, a given partial differentiation equation matrix. And some of the social theorists in the “Science Wars” controversies did get a bit carried away in that regard.)
So a lot of scientists who weren’t very well informed about the circumstances of the whole Social Text brouhaha got rather invested in the idea of Sokal having scored a “victory” for their “team” by somehow “exposing” the whole concept of nonscientists constructing social theories of science at all. Which, as you note, is not really what happened.
Yes, that was probably put a bit too strongly. I meant that claims to the effect of such standards being universal would probably be regarded with some suspicion, not that no such standards exist.
I don’t think either ‘side’ has been especially immune from the expert’s curse where their own competence in a highly specialized subject leads to an overestimated competence elsewhere, so lots of silly things have been said over the years—to generally be snatched up by others as evidence that the whole project is corrupt.