Editing Sokal affair (section)

== Article ==
Sokal reasoned that if the presumption of editorial laziness was correct, the nonsensical content of his article would be irrelevant to whether the editors would publish it. What would matter would be ideological obsequiousness, fawning references to deconstructionist writers, and sufficient quantities of the appropriate jargon. After the article was published and the hoax revealed, he wrote:

<blockquote>
The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of ''Social Text'' liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project" [sec. 6]. They apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to the purported conclusion.<ref>Sokal, Alan. [{{Google books|QkcuQFBXLFQC|page=49|plainurl=yes}} "Revelation: A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies"]. In {{Harvp|Editors of Lingua Franca|2000|pp=49–54}}.</ref>
</blockquote>

=== Content of the article ===
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"<ref name="Sokal1994" /> proposed that [[quantum gravity]] has [[Progressivism|progressive]] political implications, and that the "[[morphogenetic field (Rupert Sheldrake)|morphogenetic field]]" could be a valid theory of quantum gravity. (A morphogenetic field is a concept adapted by [[Rupert Sheldrake]] in a way that Sokal characterized in the affair's aftermath as "a bizarre [[New Age]] idea".<ref name="Sokal1996" />) Sokal wrote that the concept of "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook".

After referring skeptically to the "so-called scientific method", the article declared that "it is becoming increasingly apparent that physical 'reality{{'"}} is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct." It went on to state that because scientific research is "inherently theory-laden and self-referential", it "cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities", and that therefore a "liberatory science" and an "emancipatory mathematics", spurning "the elite caste canon of 'high science{{' "}}, needed to be established for a "postmodern science [that] provide[s] powerful intellectual support for the progressive political project."

Moreover, the article's footnotes conflate academic terms with [[sociopolitical]] rhetoric, e.g.:
{{quote|Just as [[liberal feminist]]s are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and "[[Pro-choice (term)|pro-choice]]", so liberal (and even some [[socialist]]) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic [[Zermelo–Fraenkel framework]] (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the [[axiom of choice]].}}

=== Publication ===
Sokal submitted the article to ''Social Text'', whose editors were collecting articles for the "Science Wars" issue. "Transgressing the Boundaries" was notable as an article by a natural scientist; biologist [[Ruth Hubbard]] also had an article in the issue.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Hubbard |first=Ruth |title=Gender and Genitals: Constructs of Sex and Gender |journal=Social Text |issue=46/47 |date=1996 |jstor=466851 |pages=157–165|doi=10.2307/466851 }}</ref> Later, after Sokal revealed the hoax in ''Lingua Franca'', ''Social Text''{{'s}} editors wrote that they had requested editorial changes that Sokal refused to make,<ref name="RobbinsRoss1996A" /> and had had concerns about the quality of the writing: "We requested him (a)&nbsp;to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and (b)&nbsp;to excise most of his footnotes."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html |title=Lingua Franca |access-date=September 15, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170529184504/http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html |archive-date=May 29, 2017 |url-status=live}}</ref> Still, despite calling Sokal a "difficult, uncooperative author", and noting that such writers were "well known to journal editors", based on Sokal's credentials ''Social Text'' published the article in the May 1996 Spring/Summer "Science Wars" issue.<ref name="RobbinsRoss1996A" /> The editors did not seek [[Scholarly peer review|peer review]] of the article by physicists or otherwise; they later defended this decision on the basis that ''Social Text'' was a journal of open intellectual inquiry and the article was not offered as a contribution to physics.<ref name="RobbinsRoss1996A" />