The 1996 Sokal hoax succeeded because Social Text lacked peer review

Evidence

Inspired by the Higher Superstition volume, in 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published a cotton-candy mélange of fawning postmodernism clichés and eyebrow-raising bullshit about quantum mechanics entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” And he didn’t publish it just anywhere. He sent it to Social Text, one of the leading postmodernism journals. How did it happen that they accepted it? Sokal’s idea was that if what he had read in Gross and Levitt’s book was true, he could get a nonsense paper published if it “(a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” And it worked. Social Text did not at that time practice “peer review,” so the editors never sent the paper out to another scientist who would have caught the puffery. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in epistemic mechanisms of intellectual gatekeeping and how institutions validate truth claims. — connects to: The Sokal hoax backfired by publicizing postmodernist ideas to right-wing readers — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 263

Broader Connections

• The Sokal hoax backfired by publicizing postmodernist ideas to right-wing readers #qualifies (0.75) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 263