Sokal Affair - Background

Background

In an interview on the NPR program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. In their book, Gross and Levitt claimed that an anti-intellectual trend had swept university liberal arts departments (especially English departments), causing them to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of post-modernist deconstructionism.

Higher Superstition argued that in the 1990s, a group of academics whom the authors referred to collectively as "the Academic Left" was dominated by professors who concentrated on racism, sexism, and other perceived prejudices, and that science was eventually included among their targets—later provoking the "Science Wars", which questioned the validity of scientific objectivity. Academic journals in the humanities were publishing articles by writers who, scientists argued, demonstrated little or no knowledge of science. Per the introduction: "A curious fact about the recent left-critique of science is the degree to which its instigators have overcome their former timidity, of indifference towards the subject, not by studying it in detail, but rather by creating a repertoire of rationalizations for avoiding such study."

After analyzing essays from "the academic Left", scientists argued that some of these critical writers were ignorant of the original scientific documents they were criticizing and, therefore, were making a series of nonsensical statements about the nature and intent of science. Gross and Levitt found it especially troubling that academic journals were not judging the intellectual integrity of the scholarship through peer review but were merely judging papers according to their political tilt. Higher Superstition argued that for an article to be published in some academic journals, especially those associated with the humanities, it needed only to display "the proper leftist thought" and to be written by—or to quote—well-known leftist authors.

Thus, Higher Superstition was an attempt to challenge purportedly uncritical subjectivist thought, the validity of which otherwise went largely uncriticized. Moreover, the book served as an argument from scientists that the Science Wars were primarily fought by non-scientists who were pushing contentious claims about the dubiousness of scientific objectivity.