Over the past year, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay & Peter Boghossian published a series of hoax papers in humanities journals oriented towards the “critical study” of gender and sexuality. Their plot was discovered midway through, forcing them to go public prematurely.
In a journal-length essay explaining their methods, findings, and intentions, “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship,” the authors hold up their publications as proof that research on race, gender, sexuality – along with the discipline of sociology – are defined by groupthink, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, which allow bogus work to regularly be published in these (sub)fields.
Dubbed “Sokal Squared,” or the “Grievance Studies hoax,” the incident has become something of a Rorschach Test within academic and media spaces: Those already disposed towards skepticism of “critical” scholarship on race, gender or sexuality view the incident as damning proof of a deep rot within these subfields, and perhaps with social research or academia more broadly. Those more sympathetic to “critical studies” instead see a deeply flawed and limited experiment — and accuse the authors of overstating their findings, speaking beyond their data and, intentionally or not, feeding into the agenda of right-wing reactionaries. There have been relatively few unexpected validators or critics.
The purpose of this essay is not to adjudicate between these rival perspectives, but to provide some critical context on the background of these types of experiments and this particular study, explore the relevant ethical considerations, and provide a concise description and analysis of what the trio found.
Background
NYU physicist Alan Sokal was disturbed and annoyed by postmodern social critiques and, especially, the (mis)appropriation of concepts from the “hard sciences” into social research. And so, in 1996, he crafted a paper which he viewed as not just weak, but essentially nonsensical: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” and managed to get it published Social Text – a journal which, while not peer-reviewed, regularly published essays by social criticism luminaries of the time. Shortly after it was published, Sokal penned an essay for the American literary magazine Lingua Franca exposing his original paper as a hoax; he then co-authored a book with fellow physicist Jean Bricmont, Impostures Intellectulles, expanding his critique of postmodernism, the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in social research, and the lack of intellectual rigor in “critical studies.”
This was a significant departure from the standard operating procedure:
Within the social sciences, there was already a well-established tradition of sending problematic papers up for peer review, with false attribution of authorship, in order to better understand how editors exercise discretion in selecting and evaluating work. This line of research dates back (at least) to Abramowitz, Gomes & Abramowitz’s 1975 paper in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, “Publish or Politic: Referee Bias in Manuscript Review.”
Most of these have included a control group, tested a fairly large number of papers (typically submitted to journals in the authors’ own fields), and – because they were merely testing whether editors would accept or reject the works – researchers did not allow accepted fake papers to proceed to publication, so as to avoid polluting the knowledge environment. Scholars have also tended to be fairly circumspect in detailing the findings and implications of their studies.
In contrast, Sokal wrote a single paper, submitted to a single journal. He was an outsider to the field he was testing. The paper was allowed to proceed all the way to publication, forcing the journal to retract it when the hoax was exposed. Sokal argued that the fact his piece was published suggests a deep problem with many “critical studies” fields:
” 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 targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside. In such a situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture’s intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the blow that can’t be brushed off is the one that’s self-inflicted. I offered the Social Text editors an opportunity to demonstrate their intellectual rigor. Did they meet the test? I don’t think so.”
As a result of this novelty, and the significance of the journal involved, the incident became a major story in mainstream media outlets in France, the U.S. and beyond. This, in turn, prompted robust criticism of the hoax from Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Gabriel Stolzenberg and others – who argued that the conclusions Sokal was drawing were far too wide given he only published one single (non-peer reviewed) essay; critics also argued that Sokal seemed to be misunderstanding, misrepresenting, and/or uncharitably reading most of the works he (and Bricmont) singled out.
A year after the hoax, reflecting on these criticisms, and with the perspective distance provides, and seeing how other had been using the hoax to make even stronger claims than he was comfortable with, Sokal published an essay striking a more moderate tone:
“From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn’t prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science — much less sociology of science — is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of _one_ rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a ‘conveniently credentialed ally’ (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted), flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions, and attacked their ‘enemies’.”
Ten years later, Sokal wrote a book, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture, drawing out themes from his essays on these topics in the intervening years, reflecting on the “social life” of his experiment, and trying to evaluate its significance in retrospect. Here, he again emphasized that his initial criticisms may have been overly dismissive, and perhaps even insufficiently informed. He had come to believe that much of the work he and Bricmont were criticizing at the time was not outright wrong or nonsensical – instead, the dispute turned on deep (even reasonable) disagreements about the nature of scientific knowledge.
However, in that same book, Sokal highlighted at length the ways in which bad actors — from industry executives to mass media outlets to cynical politicians — have re-appropriated tenets of postmodernism in order to render the population more vulnerable to propaganda and advertisements, and less likely to believe expert criticism of the state or corporations. As a result, in many respects, critical theory may be accomplishing the opposite of its stated purpose (a point previously emphasized by Sokal’s critic, Bruno Latour, in his 2004 Critical Inquiry essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”).
Notwithstanding Sokal’s own evolution on these issues, his 1996 hoax reenergized criticism, skepticism and resistance towards critical theory – particularly within the field of philosophy. In 1997, the journal Philosophy and Literature initiated a “Bad Writing Contest,” highlighting the most obtuse or meaningless selections of the year – generally targeting critical theorists. The contest achieved peak notoriety in 1999 when Judith Butler took the top prize (she was less than amused).
In his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, pragmatist Richard Rorty urged social scientists and activists to kick their philosophy habit (hat tip to Conor Friedersdorf):
“Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy.
Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand—a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal—they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable. These futile attempts to philosophize one’s way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country” (pp. 93-4).
Incidentally, in that same work, twenty years before Plukrose, Lindsay & Boghossian (or John McWhorter before them), Rorty also noted the apparent religiosity of critical theorists:
“The Ubiquity of Foucaldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of the ubiquity of original sin—that diabolical stain on every human soul… in committing itself to what it calls ‘theory,’ this Left has gotten something which is entirely too much like religion. For the cultural Left has come to believe that we must place our country within a theoretical frame of reference, situate it within a vast quasi-cosmological perspective.
What stories about blue-eyed devils are to Black Muslims, stories about hegemony and power are to many cultural Leftists… To step into the intellectual world which some of these Leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which the citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce… in which all the daylight cheerfulness of Whitmanesque hyper-secularism has been lost, and ‘liberalism’ and ‘humanism’ are synonyms for naiveté—for an inability to grasp the full horror of our situation” (pp. 95-6).
There were many more attempts at Sokal-style hoaxes attempting to delegitimize certain lines of scholarship within the discipline. Perhaps the most prominent of these occurred right around the 20-year anniversary of the Sokal Affair: philosophers Phillipe Huneman & Anouk Barberousse pseudonymously published what they perceived to be a nonsensical article in the Journal of Badiou Studies: “Ontology, Neutrality and the Strive for (non-) Being-Queer.” The authors claimed they perpetrated the hoax in order to help dispel the cult around prominent philosopher Alain Badiou (for whom the journal was named). In their view, many credit him a genius because they like his politics, but understand or engage little with his metaphysics – the primary subject of most of his work – which the hoaxers viewed as subpar. Philosopher Justin E.H. Smith (University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot) wrote in response:
“But what sort of victory is it? Here my laughter on first reading Huneman and Barberousse’s text quickly gave way to two concerns. One is that the joke is not so much on the abstruse theory-heads, as had surely been the case in the Sokal incident. The joke isn’t on anyone who is committed to any particular ideology or style of thinking at all. The joke is, rather, on the folks running these pop-up online journals with their ludicrously low editorial standards.
Remarkably, the editors of the Journal of Badiou Studies even admitted as much when they complained of Huneman and Barberousse’s ‘dated’ method of attack ‘in an age when the pressures on independent Open Access publishing include underfunding and time-pressured staff.’ In other words, the editors effectively confess that they do not have the resources to produce a decent journal on their own, and so must rely on the good will of the contributors to not send them crap.
But many people who submit to journals are not in a position to know of their own work whether it is crap or not, and for this reason alone a journal that does not have the resources to weed out crap would be doing scholarship a far greater service by simply not existing. The problem is compounded in the context of continental European publishing in English, where often, at every stage of production, from writing to proofreading to publishing, all of the people involved speak English, at best, as a second language. What slipped through at the Journal of Badiou Studies does not in fact look so different from what slips through on a regular basis at Springer or Brill.”
Notwithstanding these concerns, the next year Portland State philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay pseudonymously published “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” in the journal Cogent Social Sciences; they revealed their hoax in Skeptic magazine alongside a lengthy critique of gender studies.
While many who were already critical of gender studies embraced the hoax as further evidence of what they already believed, the duo were also met with widespread criticism (including from Sokal himself!) – most trenchantly for their decision to target an obscure pay-to-play journal that lacked specialists from the field they were targeting. In other words, they could not confidently assert that their work was actually representative of the literature they were trying to critique – and as a result, the strong claims they made about gender & sexuality studies on the basis of the hoax seemed to be ill-substantiated.
Humanities scholar Helen Pluckrose rose to the defense of Boghossian & Lindsay in the online magazine she oversees (Areo). Even prior to the “Conceptual Penis” controversy, James Lindsay was a semi-regular contributor to this publication — and ultimately served as the bridge between Pluckrose and his Cogent Studies co-conspirator, Boghossian. After some discussion, the three of them decided to work together to replicate the hoax in a way that would render many of the criticisms of the “Conceptual Penis” paper moot:
They chose to target well-regarded peer-review journals specializing in the critical study of gender, sexuality… and race. Of course, a single published paper — even if placed in a high-quality specialized journal – could still be written off as non-representative: an artifact of a single set of bad reviewers. So the trio attempted to compose and place dozens of papers at well-respected journals that focused on gender, sexuality and/or race.
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