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by promiscous 959 days ago
Its worth reading the editorial response[1] to the hoax. There's some context that tends to be ignored when this hoax is discussed online. For example, that the journal is non-refereed; that they deliberately publish non-scientific articles including fiction; and that the paper was initially rejected and only reconsidered for a special issue that sought to present the heterogeneous voices of the "science wars".

[1] https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf

1 comments

All the editorial response demonstrates is that the editors understood so little about so many things that they could not understand the difference between an evident satire of a pseudoscientific text and something of substance. Any scientifically reader immediately realizes that the Sokal text was a joke (if someone doesn't, they don't meet my standard for "scientifically educated").
That's not all the response demonstrates. More important is that it demonstrates that the journal is not representative of typical social scientific journals. This context is important because online commenters at times derive from the Sokal hoax general claims about the social sciences.
They're not scientifically educated. They're not a scientific journal. They publish commentary, without judgment, including outright fiction.

Ironically, I suspect that many of the same people criticizing them for accepting the paper would also accuse them of censorship if they'd rejected it. I've seen a great many people stand up for the rights of people to lie and insist that it was obligatory to carry that lie, even if they knew it was false.