‘Sokal
Squared’: Is Huge Publishing Hoax ‘Hilarious and Delightful’ or an Ugly Example
of Dishonesty and Bad Faith?
By Alexander C. Kafka October 03, 2018
Mike
Nayna
James
A. Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian, the academics who carried
out a publishing hoax that targeted scholarly journals
Reactions
to an elaborate academic-journal hoax, dubbed "Sokal Squared" by one
observer, came fast and furious on Wednesday. Some scholars applauded the hoax
for unmasking what they called academe’s leftist, victim-obsessed ideological
slant and low publishing standards. Others said it had proved nothing beyond
the bad faith and dishonesty of its authors.
Three scholars — Helen Pluckrose, a self-described "exile
from the humanities" who studies medieval religious writings about women;
James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and Peter Boghossian, an
assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University — spent 10
months writing 20 hoax papers that
illustrate and parody what they call "grievance studies," and
submitted them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Of the
20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in
process when the authors "had to take the project public prematurely and
thus stop the study, before it could be properly concluded." A
skeptical Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Jillian Kay
Melchior, began raising questions about
some of the papers over the summer.
Beyond the acceptances, the authors said, they also received
four requests to peer-review other papers "as a result of our own
exemplary scholarship." And one paper — about canine rape culture in dog
parks in Portland, Ore. — "gained special recognition for excellence from
its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture … as one of 12 leading
pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary
celebration."
Not all readers accepted the work as laudable scholarship. National
Review took "Helen Wilson," the fictional author of the
dog-park study, to task in June for her approach. "The whole reasoning
behind Wilson’s study," wrote a staff
writer, Katherine Timpf, "is the belief that researching rape culture and
sexuality among dogs in parks is a brilliant way to understand more about rape
culture and sexuality among humans. This is, of course, idiotic. Why? Because
humans are not dogs."
Another published paper,
"Going In Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria,
Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use,"
appeared in Sexuality and Culture. It recommends that men
anally self-penetrate "to become less transphobic, more feminist, and more
concerned about the horrors of rape culture."
The trolling trio wondered, they write, if a journal might even
"publish a feminist rewrite of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kampf." Yup. "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as
an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism" was accepted by
the feminist social-work journal Affilia.
Darts and Laurels
Some scholars applauded the hoax.
"Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published
in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?" tweeted the Harvard psychologist Steven
Pinker.
"Three intrepid academics," wrote Yascha Mounk,
an author and lecturer on government at Harvard, "just perpetrated a giant
version of the Sokal Hoax, placing … fake papers in major academic journals.
Call it Sokal Squared. The result is hilarious and delightful. It also
showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia."
In the original Sokal Hoax, in
1996, a New York University physicist named Alan Sokal published a bogus paper
that took aim at some of the same targets as his latter-day successors.
Others were less receptive than Mounk. "This is a
genre," tweeted Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke, "and they’re in
it for the lulz" — the laughs.
"Best not to lose sight of that."
"Good work is hard to do," he wrote, "incentives
to publish are perverse; there’s a lot of crap out there; if you hate an area
enough, you can gin up a fake paper and get it published somewhere if you try.
The question is, what do you hate? And why is that?"
Reviews of several of the papers "were partly conditional
on claims to have done some sort of actual (very bad) fieldwork," Healy
noted.
And that’s where the question of bad faith comes in.
"I am so utterly unimpressed," wrote Jacob T. Levy, a
political theorist at McGill University, "by the fact that an enterprise
that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some
of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months
deliberately trying to defraud it."
Karen Gregory, a lecturer in sociology at the University of
Edinburgh, wrote that "the chain of thought and action that encourages you
to spend 10 months ‘pulling a fast one’ on academic journals disqualifies you
from a community of scholarship. It only proves you are a bad-faith
actor."
Karl Steel, an associate professor of English at Brooklyn
College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, called the
trio’s work "simply not rigorous research" and described three
objections to it. It is too narrow in disciplinary scope, he said. It focuses
on exposing weaknesses in gender and ethnic studies, conspicuously ideological
fields, when that effort would be better spent looking at more-substantive
problems like the replication crisis in psychology, or unfounded scholarly
claims in cold fusion or laissez-faire economics.
The trio could have reached out to colleagues in physics and
other fields, but instead opted for "poor experimental design." And
they targeted groups that are "likely to be laughed at anyway,"
showing not intellectual bravery but cowardice. "These three researchers
have demonstrated that they’re not to be trusted," he said.
‘Deep Doubt’
Other online commenters said the hoax papers lack a control
group of papers for comparative purposes.
Pluckrose, Lindsay, and Boghossian, reached by phone in
Portland, said the papers that were rejected serve as a control of sorts.
Better yet, they said, consider this meta-control thought experiment: Look at
your journals and the articles they published, and see if you can distinguish
them from the hoax articles. If the answer is often no, then there is your
control.
Mounk, by phone, also said the control-group criticism is
misguided. He called it a "confused attempt to import statistics into a
question where it doesn’t apply." If the authors were claiming that their
work proves that some publications are, say, 50 percent more susceptible to
hoaxes than the average, or that 100 percent of articles published are nonsense
because these seven articles were accepted, then you would obviously need
controls. But the authors "do nothing of the sort. They demonstrate that
it’s possible, with relatively little effort, to get bullshit published."
It "sows deep doubt" about the nature of the academic enterprise in
these disciplines.
Time will tell, the trio said, but they think the mega-hoax will
effectively snuff out their academic futures. Pluckrose thinks she’ll have a
hard time getting into a doctoral program, Lindsay predicted that he would
become "an academic pariah," and Boghossian, who doesn’t have tenure,
thinks he will be punished, and possibly fired. Still, this isn’t the first
time that Lindsay and Boghossian have teamed up to mock trendy
scholarship. Last year their spurious paper "The Conceptual Penis as a
Social Construct" was published in the journal Cogent
Social Sciences.
Meanwhile, Pluckrose and Boghossian are working on a book
together, and Pluckrose is writing one on the 50-year development of grievance
studies and the leftist academic culture of victimization.
If the three are exiled from academe, said Mounk, that will be
unjust and a shame. Through "courage and quite a lot of work," they
have shown that "clearly there’s a big corner of academia where the
emperors wear no clothes." He called the hoax "a more serious
contribution to our understanding of the world than many Ph.D. theses."
The three of them, Mounk said, "should absolutely be celebrated."
Alexander C. Kafka is a senior
editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow
him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.
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