What an academic hoax can teach us about journalism in the age of Trump
Summary
As a physicist, Sokal found writing about science to be particularly offensive, and he submitted a “hoax” paper to the important academic journal Social Text titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal was conducting an experiment to see if “a leading North American journal of cultural studies — whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross — [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” They did. A few days ago, scholars Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, in their words, published “‘The conceptual penis as a social construct,’ a Sokal-style hoax on gender studies.” There is an academic context to all this silliness, both in the abstract (various arguments about truth and various “posts” — post-truth, post-modernism, post-structuralism, etc.) But there’s a way all this stuff actually matters for journalism, too, and it has to do with the arguments we’ve having about facts, fake news, Donald Trump, and the people who voted for him, despite all the factual evidence presented that they might be making a bad decision. This leads Boghossian and Lindsay to claim that their hoax demonstrated two “problems damaging the credibility of the peer-review system in fields such as gender studies: Notice something here? The problem, in other words, may not be that we — as either academics, humanists, journalists, or citizens — have lost our grip on reality in some cultural or philosophical or human way.