Article Listing

Roughly in chronological order, some of the primary texts on the matter. The bottom of this page has the most recent additions to this page. Alternatively, a ZIP file (78K) exists with these files and an .html index. If dates are highlighted, these are some of the essential articles.

This list may also be viewed by author.

1. Sokal, Alan. " Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252. Available as a single files (138K).
   Spring/Summer 1996

2. A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies by Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca. HTML
   Approximately Thusday, 23 May 1996

3. Response by Andrew Ross and Bruce Robbins Co-Editors, Social Text, on Sokal's initial Lingua Franca article. The Social Text webpage.
   Approximately Late May 1996

4. Robert Siegel talks with Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, about his parody of practitioners of "science studies." He tells how he deliberately wrote an article questioning the validity of measuring physical "reality" using nonsensical phrases, and submitted it to a well-respected academic journal. The editors published it as a serious treatise, not realizing it was written as a joke. (Sokal's article, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," appeared in the May/June 1996 issue of Lingua Franca. (6:15) (Starts after 33 Minutes). From NPR's All Things Considered, Requires Real Audio.
   15 May 1996

5. Professor Stanley Fish's New York Times editorial: "Professor Sokal's Bad Joke".
   Monday, 21 May 1996

6. Sokal's Response to the Fish Op-Ed.
   Approximately Friday, 24 May 1996

7. Social Text's comment on the Fish Op-Ed.
   Approximately Late May 1996

8. " Parody gives Duke Press unsettling dose of reality." Christina Stock, Staff Writer. Raleigh News & Observer.
   Saturday, 18 May 1996

9. Overview of the Sokal article and background information. Gary Kamiya's " Physicist's Slick Hoax Leaves Egg on Face of 'Progressive' Academic Journal. local site.
   Approximately Monday, 17 May 1996

10. Mitchell Landsberg's "Physicist Pens Parody, Fools Journal". The Salt Lake Tribune from the Associated Press.
    18 May 1996

11. Edward Rothstein's " When wry hits your pi from a real sneaky guy" Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
    27 May 1996

12. Analysis from Rush Limbaugh of the Sokal Hoax. A view of the debate from the "right".
    Wednesday, 22 May 1996

13. "Physicist Opens Fire in the Science Wars". McKenzie Wark. [Australian Site] The Australian. A philosophical positioning of the debate.
    Friday, 24 May 1996

14. Tito Claudio's "Serious Prank in Scholarly World; Physicist's hoax essay attacks the field of cultural studies" Editorial Los Angeles Times, Home Edition., pp B-4.
    Monday, 27 May 1996

15. Roger Kimball's Wall Street Journal article: "A Painful Sting Within the Academic Hive."
    Wednesday, 29 May 1996

16. Two letters on the Sokal hoax printed in the The New Republic by Mark Halpern and Alan Sokal
    July 29, 1996

17. " How Real is Real? Reflections on the "Sokal Debate". Richard van Oort. From the anthropoetics page.
    1 June 1996

18. Sokal's reply to the Social Text editors' response. (Both will be published in the July/August 1996 issue of Lingua Franca.)
    Approximately Early June 1996

19. James Bone's " Academics get lesson in pseudo science." The Times (UK).
    20 May 1996

20. The Sokal Affair: Gary Chapman on the case of the prankster physicist. An excellent reference on some of the major issues and actors in the Sokal Affair.
    6 June 1996

21. A commentary on Sokal's parody article in Social Text. It will be published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. It does not represent the views of the AMS. From "Michael C. Sullivan" <mcs@math.nwu.edu>
    New URL: http://nkrs465.math.siu.edu/~mike/Preprints/socialtext.html.
    Early June 1996

22. "A Physics Prof Drops a Bomb on the Faux Left." Ruth Rosen, Op-ed, Los Angeles Times A11.
    Thursday, 23 May 23 1996

23. "Pomolotov Cocktail", by Katha Pollitt, The Nation.
    10 June 1996

24. Letter to the Editor from Andrew Ross, Co-Editor of Social Text on Pollitt's "Pomolotov Cocktail".
    17 June 1996

25. "Post vs. Postmodern", by Steve Fuller, Professor of Sociology & Social Policy at the University of Durham, United Kingdom. A critical evaluation of the Washington Post.
    Approximately 7 June 1996

26. Response by Andrew Ross, Co-Editor of Social Text, to Prof. Sokal's article in the Times Higher Education Supplement (6 June). This article appeared during the week of 17 - 22 June 1996 in THES as well.
    17 June 1996

27. Zbigniew Koziol's Virtual Physics has compiled several references from newsgroups.
    15 June 1996

28. John Omicinski's "Hoax Article Yanks Academics' Legs." Gannett News Service.
    22 June 1996

29. Robin Markowitz's "The Nutty Professor: Reaction to the Sokal Hoax." from Cultural Studies Central
    June 1996

30. R. H. Wheatley's The Postmodern Emperor." from "What I Think" pookas.com
    10 May 1996

31. Liz McMillen's "The Science Wars: Scholars Who Study the Lab Say Their Work Has Been Distorted". Questions whether Sokal "showed that the cultural study of science was intellectually suspect and ignorant of the science it purports to study". Published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 28, 1996.
    Tuesday, 25 June 1996

32. Peter Berkowitz's " Science Fiction: Postmodernism Exposed". The New Republic. Examines what "...it say about the state of academic life that leading scholars were unable to distinguish serious argument from utter nonsense?".
    1 July 1996

33. Co-Editor of Social Text, Bruce Robbins', response to the 10 June 1996 editorial in In These Times. "Reality and Social Text", In These Times, July 8, 1996
    8 July 1996

34. Bruce Robbins, Professor of English, Rutgers University. Co-Editor Social Text. "On Being Hoaxed". To appear in Tikkun.
    15 July 1996

35. Jay Rosen. "Swallow Hard: What Social Text Should Have Done."A Response to Bruce Robbins to be published in Tikkun magazine, Sept. 1996.
    Monday, 12 August 1996

36. Cleaned sources from the SMT discussion on the Sokal Affair. For the original sources, check at the original smt-list WWW Discussion Archive for June. A search on AltaVista tends to bring up this list without the June archive location.
    June 1996

37. Evans Harrell's article written for the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
    19 July 1996

38. George Andrews. "Piltdown Man Wanders Halls." The Centre Daily Times, State College, Pennsylvania.
    14 May 1996

39. Clement W. Meighan, emeritus professor of anthropology at UCLA, comments on "Science Wars" as discussed initially in the NAS Science News List Vol III, Issue 5
    22 May 1996

40. Daniel Seligman's "Deserted by Hillary, How to Click With Radicals...". Fortune, Vol.134 N0.1
    8 July 1996

41. Lawrence Krauss. Chairman of the physics department, Case Western Reserve University. " In Defense of Nonsense." New York Times Editorial.
    30 July 1996

42. Irving M. Klotz. " Postmodernist Rhetoric Does Not Change Fundamental Scientific Facts." The Scientist. 22 July 1996
    10 August 1996

43. Dorothy Nelkin. "The Science Wars: What is at Stake?" Chronicle of Higher Education. July 26, 1996
    Monday, 12 August 1996

44. Ongoing discussion in SALON Table Talk - Books - Alan Sokal's hoax: Did Social Text deserve what it got? This site will require that you log in. Contains extensive postings on the subject.
    Monday, 12 August 1996

45. Sokal, Alan. " Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword" Philosophy and Literature 20.2
    October 1996.

46. "Stanley Fish Visits Lagado U." The news item about Stanley Fish's visit to Lagado University in connection with the Sokal affair.
    16 October 1996

47. Phillip E. Johnson's "Pomo Science: Sometimes parody is the quickest path to revealing truth." A review of the Social Text "Science Wars" issue and The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age By John Horgan
    12 November 1996

48. Frederica Mathewes-Green's " Deconstructing the cheshire cat" Religion News Service. Suggests that "...the Sokal hoax is a great coup for the proponents of reality..."
    13 November 1996

49. On 8 November 1996 there was a discussion with Alan Sokal at Syracuse University titled "Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences: An Interdiscipinary Discussion, with guest Alan Sokal". The reaction to that forum from Robert Vienneau.
    13 November 1996

50. News From La La Land. American Physical Association: New England Section Newsletter. See in addition Steven Weinberg's article in the New York Review of Books of August 8, 1996
    Fall 1996

51. Paul Grobstein's " Two Cultures or One?" The author is a Eleanor A. Bliss Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College.
    Winter 1996

52. James Mahon's " Sokal betrays leftist cause with hoax."
    2 December 1996

53. Steven Weinbergs's "Sokal's Hoax" The New York Review of Books, Volume XLII, No. 13, pp. 11-15, August 8, 1996 8 August 1996

54. Gabriel Stolzenberg's "The Sokal-Weinberg Theory of Reading."
    January 1997

55. Paul Boghossian's original article in the Times Literary Supplement. Steve Fuller's response to Boghossian. Boghossian's reply to Fuller's letter and others.
    Mid-December 1996

56. "Profess Transgression" from Notes and Comments The New Criterion
    Mid-December 1996

57. "The end of the affair." from Erich Eichman. The New Criterion
    Mid-December 1996

58. M. Balouka's "Boundaries in the Sokal Affair." "...This affair provides a solid ground for studying the relations between language and cultural categories, along with an opportunity to examine the notions of fraud/transgression, falsehood, and the role of the implicite part of language." (from the Synopsis).
    November 1996

59. Emmanuel Marin's Summary of articles from Le Monde.
    January 1997

60. Alan Sokal's " Professor Latour's Philosophical Mystifications" from Le Monde. Also available in French
    January 1997

61. Three Lacanians comment on the Sokal hoax. J.M Vappereau, S. Hajlblum et R. Lew.
    March 1997

62. David Dickson's "The 'Sokal Affair' Takes Transatlantic Turn," Nature 385 (30 January 1997), p. 381..
    February 1997

63. Editor, "Science Wars and the Need for Respect and Rigour," Nature 385 (30 January 1997), p.373..
    November 1996

64. Weiner, Ben. Some thoughts on the Sokal/Text affair. Includes "the reference to the semi-famous parody physics article which Hans Bethe and others got accepted and published in Die Naturwissenschaften in 1931."
    25 April 1997

65. Jeremy Stangroom of The Philosophers' Web Magazine mentioned an interview with Alan Sokal in that publication. (alternatively check http://www.philosophers.co.uk - Current Issue - Forums)
    October 1998

66. Unsorted Articles from newgroups, primarily talk.origins, alt.postmodern, sci.physics and sci.skeptic. Includes Rush Limbaugh's and George Will's perspectives on the matter.
    Assorted Dates in late May and June