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BY CHRISTINA STOCK, Staff Writer
Stung by a parody in an academic journal, editors at Duke University Press are reassuring reporters across the nation of their stand.
"Of course the world exists," Stanley Fish, executive director of the Duke press, said between phone calls from CNN, NPR, "Dateline NBC," The Associated Press, ABC News and The New York Times.
The sudden reality crisis started when the journal Social Text, published by the Duke press, published an article that argued against the basic tenet that reality is real.
"It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical 'reality' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct," said the article, which was in the journal's Spring/Summer issue. It was titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.''
But it turns out that the article, written by New York University physicist Alan Sokal, was a joke -- a parody that was supposed to embarrass the editors of the journal, a fact they became aware of only when Sokal gloated about his prank in a magazine for academics, Lingua Franca.
Part of the mission of the special issue, called Science Wars, was to question the foundations of scientific thinking, drawing upon a scholarly approach called social constructionism. This philosophy holds that scientific knowledge is socially constructed, that is, it is informed by the values of the scientists who create it, and therefore cannot be objective.
"Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the 21st floor),'' Sokal said in the Lingua Franca article.
The philosophy, Sokal said, is "nonsense and sloppy thinking," and that's why he wrote his Hermeneutics.
"I'm definitely not criticizing the whole field of sociology. However, there is a trendy subset of these academics who have been questioning whether scientific theories are true," Sokal said, "And that's absurd."
Sokal's article was meant to show the editors of Social Text that their theories and scholarly jargon are so ridiculous and impenetrable that they can't even tell quality work from a sham.
"It's their bad luck they chose it," he said. "I have no particular animus against Social Text. I'm trying to open up a debate."
He said he got no criticisms, only an acceptance letter, though he repeatedly asked for editor 73c ial comments.
None of the editors would admit to embarrassment. But they certainly sounded angry.
"This is a despicable act," Fish said.
"It's an adolescent male prank," said Andrew Ross, the primary target of Sokal's ridicule as editor of the journal, which has a circulation of 800 copies and costs $26 for four issues a year. "We thought he was writing in good faith, but he wasn't."
Ross said staff members were feeling a range of emotions from "anger to pleasant astonishment that anyone would take the journal so seriously as to perpetrate a hoax on it."
Because the journal is not peer reviewed, it is particularly susceptible to such hoaxes, Ross added. Most scholarly journals send articles to experts, peer reviewers, to ensure that the author is making a valid contribution to the field.
Ross and Bruce Robbins, the editors who accepted the 30-page article, a morass of jargon and gibberish followed by 55 absurd endnotes, probably never would have realized the joke if Sokal hadn't crowed about it in Lingua Franca.
"I intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize that it is a spoof," Sokal wrote in his "true'' article.
And in a follow-up article, he wrote, "Could the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a parody?"
Well, no, admits Ross.
When asked whether Duke University Press journals would institute a new policy to try to prevent such a prank in the future, Fish was noncommittal.
"How would one do that?" he asked.