Part 1. Sokal’s Hoax

The ploy was cleverly simple

Critic Bruno Latour (Image from youtube.com).

One of the most notorious and potentially foundation de-stabilizing events to occur in recent times within the humanities was the 1996 Sokal Affair. The ploy was cleverly simple:

1. physicist Alan Sokal submits a paper for publication to the cultural studies journal Social Text entitled: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics…