The Hoax Revisited

The editor of Wine Spectator, Thomas Matthews, criticizes the hoax he experienced by pointing out that it is not feasible for the magazine to fact-check every piece of information it receives.  Indeed, doing so would require it to make the baseline assumption that no one with whom it deals can be trusted.  The author of the blog entry, Stanley Fish, cites Matthews as stating, "every applicant must warrant 'that all statements and information provided are true and accurate,' and given such a warrant, 'we assume that if we receive a wine list, the restaurant that created it does in fact exist.'”  While it would be best if the magazine could check every fact it publishes, this would be extremely tedious. But more importantly, it would probably be unnecessary to do so, because the entity submitting information to the magazine usually has a level of trust which compels him to submit true information.

Unfortunately Mr. Fish attempts to extend this analysis to the Social Text, citing philosopher Simon Blackburn's criticism that when a credible person, such as Mr. Sokal, sends an article to another party, the other party has a legitimate reason to assume that the credible person is not being disingenuous.  Fish uses Blackburn's example:

This entire analysis falls apart, however, when comparing the nature of the two hoaxes and Blackburn's thought-experiment.  The folks at Wine Spectator received a submission that had no superficial signs of fraud.  The paper from the "well-regarded historian" has no logical errors or incoherence in the argument.  In other words, a person with unlimited a priori intelligence, but no knowledge of certain factual details would not have objected to either as a fraud.  The difference with the Sokal Hoax is that, unlike the other two frauds, it was intentionally nonsense, and it fails our criterion involving the person with unlimited intelligence.  Indeed, because it was nonsense, the editors of Social Text could not possibly have understood it.  In contrast, without a few pieces of factual knowledge the article in Wine Spectator and the essay on Hobbes are superficially legitimate, while the Sokal Hoax is not legitimate in its facts or its logic.  The objection that they were correct in trusting Mr. Sokal without any understanding of his arguments is only valid if academic journals are considered merely as publishing "repositories" like the web that will publish anything that they receive (assuming it comes from someone of "status", of course!).  Thankfully, most publications--academic or otherwise--insist on having standards of publication.  In order to have any standards whatsoever, a publisher simply must understand what the material he is publishing is actually stating.  So even if one buys the argument that academics should trust that credible people have checked their facts and are being honest, it is abhorrent publishing practice to publish things that no one in the publication actually understands at all.

This last point, I think, is the point that Sokal was actually trying to make.  It's not that the editors of Social Text should not have trusted him.  The point is that in order to have any publishing standards or intellectual standards one must first understand the things that one publishes.  If Social Text is publishing utter gibberish like Mr. Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", then they are either lazy publishers or their publication or discipline has no intellectual standards.  Either way, they are at fault.  And either way Mr. Sokal proves his point.  We should not fault Mr. Sokal for exposing rampant lack of rigor masquerading as rigor with obscurantism.  Nor should we fault Mr. Sokal for misleading people who should have been smart enough to not be misled.  They should have just asked a physicist.