Back in 1996, physicist Alan Sokal conceived of and inflicted a hoax on, well, the soft sciences:
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a scholarly publishing sting perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether “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”.
The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor. [Wikipedia]
While Sokal became embroiled in some academic disputes over the matter, that seemed to be the extent of the personal damage he sustained. But that doesn’t appear to be true for one of his recent successors in the hobby of testing editors of academic journals on their expertise in their field. He is Assistant Professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. Inside Higher Ed has the story:
A hoax revealing that academic journals had accepted fake papers on topics from canine “rape culture” in dog parks to “fat bodybuilding” to an adaption of Mein Kampf met with applause and scorn in the fall. Fans of the project tended to agree with the hoaxers that critical studies scholars will validate anything aligned with their politics. Critics said that the researchers acted in bad faith, wasting editors’ and reviewers’ time and very publicly besmirching academe in the process: the story was covered by nearly every major news outlet.
Now the controversy has flared up again, with news that one of the project’s authors faces disciplinary action at his home institution. Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and the only one of three researchers on the project to hold a full-time academic position, was found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct. Specifically, he failed to secure its approval before proceeding with research on human subjects — in this case, the journal editors and reviewers he was tricking with his absurd but seemingly well-researched papers. Some seven of 20 were published in gender studies and other journals. Seven were rejected. Others were pending before the spoof was uncovered.
It’s a clever semantic trap, I suppose. By defining the malpracticing journal editors as human test subjects who must, by most IRBs’ rules, be informed that a test is occurring, and be protected against dangerous or unethical activities, the journal editors transform into victims. I suspect Boghossian has stumbled further into the trap with this:
Later in Boghossian’s recent video, he’s featured discussing the matter with his collaborators, who agree that there was “no way” to get the informed consent typically required by review boards from the journal editors involved in the “audit.”
It’s always dangerous to imply your work is more important than the guidelines and rules which govern it. There’s always the option to request an exemption. But this may just be a quibble.
But it’s not clear to me that Boghossian was conducting a real study, at least in his mind. Perhaps this is because I am not intimate with the situation, but the remark from the University makes me suspicious that the IRB had to overreach in order to take the moral high ground:
The IRB determined that the project, as discussed in Aero, was research since it was “a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” The determination letter continued, “The publicly available information about the project clearly indicates an iterative and systematic approach to performing the work, with an intention of generalizing the results.”
Again, perhaps I don’t know enough about this particular situation, but generally research is about the acquisition of knowledge through the testing of hypotheses. But Boghossian, and, earlier, Sokal, did not appear to have the acquisition of knowledge as their primary goal, but rather the testing of the competency of the journal editors, and even the validity of the fields themselves.
In essence, it’s difficult to see how the IRB can possibly insert itself in a plausible manner into this situation.
And then there’s this curious comment:
“The ‘hoaxes’ are simply lies peddled to journals, masquerading as articles,” wrote the group of about a dozen professors. “They are designed not to critique, educate or inspire change in flawed systems, but rather to humiliate entire fields while the authors gin up publicity for themselves without having made any scholarly contributions whatsoever. Chronic and pathological, unscholarly behavior inside an institution of higher education brings negative publicity to the institution as well as the honest scholars who work there. Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued.”
Before we go off on Boghossian and his cohorts, let’s ask a simple question: Whose behavior resulted in the besmirchment of the academe? Was it Boghossian’s hoax articles?
Or was it the failure of the editors and reviewers of the journals to detect the hoaxes?
If the editors had rightly detected and rejected the hoaxes, there’d be nothing more than some ruffled feelings, easily smoothed over through diplomacy on Boghossian’s part. That’s easy enough to do: a few congratulations, some inquiries about their work, and soon enough they’re pleased with themselves.
But several failed the simplest of tests. We’re not talking about faked data, but, according to what I read, sheer gibberish, such as “… an adaption of Mein Kampf …” That these editors didn’t catch it is telling.
This collection of professors have lost sight of the point of science, which is to study reality and discover truth. Judging from their singular statement, they want a safe area where their work is not questioned and they need not answer to questions concerning their work – because their journals are little more than cosseting nurses. If they’re confident that their fields are legitimate, then they should be nodding with Boghossian and calling for the failed editors to be tossed out on their heads – not frantically defending failures. They worry about besmirchment? Here it is, and they’re the ones catching the blame.
But now those editors and professors have boxed themselves in. They may flush Boghossian out of Portland State University, but they’ve revealed themselves as possible frauds and hucksters. There’s no real way out of the trap, and that’s too bad. No doubt many of them are sincere, but that’s not going to help. Instead of defending truth, they chose to defend their turf, and that’s gonna hurt them.
