spoof. Evidently the editors of Social Text felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject. (Carroll) Sokal’s main objective was not to target the journal for mockery but to identify the “apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities”(Sokal Experiment).Sokal set up his paper so the reader could clearly see it was a parody if they just looked into it a bit. After he announced the hoax he pulled off he goes into more detail how he wrote it. The paper was based on quotations that he had found written by scholarly people. Each one was very silly in nature and therefore he needed to only connect and praise them. He did this by “advocating an incoherent Hickey 3mishmash of trendy ideas -- deconstructive literary theory, New Age ecology, so-called “feminist epistemology”, extreme social-constructivist philosophy of science, even Lacanian psychoanalysis” (Sokal Afterword). Sokal uses abstrack ideas in his paper in order to add to the humor of the paper. Sokal also talks about reading scholarly journals of scientist who wrote page after page on things they are still confused on. Sokal formed his own opinion. Bruno Latour's semiotic analysis of the theory of relativity, published in Social Studies of Science, in which “Einstein's text is read as a contribution to the sociology of delegation” … Latour has produced 40 pages of comical misunderstandings of a theory that is nowadays routinely taught to intelligent college freshmen, and Social Studies of Science found it a worthy scholarly contribution. You can start to see what fueled Sokal’s drive to pull off this hoax. Reading publications like this with people talking nonsense about his field of work sure lit the fire. His paper also illustrated the play on words that the writers use. More sp...
