Igor Bogdanoff - Comparisons With The Sokal Affair

Comparisons With The Sokal Affair

Several sources have referred to the Bogdanov Affair as a "reverse Sokal" hoax, drawing a comparison with the Sokal Affair, where the physicist Alan Sokal published a deliberately fraudulent and indeed nonsensical article in the humanities journal Social Text. Sokal's original aim had been to test the effects of the intellectual trend he called, "for want of a better term, postmodernism". Worried by this "more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment", Sokal decided to perform an experiment which he later cheerfully admitted was both unorthodox and uncontrolled, provoking a maelstrom of reactions which, to his surprise, received coverage in Le Monde and even the front page of The New York Times. The physicist John Baez drew a comparison between the two events in his October 2002 post to the sci.physics.research newsgroup.

Both Igor and Grichka Bogdanov have vigorously insisted upon the validity of their work, and possess academic degrees in the fields in which they are publishing, although the bona fides of their credentials are a bone of contention. In comparison, Alan Sokal was an outsider to the field in which he was publishing—a physicist, publishing in a humanities journal—and promptly issued a statement himself that his paper was a deliberate hoax; indeed, Sokal published the article to expose the weakness of the journal's editorial process. Replying on sci.physics.research, Sokal referred readers to his follow-up essay, in which he notes "the mere fact of publication of my parody" only proved that one particular journal's editors were "derelict in their intellectual duty". (According to The New York Times, Sokal was "almost disappointed" that the Bogdanovs had not attempted a hoax after his own style. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander", he said.) Baez, who made a comparison between the two affairs, later retracted, saying that the brothers "have lost too much face for to be a plausible course of action".

In a letter to The New York Times, Cornell physics professor Paul Ginsparg writes that the contrast between the cases is plainly evident: "here, the authors were evidently aiming to be credentialed by the intellectual prestige of the discipline rather than trying to puncture any intellectual pretension." He adds that the fact some journals and scientific institutions have low or variable standards is "hardly a revelation". Both matters have, however, provoked discussion of peer-review reliability, value of academic papers published under credentials alone, and adequate evaluation of scholarly work by academia at large.