Sokal Affair

The Sokal Affair occurred in 1996 when physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately nonsensical article to a cultural studies journal to test its intellectual standards. The article, full of jargon and obscure references, was accepted and published. Sokal revealed it was a hoax to demonstrate how some academic disciplines could accept meaningless or ideological writing as valid scholarship. The incident sparked debates about academic rigor, the credibility of certain fields, and the influence of postmodernist ideas in sciences and humanities.