Talk:Sokal affair

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Similar incidents

The section "Similar incidents" bears a notice from November 2015 that it may stray too far from the topic, and invites discussion here. Sadly, in the one year and more that has elapsed since that notice was posted, no other editor has seen fit to comment. Possibly the editor who posted the notice may have got more traction with an RfC. FWIW, I'll give my opinion of the question, and hope to see some other comments here, before ... let's see, 2020? Who knows, I may even start an RfC myself ...

Remove: I think that the list of "similar incidents" should be removed in its entirety, since it strays so far off-topic as to essentially constitute another article. That would leave only the reference to the Category:Academic scandals, which would then no longer be a "Main category" reference. Better still would be to replace that reference by one to a new article on Academic publishing scandals, incorporating the removed contents, also in the Category:Academic scandals. If I can make time – and barring any better suggestions – I'll do so myself. yoyo (talk) 17:25, 16 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Trim: I would support trimming the section for length and only retaining a few of the well-sourced and most closely similar incidents. —jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 00:33, 17 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Remove. If we trim it (or if we do nothing), it will continue to invite people to add more, and it will grow again. It could be a separate article though. I think Scientific publishing hoaxes or something like that would be preferable, since "scandals" would also include fraudulent papers and poor papers that had to be retracted - or were not but should have been. --Hob Gadling (talk) 19:09, 18 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I went ahead and split the section off into List of scholarly publishing hoaxes. fgnievinski (talk) 19:30, 5 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Derrida Cited for "Hoax"

Why is Derrida the first citation for the SA being called a Hoax. The Lingua Franca issue published prior to Derrida's Le Monde piece does that same: http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/tsh.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2603:7000:3902:b10a:484e:8f3a:c810:4ae6 (talk • contribs)

Fair enough, I swapped it out for that source instead. ‑‑Volteer1 (talk) 07:05, 7 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Legacy

The article could use a Legacy section because it is being discussed to this day. Critics of the current university and peer-review system will bring this up on a daily basis. Many detractors of mainstream academia want more experiments like the Sokal Hoax to test journal's integrity. At the same time, Sokal continues to be scathingly criticized by those who point out that peer-review processes aren't set up to detect insincerity on the part of the writer, and that the current peer-review protocols stress distinction between considering an article to be worthy of publication and considering the article to be genuinely good or insightful. 2601:18D:C180:F6A0:0:0:0:718E (talk) 00:30, 30 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with this assesment. especially the current political climate, with a significant amount of the media and common perception turning against any social sciences, the discussion of the Sokal affair has ticked up significcantly (google trends "sokal hoax": https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=sokal%20hoax&hl=en-GB) Wikipedian speaking English, German and Russian (talk) 11:50, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why delinkify?

@AlsoWukai: Many of these terms are not familiar and I linked those. Why delinkify? Greatder (talk) 06:19, 24 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure, but there may be WP:SEAOFBLUE problems here, plus, I'm not sure whether the given links help the reader understand the sokal affair. The point of the quote is to highlight the gobbledygook that was submitted as the text, and not necessarily to explain to the reader these concepts as they are at best tangential to the sokal affair. Theheezy (talk) 09:42, 25 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Criticism of Sokals methodology

I have heard many criticisms of Sokals methodology, including but not limited to: - not having a control case - publishing an experiment based on one data point with a claim of statistical importance - claiming thesinge data point has wide reaching implications on the entire field of the humanities and any criticism of the natural sciences - disregarding existing and new experiments, which have more and/or better data, and a more narowly defined topic of study (which is therefore easier to fully understand and effectively examine) - not responding adequately to the criticisms above therefore: - If any or all of these criticisms have been published by reeputable sources they should be included. - Other studies on simmilar topics, which actually followed the scientific method, and have more than one data point, should be mentioned Wikipedian speaking English, German and Russian (talk) 12:08, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]