The first journal that Bognossian and Lindsay submitted their hoax paper to, and that rejected it, was NORMA: The International Journal for Masculinity Studies. This journal doesn’t even hit the top 115 journals in Gender Studies. So, what happened here was that they submitted a hoax paper to an unranked journal, which summarily rejected it. They then received an auto-generated response directing them to a pay-to-publish vanity journal. They submitted the paper there, and it was published. From this chain of events they conclude that the entire field of Gender Studies is “crippled academically”. This tells us very little about Gender Studies, but an awful lot about the perpetrators of this “hoax”.... and those who tout it as a take down of an entire field.

Every once in awhile [sic] it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion [sic], which is why we are proud to publish this expose [sic] of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed article [sic] today. It’s [sic] ramifications are unknown but one hopes it will help reign [sic] in extremism in this and related areas.

...Sokal’s method was to read actual papers, find quotations and string them together. He was not a Markov bot! Sokal writes,

In fact, the article is structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics (and the philosophy of mathematics and physics) from some of the most prominent French and American intellectuals; my only contribution was to invent a nonsensical argument linking these quotations together and praising them.

Which was exactly the point, and what he really wanted to talk about: Not the single failure on the part of one “rather marginal journal,” but the widespread examples of famous (or at least academic-famous) people taking about important questions with apparently no feedback or quality control. Sokal argues at length that philosophical, cultural and sociological studies of science are good things we should be doing; his beef is that people were doing these important things badly.

If you subtract out the shoddy publication practices of Social Text, you still have real substance to discuss—in fact, it’s the more important substance. Were all of the examples that Sokal found really as bad as they first appeared? There’s the possibility of a productive conversation there. If you subtract out the shoddy publication practices of Cogent Social Sciences, you’re left with nothing, because there’s no actual work behind Boghossian and Lindsay’s stunt. Peel back the surface, and underneath, there’s just no there there.

Far from being the “son of Sokal” event that Boghossian, Lindsay, Shermer and fans all salivate for, this sorry excuse for a scandal fails to emulate the one meaningful aspect of what Sokal did.