An author, philosopher and mathematician walk into a bar…

Of all the unusual research we have covered over the years here on Science Lite – even we baulked at pitching this to the Editor. But pitch we did, and it meant we had to say the following sentence. Out loud. In a room full of people.  

“How do you feel about the inspection of dog genitalia and a feminist re-working of Mein Kampf…?”   

Quite rightly, the validity of this was immediately – and robustly – questioned. After all, this can’t be the stuff of academic publishing can it?   

But it turns out it can… well sort of. Time to take a puzzling meander through the bizarre world of academic hoaxes and what they mean – if they mean anything at all for science.   

Quite a grievance 

It is all – as many a wise person has said – kicking off. In the social science world that is. Over the last few months a hoax of epic proportions has crashed on the shore of something called ‘grievance studies’ – which essentially covers the areas of culture, race, gender and sexuality studies.   

Over the course of a year a mathematician, an author and a philosopher set about an intricate parody of the slack academic publishing practices of various branches of ‘critical theory’.  

What, we hear you cry, exactly is that? Well it is a social theory, derived from literary criticism, which is oriented toward changing?society?as a whole. The problem, as Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian – our spirited three horsemen of the acrapalypse – saw it, was that political ideology was guiding the conclusions of this field while poor science was undermining any real work being done.   

They were convinced that if you used enough buzz-words you could get anything published in a scholarly journal… even if it was distinctly non-scholarly. Which is exactly what they did.   

Before their hoax was uncovered, they had four papers published. One paper about rape culture in dog parks – in which the writer claimed to have inspected the genitals of just under 10,000 dogs while asking their owners about their sexuality – was honoured for excellence as one of 12 exemplary pieces in feminist geography by highly ranked journal?Gender, Place and Culture, which published the paper.  

Oh dear.  

Another accepted paper in a separate journal replaced the anti-Semitic phrases in Hitler’s Mein Kampf with feminist buzzwords.   

Oh dear, oh dear… This really, really doesn’t look good for critical theory.   

Sokal affair And this has happened before. Back in 1996 it took a physicist to break the dam. Professor Alan Sokal got a paper mixing postmodern philosophy with the theory of quantum gravity into a prestigious cultural studies journal. It was praised, then revealed as a hoax.   

"I didn't know people were using deconstructive literary criticism not only to study Jane Austen but to study quantum mechanics," he said at the time. ? 

So, as the humanities suffer idealistically rooted blows to their integrity will more traditional science suffer a similar fate? We can’t see how – science is always rooted in data, and that is ordinarily the sticking point of any submitted work. If your data is shoddy, no dice.   

That is of the highest importance. But, more pressingly, it isn’t the idea that scientists will follow suit that is the worry, more that the critical theorists will attack science. And that isn’t an empty fear. Postmodern critical theorists have indeed suggested that the pursuit of an objective truth – even with empirical science – is always biased, and as such not valid.   

But if this affair shows us anything it’s that careful, data-based, scientific examination is the best game in town for understanding the world and ourselves.  

And on that note, we are off to walk the dog.