> Many people try to portray the Sokal Hoax as a broad indictment of the wide field of everything that is considered "pomo," when really it is at most the indic

> Many people try to portray the Sokal Hoax as a broad indictment of the wide field of everything that is considered "pomo," when really it is at most the indictment of a single journal. Well, the problem is "pomo" being such an ambiguous term for the two of us to be likely talking at cross purposes. There is an outstanding set of academic journal writing in the humanities whose jargon includes casual references to the jargon of the hard/soft sciences. By casual, I mean the relevance of the scientific jargon is left as an exercise to the reader. The implication in this writing is that the argument put forth is of such profundity that nothing but the scientific concepts will do to elucidate it. Sokal submitted an article to a journal full of that kind of writing. In his article he removed the argument and left the referents. The editor didn't notice. End of prank. That is as legitimate a criticism of this journal as getting a fake journal to accept an article written by a python script. It has nothing to do with point scoring. The prank extends to any other "pomo" journals, articles, and books which utilize the same type of causual science jargon. Sokal wrote a book that gives more examples of such writing.