The Sokal Affair was the central and most highly publicized episode of the "Science Wars," a fracas that roiled the academic atmosphere throughout the 1990s. The main point at issue in these conflicts was the accuracy and indeed the legitimacy of critiques of science and technology propounded by scholars committed to or influenced by postmodern thought and identity politics. The hoax itself, as well as the volume of Social Text (no. 46/47, Spring/Summer 1996) in which it appeared, arose chiefly in response to an earlier science wars salvo, the book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt (1994), which aggressively criticized the "science studies" movement that had emerged from poststructuralist and social-constructivist doctrines.

The squabbles ignited by Higher Superstition alerted Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, to the controversy. Further research nullified his initial suspicions...