What Sokal Didn't Do

From a comment by James Hanley at Positive Liberty:

But let me ask this question, which I do not mean snarkily. How are we to tell when someone is engaged in reasonable exegesis rather than “house of card” building? I hae in mind the great Sokal hoax, in which he clearly demonstrated that post-modernists were engaged in house of cards building.

I hear this quite a lot: that Sokal's hoax demonstrated that "postmodernism," a vague word in itself, is bunk. This is clearly absurd. What Sokal's hoax showed, if anything, is that the editors of Social Text weren't very good at distinguishing good scholarship from "house of cards building." Or at least that the editors of Social Text are not physicists, and are easily duped on the subject of physics. Which isn't at all surprising.

Sokal published an article in one journal. This proves nothing about an incredibly heterogeneous collection of scholars and scholarship. Could the Bogdanov Affair show that all physics is mere "house of cards building?" Of course not. If you wanted to demonstrate that postmodernists were, as a group, engaged in house of cards building, you'd have to do much more than Sokal did.