When the May 1996 issue of the journal Social Text appeared, an issue devoted to the understanding of ‘‘Science Wars,’’ the editors became targets in these ‘‘wars’’ in ways they had not imagined. The issue included a bogus article by New York University mathematical physicist Alan Skoal, who feigned an earnest resection on the political and philosophical implications of recent physics research for cultural studies. Asoka re-leaved the hoax himself, and it immediately became a hotly debated issue in academic and popular media around the world. The appearance of the article was not only taken as a sign of shoddy scholarship by the Social Text editors but as an expose´ of cultural studies and social science in general. For instance, Nobel prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg used the hoax to identify what he calls a fundamental ‘‘opposition’’ between natural and social scientists, especially regarding what Weinberg sees as dangerous anti-rationalism and relativism in social science and cultural studies.
Those on the other side of the ‘‘wars’’ countered by criticizing Skoal and calling Weinberg and like-minded natural scientists ‘‘per-Kantian shaman[s]’’ repeating the ‘‘mantras of particle physicists,’’with their ‘‘reductionist view of science’’ .The year before Skoal's hoax, the ‘‘wars’’ had raged over the scientist status of a high-prole US National Opinion Research Center study,
which had been launched as a ‘‘deWnitive survey’’ of sexual practices in the United States
.Here, too, doubts were raised not only about the status of scholarship of the study in question, but of sociology and social science as such. The study had received the doubtful honor of becoming
the topic of an editorial in The Economist under the heading ‘‘74.6% of Sociology is Bunk.’’6 In The New York Review of Books, Harvard biologist and statistician R. C. Continent criticized the researchers behind the
