Sokal took too much for granted in his account of his prank. Indeed, his claim---that our publication of his article proves that something is rotten in the state of cultural studies---is as wobbly as the article itself.
… [I]t has been many years since [we] published … [general] debate about postmodern theory…. [W]e read it more as an act of good faith of the sort that might be worth encouraging than as a set of arguments with which we agreed.
Having talked to the (real) Sokal subsequently, we believe that … the [critiques] he intended to air are, at this point, rather well known to [our side]. Indeed, they have been going the rounds … since the first postmodern … critiques of positivism appeared over thirty-five years ago.… Nor are these critiques unfamiliar to folks who have long [debated] the direction of the Left, where positivism has had a long and healthy life. At this point in time, we have a vestigial stake in these critiques and debates, but much less of an interest than Sokal supposes. …[H]e appears to have absorbed … only … caricatures and has been reissuing [them] in the form of otherworldly fanatics who deny the existence of facts, objective realities, and gravitational forces. We are sure Sokal knows that no such persons exist….
We share Sokal's … concerns about obscurantism.… It is highly ironic that Social Text should now be associated with a … sectarian postmodernism that we have been at pains to discourage for many years.…
Our main concern is that readers new to the debates … are not persuaded … that this is simply an academic turf war … with each side trying to outsmart the other. [That] would … reinforce the premise that only professional scientists have the credentialed right to speak their minds on scientific matters that affect all of us. …
Why does science matter so much to us? Because its power, as a civil religion, as a social & political authority, affects [people] and [nature]…. [We do not presume to overturn gravity; rather we are concerned by] centuries of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific domination of nature….