Predictably, the spoof chafed sincere pedagogues of such bogus scholarship. Professor Stanley Fish, executive director of the Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, wrote a lengthy denunciation for The New York Times. In fact, Sokal wrote the article so that any competent undergraduate physics or math major would realize that it was a spoof. The piece is so saturated with New Age banalities and New Left gibberish that its deception could not be missed except by someone who began with a deep and corrosive gullibility. Sokal carefully omits any evidence for the outlandish claims that form the very foundation of his satirical thesis.
Rational arguments are conspicuously absent.
The article literally makes no sense. That is Sokal's legacy. But, as Sokal points out in Lingua Franca, it is the editors' duty as scholars to judge the validity of what they publish. Sokal did not invent or falsify data. He produced an immense pile of irrational doo-doo and political jargon.