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A cognitive bias, meta-bias, and logical fallacy named after the Sokal Affair, where one dismisses an entire field or area of knowledge as wrong based on the existence of hoaxes, bad scholarship, or fraudulent papers within that field. Sokalism is a form of academic Bulverism: instead of engaging with the actual arguments and evidence of a discipline, you point to a hoax or scandal and declare the entire field invalid. "[Postmodernism] is worthless because Sokal hoaxed them." "[Gender studies] is pseudoscience because of hoax papers." The fallacy ignores that every field contains bad work, that hoaxes reveal weaknesses in peer review but not the worthlessness of entire disciplines, and that dismissing a field based on isolated incidents is itself unscientific. Sokalism is the favorite fallacy of culture warriors who want to dismiss entire areas of inquiry without doing the work of [understanding] them.
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