You can observe without experimentation. This is how we initially found evidence for cigarette smoking causing cancer. And then there's stuff like math, philosophy (including logic), and afaik. major parts of astronomy, which are not experimental, and yet produce knowledge.
Its worth reading the editorial response[1] to the hoax. There's some context that tends to be ignored when this hoax is discussed online. For example, that the journal is non-refereed; that they deliberately publish non-scientific articles including fiction; and that the paper was initially rejected and only reconsidered for a special issue that sought to present the heterogeneous voices of the "science wars".
All the editorial response demonstrates is that the editors understood so little about so many things that they could not understand the difference between an evident satire of a pseudoscientific text and something of substance. Any scientifically reader immediately realizes that the Sokal text was a joke (if someone doesn't, they don't meet my standard for "scientifically educated").
That's not all the response demonstrates. More important is that it demonstrates that the journal is not representative of typical social scientific journals. This context is important because online commenters at times derive from the Sokal hoax general claims about the social sciences.
They're not scientifically educated. They're not a scientific journal. They publish commentary, without judgment, including outright fiction.
Ironically, I suspect that many of the same people criticizing them for accepting the paper would also accuse them of censorship if they'd rejected it. I've seen a great many people stand up for the rights of people to lie and insist that it was obligatory to carry that lie, even if they knew it was false.
The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.
False hypotheses like the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of gravity, or the orbit around the sun? All of which have been denied in the past by philosophers and other pseudoscientists with cultural “proofs” to the contrary?
Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.
