Well, I'm not entirely convinced the phrase "order academic fields by rigor and exactness" is a completely meaningful one. It implies a level of direct comparability that I'm not confident exists. I certainly agree that humanities makes for very bad science, but then, so does basket weaving. The flip side is that science has not developed a particularly useful vocabulary for dealing with nuance, ambiguity, or irony.

I'm also not sure a philosopher/cultural critic without significant scientific training is bound to write nonsense, so long as they actually stick to their field of expertise. Now, it may well be true that humanities sorts are more prone to straying from their actual areas of expertise - certainly a study demonstrating that would not surprise me. But I think that one can write for a very, very long time about sexual politics in Victorian literature without ever running into a situation where lack of knowledge of science beyond a high school level is going to be a problem. It's certainly difficult to imagine it resulting in nonsense production that goes beyond a stray sentence here or there.

And yes, the Sokal Affair clearly reflects badly on the editors of Social Text. But that's why I compared it to getting nonsense published in a newspaper - which has been proven possible from the local level up to major international papers. I also would not describe Social Text as "eager" to publish Sokal's essay. They rejected it initially, and only dusted it off because it was directly relevant to a special issue they were publishing and, probably more importantly for a paper journal, it was very short. But more to the point, Social Text is not a scholarly journal. I wasn't in the field at the time of the Sokal Affair, so any sense I have of its reputation is second hand, but if an un-peer reviewed journal was being treated as equivalent to PMLA or Critical Inquiry or something, that, much more than the Sokal Affair, is damning evidence against the humanities.

I should note that I am also more hostile towards Sokal for his completely and irredeemably awful book Fashionable Nonsense than I am for the Sokal Affair. He, at least, does not overstate the significance of his own hoax. Whereas Fashionable Nonsense is a sufficiently wretched book that I would generally advise people that their time would be better spent reading up on the intricacies of crystal energy healing.