Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (ISBN 0-312-20407-8; French: Impostures Intellectuelles; published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, ISBN 1-86197-631-3) is a book by professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Sokal is best known for the Sokal Affair, in which he submitted a deliberately absurd article [1] to Social Text, a critical theory journal, and was able to get it published.
Fashionable Nonsense was published in 1997 in France, and in 1998 in the United States. As part of the so-called science wars, the book criticizes postmodernism in academia for what it claims are misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Within the humanities, the response to the book was bitterly divided. Some were delighted, some enraged; reaction was polarized between impassioned supporters and equally impassioned opponents of Sokal.[2] Critics of Sokal and Bricmont charge that they lack understanding of the writing they were criticizing. Responses from the scientific community were far more blunt and supportive.
Contents |
Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics:
The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism."[4] In particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing."[5]
The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
Sokal and Bricmont claim that they do not intend to analyze postmodernist thought in general. Rather, they aim to draw attention to the abuse of concepts from mathematics and physics, subjects they've devoted their careers to studying and teaching. Sokal and Bricmont define abuse of mathematics and physics as:
The book gives a chapter to each of the above mentioned authors, "the tip of iceberg" of a group of intellectual practices that can be described as "mystification, deliberately obscure language, confused thinking and the misuse of scientific concepts."[6] For example, Luce Irigaray is criticised for asserting that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation" because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us"; and for asserting that fluid mechanics is unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics.[7] Similarly, Lacan is criticized for drawing an analogy between topology and mental illness that, in Sokal and Bricmont's view, is unsupported by any argument and is "not just false: it is gibberish".[8]
Sokal and Bricmont highlight the rising tide of what they call cognitive relativism, the belief that there are no objective truths but only local beliefs. They argue that this view is held by a number of people, including people who the authors label "postmodernists" and the Strong Programme in the sociology of science, and that it is illogical, impractical, and dangerous. Their aim is "not to criticize the left, but to help defend it from a trendy segment of itself."[9] Quoting Michael Albert, "there is nothing truthful, wise, humane, or strategic about confusing hostility to injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense."[9]
Philosopher Thomas Nagel has supported Sokal and Bricmont, describing their book as consisting largely of "extensive quotations of scientific gibberish from name-brand French intellectuals, together with eerily patient explanations of why it is gibberish,"[10] and agreeing that "there does seem to be something about the Parisian scene that is particularly hospitable to reckless verbosity."[11]
Several scientists have expressed similar sentiments. Richard Dawkins, in a review of this book, said regarding the discussion of Lacan: "We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about."[7]
The book has been subject to heavy criticism by post-modern philosophers and by scholars with some interest in continental philosophy. Bruce Fink (who produced the first complete English translation of Jacques Lacan's Ecrits) offers a critique in his book Lacan to the Letter, where he accuses Sokal and Bricmont of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings".[12] Fink asserts that some concepts which Sokal and Bricmont consider arbitrary or meaningless do have roots in the history of linguistics, and that Lacan is explicitly using mathematical concepts in a metaphoric way, not claiming that his concepts are mathematically founded. He takes Sokal and Bricmont to task for elevating a disagreement with Lacan's choice of writing styles to an attack on his thought, which, in Fink's assessment, they fail to understand. Fink says that "Lacan could easily assume that his faithful seminar public... would go to the library or the bookstore and 'bone up' on at least some of his passing allusions".[12]
While in the book, Sokal and Bricmont acknowledge that they "do not always understand the rest of these authors' work,"[13] Fink goes further and accuses them of having "no idea whatsoever what Lacan is up to,"[14] while himself noting that "even those of us who devote a lot of time and energy to deciphering Lacan's work — become infuriated with him for it at one point or another."[15] The pertinence of this criticism is debatable since Sokal and Bricmont see their work as critiquing the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts, which, as scientists, they do understand.
This latter point has been disputed by Arkady Plotnitsky (one of the authors mentioned by Sokal in his original hoax[16]). Plotnitsky suggests four serious problems with Sokal and Bricmont. First, that they lack familiarity with the subject matter and context of the works that they criticize. Second, that they ignore the historical contexts of the use of mathematics and science. Third, that they generally show a lack of aptitude for philosophy. Fourth, that they do not show an understanding of the history or philosophy of mathematics and science, and indeed display less understanding of the mathematics than Lacan does in some areas. Plotnitsky holds in particular that "some of their claims concerning mathematical objects in question and specifically complex numbers are incorrect,"[17] specifically attacking their statement that complex numbers and irrational numbers "have nothing to do with one another"[18] Plotnisky here defends Lacan's view "of imaginary numbers as an extension of the idea of rational numbers—both in the general conceptual sense, extending to its ancient mathematical and philosophical origins ... and in the sense of modern algebra."[19] The first of these two senses refers to the fact that the extension of real numbers to complex numbers mirrors the extension of rationals to reals, as Plotnitsky points out with a quote from Leibniz: "From the irrationals are born the impossible or imaginary quantities whose nature is very strange but whose usefulness is not to be despised."[20] However, with regard to the second sense, which Plotnisky describes by stating that "all imaginary and complex numbers are, by definition, irrational,"[21] mathematicians generally agree with Sokal and Bricmont in not taking complex numbers as irrational.[22][23][24] Indeed, the concept of rational numbers has been extended into the complex domain to include Gaussian integers and Gaussian rationals.
Plotnitsky goes on, however, to agree with Sokal and Bricmont that the "square root of –1" which Lacan discusses (and for which Plotnitsky introduces the symbol 
) is not, in spite of its identical name, "identical, directly linked, or even metaphorized via the mathematical square root of –1,"[25] and that the latter "is not the erectile organ."[25] Lacan's assignment of new meanings to standard mathematical terms in this way, though supported by Plotnitsky as valid within the context of his work, is precisely what Sokal and Bricmont object to.
While Fink and Plotnitsky question Sokal and Bricmont's right to say what definitions of scientific terms are correct, cultural theorists and literary critics Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt acknowledge that right, seeing it as "defend[ing] their disciplines against what they saw as a misappropriation of key terms and concepts" by writers such as Lacan and Irigaray.[26] However, they point out that Luce Irigaray might still be correct in asserting that E=mc2 is a "masculinist" equation, since "the social genealogy of a proposition has no logical bearing on its truth value."[26] In other words, gender factors may influence which of many possible scientific truths are discovered. They also point out that, in criticising Irigaray, Sokal and Bricmont sometimes go beyond their area of expertise and simply express a differing position on gender politics.[26]
   | Alan Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair - Alan Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair |
| | Review of ''Intellectual Impostures'' in Nature, 1998 - Dawkins Review of Intellectual Impostures |
| | Postmodernism and the Left - Postmodernism and the Left |
| | A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies - A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies |
| | Is this quote from Sokal & Bricmont or from Lenin? - Sokal & Bricmont or Lenin? |
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