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Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

by Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont

3.93 · Rating details · 1,342 Ratings · 118 Reviews

In 1996, Alan Sokal published an essay in the hip intellectual magazine Social Text parodying the scientific but impenetrable lingo of contemporary theorists. Here, Sokal teams up with Jean Bricmont to expose the abuse of scientific concepts in the writings of today's most fashionable postmodern thinkers. From Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to Luce Irigaray and Jean Baud

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Paperback, 320 pages

Published October 29th 1999 by Picador (first published October 1st 1997)

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Aug 29, 2015 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: psychology, culture, scince, non-fiction, 20th-century, criticism

Impostures Intellectuelles = Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, c2003, Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (French: Impostures Intellectuelles), published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Sokal is best known for the Sokal Affair, in which he submitted a deliberately absurd article to Social Text, a critical theory journal, and was able to get it publishe Impostures Intellectuelles = ‎Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, c2003‬, Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (French: Impostures Intellectuelles), published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Sokal is best known for the Sokal Affair, in which he submitted a deliberately absurd article to Social Text, a critical theory journal, and was able to get it published.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: یازدهم ماه اکتبر سال 2009 میلادی
عنوان: چرندیات پست مدرن؛ نویسنده: آلن سوکال؛ ژان بریکمون؛ مترجم: عرفان ثابتی؛ تهران، ققنوس، چاپ دوم 1387؛ در 399 ص؛ شابک: 9789643116149؛ چاپ سوم 1392؛ کتابنامه، نمایه، موضو, سوء استفاده روشنفکران پست مدرن از علم؛ قرن 21 م
کتاب «چرندیات پست مدرن»، بنابه اظهارنظر نویسندگانش طوفان کوچکی در برخی حلقه‌ های روشنفکری به پا کرده است. آن‌ها نشان داده‌ اند که «فلسفه فرانسه‌ ی مدرن پر از مهملات قدیمی است» ولی جالب است بدانید که نویسندگان کتاب مدعی هستند روشنفکران مشهوری از قبیل: لاکان، کریستوا، ایریگاری، و بودریار، بطور مکرر از مفاهیم و واژگان علمی سوء استفاده کرده‌ اند یا ایده‌ های علمی را کاملاً خارج از بافت و زمینه ی خود به کار برده‌ اند و هیچ گونه دلیلی هم برای این کار نیاورده‌ اند. نظر شما چیست؟ آیا به راستی آن‌ها می‌توانند این موضوع را ثابت کنند. این کتاب در واقع دو اثر مجزا – ولی مرتبط – در یک جلد است که به پیچاندن مطلب، استفاده از زبان عمداً مبهم، فکر آشفته و پریشان و سوء استفاده از مفاهیم علمی می‌پردازد. ا. شربیانی ...more

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Oct 09, 2009 Jimmy rated it it was amazing

Shelves: general-science, philosophy-of-science

Assessing the usefulness or relevance of philosophy is a seemingly confounding endeavor. It becomes even trickier when approaching a specifically nuanced trend or style of philosophy. Since endless question-begging thought cycles are the genesis of any given philosophy, there is understandable difficulty in posing additional ones that might trump the foundation of that given philosopher's logic or reasoning. To add to that, there is the incessant theoretical backpedaling and earnest apologetics Assessing the usefulness or relevance of philosophy is a seemingly confounding endeavor. It becomes even trickier when approaching a specifically nuanced trend or style of philosophy. Since endless question-begging thought cycles are the genesis of any given philosophy, there is understandable difficulty in posing additional ones that might trump the foundation of that given philosopher's logic or reasoning. To add to that, there is the incessant theoretical backpedaling and earnest apologetics that are such a characteristic reaction to a critique of a particular philosopher's thought. The reason this is complicated is because said apologetics typically entail claims that the philosopher in question was being misread, misunderstood, or read or understood in the incorrect context. They might also claim that the translation of the work in question was a poor one, or that their critics have a very particular axe to grind against them, whether it be political, racial, or class-based. Of course, people usually question philosophers with good reason. These are, after all, academics that make a living out of composing texts full of "deep questions", ones that typically aren't steeped in methodologies that tend to provide reliable evidence or proof. So it's usually the soundness, logic, style, and originality of the philosopher's body of work and thought that tends to be revered or questioned in the end. The point here is that the importance or relevance of philosophy tends to be found in the act of posing big questions in unique ways, all the while offering something new to the theoretical ground that has been covered since the time of Thales and the pre-Socratics. In this sense, science, philosophy's clichéd adversary, often remains silent. What would be the point in questioning anyone’s philosophical system when it's more or less common knowledge that philosophy tends to be a contrived, and narrowly subjective purview of the basic questions of our purpose on this earth, how knowledge works, how perception works, and what way of life is the most morally sound? Well, probably when philosophers purport to understand actual science and implement it as a tool for understanding less scientifically observable phenomena such as the aforementioned types which are so inimical to the concerns of philosophy.

At least this was the problem that Alan Sokal, professor of physics at New York University, seemed to have with an intrinsically French brand of thought which came to popularity in the early 1970’s that usually went by the name postmodernism. Well, it actually went by and/or came out of quite a few different names; structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, etc. It also came to the attention of Western academics around the same time as the academic “discipline” of cultural studies did. Since the late sixties, postmodernity was (and continues to be) a vague moniker under which a variety of culture (in general) defined and questioned itself. Sokal was really just interested in what could roughly be considered postmodern philosophy; specifically the philosophies of Jacques Lacan, Julie Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Gille Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. As an intellectual, Sokal probably found the writings of these particular philosophers to be nothing more than a lot of shallow, erudite poetics that, when analyzed on a grammatical and syntactical level, meant relatively little. Yet as a physicist, he struggled with the fact that the level of understanding displayed in the math and physics that these thinkers were employing in their respective philosophies was flat-out incorrect, when it wasn't simply banal. So in 1996, Sokal devised a devilishly clever intellectual prank: he contrived his own parody of a standard sort of postmodern essay, using the names of the aforementioned French (and Belgian) thinkers as references and source material; it was aptly entitled Transgressing the Boundaries; Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Sokal submitted this essay to a prestigious American cultural studies journal by the name of Social Text. His fake essay was immediately lauded with praise from some of the intellectuals mentioned in it, as well as a number of American academics and philosophers who were influenced by the prominent postmodern thinkers. Naturally, at the realization that the essay was a parody, intended to reveal the lack of intellectual rigor on the part of the editors of Social Text, as well as that of cultural studies departments all over the world, the editors claimed that Sokal seemed like an earnest scientific academic interested bringing the disciplines of the natural sciences and the social sciences closer together, furthermore that the writing was bad and that, “its status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document." What Sokal’s intentions truly were, above all else, was to illustrate the fraudulence of postmodern approaches to critical thinking by submitting a sociological essay on the academic divide between the hard sciences and the social sciences - an essay that did so by flattering its references, using deliberately obscure and meaningless language, and making false scientific claims – he could show how this style of thinking was “fashionable nonsense” that caused more harm than good. In other words, these thinkers were frauds, through purporting an understanding of science that they didn’t possess, and possibly in various other aspects of their respective philosophies.

A year later, Sokal collaborated with Jean Bricmont, a Belgian theoretical physicist, on a book covering the research and motivation for the Social Text essay entitled Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. In it, the two run through the list of names, with fully researched analysis of writings illustrative of particular instances in which erroneous claims about science are made. The two also attempt to explain, to a popular audience, some of the theoretical arguments and discussions that have occurred throughout the history of the philosophy or sociology of science; thinkers such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyeraband are taken into account. Sokal also devotes an entire chapter to the so-called “science wars” and offers suggestions, from a scientists point of view, of ways in which the two disciplines would benefit from a sort of academic synthesis. Much like Edward O. Wilson’s best-selling book Consilience, Fashionable Nonsense reveals that in fact there wouldn’t really be much need for philosophers in this hypothetical scenario. Or rather, if social scientists were still needed, their services would be required in a more poetic context, rather than one of research, or merely that of developing theories and methodologies for use in the field.

Certain aspects of Fashionable Nonsense offer complications for the general reader uninitiated in technical physics, math, and science. On the one hand, if the technical explanations are over their head, much of the argument probably won’t make a great deal of sense. Or, if one is of an intellect not steeped in technical science, but more than capable of gleaning the thrust of the debate and controversy, then a little blind faith is required in order to trust Sokal’s explanations. Still, any rational person should be able to see that it’s quite unlikely that a professor of physics would utilize erroneous math and physics in order to debunk the fraudulence inherent in other writers who do the same. Not only would this be immediately revealed by even more outraged scientists, but what exactly would be the point?

Of course, things continue to seem even more complicated thanks to something called epistemic relativism. This is the school of thought that suggests that any mode of knowing – usually what people refer to as an objective truth – is just as good as the next. In other words, what is commonly implied is that western science is just as solidly objective and reliable as tribal myth. Sokal discusses Feyeraband and his anarchic views on scientific method in discourse on the plausibility of epistemic relativism. Again, to the skeptical lay-reader, the entire argument might sound like two sides vociferously attempting to persuade and convince a neutral party. Such is the essence of discussion and argument really. To further complicate things, the Strong Programme is discussed as well, which makes the claim that “true” and “false” scientific theories should be treated equally, and that social status and culture play a role in influencing different scientific theories. Or to put it rather bluntly, the Strong Programme basically states that there is no such thing as observable rationality or reason. In a sense, epistemic relativism lies at the heart of what Sokal and Bricmont are criticizing. This sort of philosophical vagueness, coupled with an unfulfilled, question-begging prophecy are characteristic of what Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction attempted to do with language and writing. In fact, it’s quite characteristic of the analytical approach that most of the authors who are discussed in Fashionable Nonsense rely on in order to excuse the ostensible lack of meaning in their writings.

There are some gargantuan debates and intellectual controversies discussed in Sokal and Bricmont’s incredibly layered book, which is why it should encourage the reader to investigate the verisimilitude of certain philosophies. The two physicists are very much aware of the apologetic arguments that might keep philosophical hucksters theoretically safe, but the basic question of why one would bandy about a very technical and specific scientific language to meet the ends of their philosophical means, remains inadequately answered. It most likely will for some time. The responses to Sokal’s Hoax from the writers in question were predictably incredulous. If it wasn’t the likes of Julie Kristeva accusing them of spreading “disinformation as part of an anti-French, politico-economic campaign”, it was Robert Maggiori in Libération saying that, “Sokal and Bricmont are Humorless scientific pedants who correct grammatical errors in love letters”. Along with this, accusations of right-wing politics and conservatism were made.

In the face of such abysmal intellectual denial, scientific reason can only repeatedly make the claim that there are such things as facts, and that they are observable. This has much to do with why scientists aren’t attached to specific theories for terribly long; these theories are created with the intention of being exploded or discarded if they turn out to serve as unstable groundwork for method. Fashionable Nonsense is polemical, but only in the sense that Sokal feels an obligation to his notions of truth and fact as a scientist. He repeatedly mentions the point that these writers willfully chose to include specifically scientific terminology in their writings. As he mentions in the book, science doesn’t exactly have a monopoly on words such as chaos, velocity, or speed, but when used along with other well recognized terms clearly alluding to specific scientific facts, they cannot be construed as metaphors. Sokal set out to reveal how one aspect of postmodernism was fraudulent, and in doing so seemed to invariably reduce that particular style of thinking and writing to what it truly is: superficial erudition garnished with a lot of fancy-sounding technical language. He wasn't arguing against the usefulness or relevance of the social sciences, rather, he was arguing against pretentious nonsense promulgated as fact under the guise of science.
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Jul 08, 2010 J.G. Keely marked it as to-read

Shelves: non-fiction, to-buy-or-borrow, lit-crit, science

Why is it that whenever a theory of social science is found to be flawed, and loses the respect of the scientific community, it manages to find new success as a branch of literary criticism? Freud's theories are by this point laughable, and yet they persist as viable modes of literary analysis. Marx's tautological economic theories have gone the same way. If I had to predict, I'd say Chomsky is up next.

There is a point at which ahistoricism and structuralism are willing to accept any method, any Why is it that whenever a theory of social science is found to be flawed, and loses the respect of the scientific community, it manages to find new success as a branch of literary criticism? Freud's theories are by this point laughable, and yet they persist as viable modes of literary analysis. Marx's tautological economic theories have gone the same way. If I had to predict, I'd say Chomsky is up next.

There is a point at which ahistoricism and structuralism are willing to accept any method, any idea, any theory, and clasp it close, independent of whether it has any worth. Many literary critics seem to judge an idea good not due to its merit, but its novelty and outrageousness.

Alan Sokal would go further and say that the upper echelon of Literary criticism, the tenured professors, the peer-reviewed journals, and the most successful critics are more interested in vague, garbled nonsense than in really sound or revolutionary ideas. Which is why he famously submitted an essay filled with jargon terms, popular ideas, and quotes from the right people, but comically nonsensical and scientifically childish, and of course it was accepted, printed and lauded.

This book, like much of Sokal's work, is aimed at debunking the modern powerhouses of literary criticism, by the simple act of pointing out that their rhetoric, definitions, and understanding of the scientific principles they invoke are entirely flawed and amount to nonsense.

Even to those of us without Sokal's scientific background, it quickly becomes clear that Lacan and Derrida (and to a lesser extent, Foucault and Barthes) are just sensationalist, erudite nonsense, and that they are only quoted so often because little they say has any foundation in reality, and hence, they can be used to support or refute anything.

Hopefully the bloated, meandering heads of academia will soon be shamed into doing real work by the efforts of men like Sokal. It would be nice to return to some semblance of reason and rhetoric in the Lit Crit field.

Hopefully I'll find a copy of this book to go through, myself. Though Dawkins isn't my favorite, I have to thank him for cluing me into Sokal, and to the Postmodernism Generator, which creates random postmodernist papers whenever you hit refresh, and which are surprisingly difficult to tell from the work of real postmodernists. ...more

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Nov 14, 2008 Eric_W rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy

In 1996, Alan Sokal submitted an article to Social Text entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." If that title means little to you, that's OK because the article was, in fact, nonsense. It was part of an elaborate hoax and parody that Sokal was perpetrating on those who subscribe to "epistemic relativism," i.e., the belief that modern science is nothing more than myth, a "social construction."

This philosophy is particularly endemic to mod In 1996, Alan Sokal submitted an article to Social Text entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." If that title means little to you, that's OK because the article was, in fact, nonsense. It was part of an elaborate hoax and parody that Sokal was perpetrating on those who subscribe to "epistemic relativism," i.e., the belief that modern science is nothing more than myth, a "social construction."

This philosophy is particularly endemic to modern French philosophers who have attempted to appropriate the language of science in order to validate some of their thinking without understanding the science itself. Sokal, a renowned physicist, by filling his article with scientific balderdash and liberally citing the editors of Social Text (David Lodge's Law of Academic Life says "It is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.") had his article gleefully accepted, revealing the ignorance and vacuity of the pseudo-thinkers.

Fashionable Nonsense expands the revelations behind the parody and thoroughly reveals the emperor's nakedness. The authors, by analysis of several postmodernist French philosophers, show how they misuse, misrepresent, and misunderstand basic science. Sokal and Bricmont disclose how "deliberately obscure language" is used to hide confused thinking, that often if something is difficult to understand in the writings of these philosophers it's because they aren't saying anything.

Postmodernism, a trend fashionable in some social science and humanist circles, adopts the view that rejects the rationalism of the enlightenment and proposes that science is a "social construction" or "narration" and that there is no need to look for empirical evidence.
Unfortunately, much of postmodernist "thinking" has become associated with the left, a linkage Sokal abhors. He wants to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. As Michael Albert, wrote for Z Magazine, "There is nothing truthful, wise, human, or strategic about confusing hostility with injustice and oppression, which is leftist, with hostility to science and rationality, which is nonsense."

A follow-up article, published as an appendix to the book, was submitted to Social Text but was rejected as not meeting their intellectual standards! It must have been understandable and made sense. In it Sokal wrote, "I confess that I am an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them."

This book is a delightful attack on intellectual confusion and a ringing call to obfuscate obfuscation.

reposted with minor editing 1/15/10 ...more

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Mar 04, 2015 Nostalgebraist rated it liked it

Shelves: nonfic-misc

This is a book that serves its modest purpose reasonably well, but after finishing it, I was left mostly wondering whether it was a purpose that needed to be served.

First, a note on context -- this book was co-authored by Alan Sokal, the perpetrator of the (in)famous Sokal Hoax. I won't describe or weigh in on the hoax here, since there has been a lot said about it elsewhere (this article by Michael Bérubé is a good even-handed retrospective), and also because this book is a much less inherently ...more

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Sep 10, 2007 Lane Wilkinson rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: anyone sick of the post-modern hegemony

Shelves: postmodernism

"We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously"

This quote, from psychoanalyst Félix Guat "We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously"

This quote, from psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, is typical of the obfuscation that runs amok in contemporary humanities; an obfuscation called into question some years ago by the famous Sokal Affair and re-invigorated by Sokal and Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense .

There is a reason that science and the humanities are administered by different departments in (almost) every university. Common-sense would dictate that physicists are not in the habit of teaching courses on Shakespeare, and English professors are not in the habit of teaching quantum mechanics. However, as Sokal shows us, the latter is no longer true in all cases.

As a scientist, Sokal does not overstep his own areas of expertise, while showing that po-mo academics routinely overstep theirs. Keeping strictly to the scientific claims (and subsequent abuses) of several famous po-mo academics, Sokal shows both that post-modernism has created a parody of intellectual rigor, and that the post-modern methodology is in danger of undermining the once proud study of arts and letters.

The results of Sokal's critique are often hilarious. That the theories of Irigiray, Guattari, Deleuze, et. al. are supposedly malleable enough to be applied to any topic whatsoever is almost a running gag. To wit, Sokal's discussion of Irigiray's bizarre combination of gender studies, feminist ethics, and special relativity is a comedic highpoint (E=mc^2 is a sexist equation?!). The underlying message is, of course, that po-mo theorists are intellectually dishonest insofar as they purport that a scientific theory is just another 'text' to be deconstructed. That 'special relativity' and 'cultural relativism' share the same etymological root does not mean they share the same epistemological foundation. The equivocation is blatant enough to be funny; though Sokal shows that we should temper our laughter.

If Sokal is correct, the shibboleths 'hermeneutics', 'Lacanian' and 'desituationism' are sufficient for advanced degrees from premier universities, and this has lead to a crisis. This crisis is not so much a 'dumbing-down' of the humanities, but, rather, that the humanities are in danger of losing credibility. By making scientific claims from outside of the scientific method, post-modernists are coming across as the ivory-tower equivalents of Ann Coulter: incredibly bright but misguided to the point of parody. The credibility gap is perpetuated when po-mo academics couch their usually non-existent 'theories' in language so dense and difficult to read that those who cannot understand are looked down upon as intellectual inferiors and those who do understand are lying. In sum, post-modern theories are the epitome of the academic foolishness described by Pope: "Such laboured nothings in so strange a style, / Amaze th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile." Unfortunately, if Sokal is correct about the humanities, a majority of English majors may not even know who Pope is.
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Mar 14, 2011 Hadrian rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, philosophy, nonfiction

As I've only taken a few semesters of the 'hard sciences' at the university level, I have very little to add to this discussion on the use of science in philosophy.

Although I enjoyed the ribbing of academic obscurantism, my impression of the original 'Sokal Affair', where he submitted a gibberish article to an academic journal, seems to be based on a case of sloppy peer-review, which is an ongoing issue.

http://www.nature.com/news/faked-peer...

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Jan 28, 2008 Dave Brick rated it really liked it

If you've ever had to read the postmodernist writings of Focault, Derrida, Lacan, or any of their innumerable disciples and come away with only the vaguest idea as to their meaning, you might want to read this book. But if like me, you regularly have to encounter postmodernism in the flesh and just don't get it, this is a must-read. It will reassure you that incoherent sentences mixed shameless displays of (false) erudition--although extremely humorous--cannot change the fact that reason, eviden ...more

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Oct 10, 2014 Mark rated it it was amazing

I think it's crucial that respectable academics stop purveying semantically vacuous nonsense that egregiously expropriates terms that have precise scientific meanings, with demonstrably no understanding whatever of those meanings, for the purpose of furthering an atmosphere of moral equivalency for sense and nonsense. (I use the word "respectable" contextually: the perpetrators of this furtherance of discursive entropy are respected by many of the academics within their own fields.)

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Dec 22, 2007 Jafar rated it really liked it

This book started off as a prank when Sokal sent an article to Social Text which was full of nonsense, but used pomo's vague and pompous style and confirmed some of their social/political beliefs. The editors, excited that a physicist has converted to their side, promptly published the article. Once caught, they refused to publish the subsequent paper in which Sokal explained the reason for his prank and how absurd the first article had been.

Richard Dawkins said it best in one of his essays in This book started off as a prank when Sokal sent an article to Social Text which was full of nonsense, but used pomo's vague and pompous style and confirmed some of their social/political beliefs. The editors, excited that a physicist has converted to their side, promptly published the article. Once caught, they refused to publish the subsequent paper in which Sokal explained the reason for his prank and how absurd the first article had been.

Richard Dawkins said it best in one of his essays in A Devil's Chaplin. These postmodern/poststructuralist/deconstructionist/whatever writers have "physics complex". Physics is a subject that is genuinely very difficult. Most of the things that the pomo camp is trying to say, if you have the patience to go through their pretentious and convoluted writing, are quite ordinary and can be said much more simply. (I've certainly had this impression from the few pomo books and articles that I had the patience to go through.) To give their ideas the impression of being involved and complicated, and impress their peers and readers and satisfy their vanity, they resort to mixing pomposity with nonsense. It used to be quite fashionable, and fortunately it's going out of fashion.

One particular form of their pretentiousness is their (ab)use of scientific concepts and jargon in their writing. They not only don't understand the subject, a lot of them are against science and rationality and deny the very existence of any objective truth - which makes you wonder why they want to employ (pseudo)science in their arguments. The book has a lot of such examples from various prominent pomo thinkers. My favorite ones are Luce Irigaray's analysis of why Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is a sexist equation; and Jaques Lacan's assertion that penis represents square root of minus one (only a deconstructionist psychoanalyst can come up with such a genius idea).

As for the prank itself - vanity is something that afflicts all of us, including scientists. The prominent neuroscientist Ramachandran (Phantoms of the Brain) sent an article to a magazine specializing in evolutionary biology. He compiled a bunch of scientific-sounding arguments to prove why it make evolutionary sense for men to prefer blond women over brunettes. (Has such preference among men been statistically proven? I personally cast my vote for brunettes.) The editors got too excited that such a famous neuroscientist has discovered yet another minor detail about our nature to be the result of evolution and natural selection. They gladly published the article, and then Ramachandran told them, Hahaha, that was just a joke!
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Apr 23, 2014 Aurelien rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: debunking, philosophy

One will never be grateful enough to Sokal and Bricmont for pointing fingers towards a naked emperor. Being French, I know far too well how postmodernism/poststructuralism/social constructivism (or whatever other stupid name a certain intelligentsia wants to call itself) damaged a whole field of academics and, as such, modern intellectual life and debate. Stemming from the like of Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio and co (to name just the ones targeted here) there One will never be grateful enough to Sokal and Bricmont for pointing fingers towards a naked emperor. Being French, I know far too well how postmodernism/poststructuralism/social constructivism (or whatever other stupid name a certain intelligentsia wants to call itself) damaged a whole field of academics and, as such, modern intellectual life and debate. Stemming from the like of Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio and co (to name just the ones targeted here) there is indeed a vague intellectual Zeitgeist corrupting a whole part of modern societies, one based on subjectivism, relativism and, all in all, a reject of the rationalism of the Enlightenment that needed to be addressed. If the impact of these intellectuals upon political issues, especially via their influence on part of the Left, is well known (cultural relativism, multiculturalism, political correctness etc.) politics however is not what Sokal and Bricmont are here interested in. Both scientists by trade, specialists in mathematics and physics, they are in fact coming back on their now famous hoax (the so-called 'Sokal Affair') to better expose how fallacious such philosophies are. Analysing the texts of some of these 'thinkers' that they quote at large (and gosh! what an heavy and pompous nausea their prose is!) they show that, their extensive use of scientific terminology (drawn from topology, chaos theory, quantum mechanics, relativity etc.) applied to fields of social sciences (psychoanalysis, linguistics, political philosophy etc.) is not only irrelevant but, more often than not based on a complete ignorance and/or misunderstanding of the hard sciences involved! Hence nonsensical verbiage, demonstrating that such philosophies are nothing more than 'mystification, deliberately obscure language, confused thinking, and the misuse of scientific concepts', the authors dismiss them for what they are: intellectual imposture and frauds. Of course, this is not an attack on Humanities as a whole, French academias, nor against the political Left (Sokal, deliciously, even actually define himself as 'an old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class')! Such reading, beyond its denunciation of ignorant and incompetent nonsense, serves on the contrary as a warning against that so called 'postmodern Zeitgeist', a dangerous and irresponsible way of thinking in a world prey to obscurantism, fanaticism and superstition. In fact, even the causes these philosophical stances are supposed to help (feminism, gay rights, anti racism) would be far better off without such imbecilities! This book is thus a pure delight for anyone fed up and annoyed by pompous and farcical 'philosophers' being, dangerously enough, taken seriously among some pedantic leftist circles. Point fingers and laugh: the emperor at long last has been revealed naked. ...more

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Jul 27, 2016 Harry Doble rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy, postmodernism, science, my-personal-canon

I give Fashionable Nonsense five stars because for all its shortcomings, it achieves exactly what Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont set out to do. This book is a few things: a love letter to science, a critique of bad academic writing, a plea for clarity and reason in the political left. But to understand what this book is, you also have to understand what it is not. Contrary to popular belief, this is not an attack on postmodernism and the humanities at large by arrogant scientists who simply don' I give Fashionable Nonsense five stars because for all its shortcomings, it achieves exactly what Alan Sokal & Jean Bricmont set out to do. This book is a few things: a love letter to science, a critique of bad academic writing, a plea for clarity and reason in the political left. But to understand what this book is, you also have to understand what it is not. Contrary to popular belief, this is not an attack on postmodernism and the humanities at large by arrogant scientists who simply don't get it. The preface and introduction to my edition make this clear, and the care Sokal and Bricmont employ in defining terms and not overstepping their boundaries of expertise is commendable. This book is extremely charitible to the subject of its critique, in fact, but charity can only be taken so far. What we have here is a catalogue of some of the most blatantly stupid and lazy things ever written by an academic of some prestige, all of which have in common the tendency to invoke scientific and mathematic concepts the author does not understand. This is where Sokal and Bricmont step in, to offer commentary on misuses and explain the underlying concepts in layman's terms the best they can where they see them. There are chapters on Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. I have read some criticism that Sokal and Bricmont's approach is little more than quoting a block of text from these writers and offering a short remark with some footnotes, but for their purposes, this is fine. It is the chapter on Epistemic Relativism in the Philosophy of Science that is the true highlight for me. Sokal and Bricmont help the reader contextualise several relativist threads within the philosophy of science that are frequently used to undermine its authority, namely underdetermination, the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and the strong programme of sociology. I found their argument in this chapter an exhilarating defense of science as practice. There are also chapters on chaos theory and Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which are similarly terrific. Sokal's original essay on how gravity is a social construct is also included here with notes, and if you are anything like me, there is delight to be had in combing over it to see how he exploited common tropes of postmodernist writing for his prank. Fashionable Nonsense is a timely and necessary book, one I would recommend to both students of the sciences and humanities alike. ...more

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Feb 11, 2009 Worthless Bum rated it really liked it

Shelves: sc-library, philosophy, science

Alan Sokal is known for having written a splendid parody known as the "Sokal Hoax", a paper submitted and published in the journal "Social Text" which criticizes certain academic trends in literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, such trends being largely influenced by certain French philosophers. Categorizing these trends and philosophies under the regrettably vague moniker "postmodernism" (a term whose vagueness owes itself in no small part to the tendency for obscurity, inconsistency, a Alan Sokal is known for having written a splendid parody known as the "Sokal Hoax", a paper submitted and published in the journal "Social Text" which criticizes certain academic trends in literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology, such trends being largely influenced by certain French philosophers. Categorizing these trends and philosophies under the regrettably vague moniker "postmodernism" (a term whose vagueness owes itself in no small part to the tendency for obscurity, inconsistency, and incoherence of philosophies so called), Sokal and co-author Jean Bricmont take to task some of the most famous and influential of these so called postmodernist (PoMo) thinkers. Just about every chapter in the book is devoted to a particular PoMo thinker, the exceptions being a couple of fascinating "intermezzo" chapters dealing with epistemic relativism and chaos theory respectively. The criticisms of the PoMos was confined to abuses of concepts in math and science.

The chapters dealing with the PoMo thinkers consist of textual excerpts analyzed by Sokal and Bricmont. These excerpts are painful to read. They exhibit what the authors call "superficial erudition", an obscure and technical verbiage laden form of writing that turns out to be either incoherent or trivial when unpacked. A person reading such passages who doesn't understand the technical math and science concepts invoked may well think "wow, this is so profound that it goes over my head", and that seems to be one of the motivations behind this kind of writing, to wow laypeople with superficial, pedantic intellectuality. In other words it is intellectual masturbation. In the quoted excerpts from the PoMos, it always turns out that they don't understand the technical concepts that are using, or that the use of them is gratuitous, that the comparisons and analogies made between a math or science concept and something in literature or sociology is not adequately justified.

I found the first intermezzo chapter dealing with epistemic relativism to be the most interesting chapter in the book. Feyerabend's "epistemic anarchy" as put forward in his putative "Against Method" is analyzed, as is a radical interpretation of Quinean underdetermination and incomensurability, and Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
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Aug 11, 2011 Benedict Reid rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

If you ever find yourself thinking the postmodern French philosophers actually have a point. This is the book you need to read. It is simply undeniable proof that postmodern thinking is word-games, not actual theories. More sense is in these pages than most undergraduate arts degrees.

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Aug 25, 2012 Yves rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy

Thanks to this book I came to realize why I didn't understand so many things of the continental philosophy classes at the university: we were simply taught either bullshit or deepities. It's a shame our money is spent so foolishly to support the production of postmodern and obscurantist crap.

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Jan 14, 2016 Vikas Lather rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, non-fiction

A must read for all who are interested in social science

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May 22, 2013 Maziar Attarieh rated it liked it · review of another edition

خواندنش را برای تمام متفکران و متفکرنمایان به ویژه در وادی ادبیات چپ واجب اعلام میکنم. ...more

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May 21, 2014 Naghmeh Taba added it · review of another edition

«چرندیاتِ پستمدرن»؛ یک سرکاریِ درست و حسابی.

داستانِ این کتاب با یک حقه آغاز شد. حقهای که جامعهیِ هدفِ آن بخشهایِ وسیعی از علومِ اجتماعی و علومِ انسانی بود که فلسفهیِ «پستمدرنیسم» را دنبال میکردند. جریانِ فکری که مشخصهیِ آن طرد کمابیش صریحِ عقلانیتِ عصرِ روشنگری، جداییِ گفتمانهایِ نظری از هر گونه آزمونِ تجربی، و نوعی نسبیتگراییِ شناختاری است که نهایتاً علم را چیزی جز نوعی «روایت»، نوعی «اسطوره» یا نوعی برساختهیِ اجتماعی نمیداند.

حالا فرض کنید که شما روشنفکرِ دغلبازی هستید که حرفِ خاصی برای گفتن ند «چرندیاتِ پست‌مدرن»؛ یک سرکاریِ درست و حسابی.

داستانِ این کتاب با یک حقه آغاز شد. حقه‌ای که جامعه‌یِ هدفِ آن بخش‌هایِ وسیعی از علومِ اجتماعی و علومِ انسانی بود که فلسفه‌یِ «پست‌مدرنیسم» را دنبال می‌کردند. جریانِ فکری که مشخصه‌یِ آن طرد کمابیش صریحِ عقلانیتِ عصرِ روشنگری، جداییِ گفتمان‌هایِ نظری از هر گونه آزمونِ تجربی، و نوعی نسبیت‌گراییِ شناختاری است که نهایتاً علم را چیزی جز نوعی «روایت»، نوعی «اسطوره» یا نوعی برساخته‌یِ اجتماعی نمی‌داند.

حالا فرض کنید که شما روشنفکرِ دغل‌بازی هستید که حرفِ خاصی برای گفتن ندارید ولی تمایلِ زیادی به موفقیت در زندگیِ آکادمیک دارید و دوست دارید سطورِ کتاب‌هایِ‌تان هایلایت شود و نوچه‌ها دنبال‌تان بیفتند و مریدانی، که به شما ایمان داشته باشند مانندِ مؤمنانی که به متونِ مقدس ایمان می‌ورزند. شما که محتوایی برای عرضه ندارید به ناچار فرمی را به‌کار می‌گیرید که یاوه بودن آثارتان به این راحتی‌ها فاش نشود، ناگفته پیداست که زبانِ روشن و شفاف، زود مشت‌تان را باز می‌کند.

آلن سوکال و همکارش ژان بریکمون، طیِ تحقیقی چند ساله به فکرِ افشایِ این دغل‌کاریِ گسترده افتادند، به این شکل که سال ۱۹۹۶ سوکال به مجله‌ی Social Text مقاله‌ای تحویل می‌دهد از نوع همین کارهایی که در سال‌هایِ اخیر رواج داشته‌اند، مقاله‌ای سرشار از حرف‌هایِ بی‌ربط و مغالطه‌هایِ آشکار. عنوانِ مقاله «تجاوز از حدود: به سویِ تأویلی متحول‌کننده از گرانشِ کوانتومی» است. طیِ این مقاله صریحاً اعلام می‌شود که «واقعیتِ فیزیکی، درست به اندازه‌یِ واقعیتِ اجتماعی، در اصل نوعی برساخته‌یِ اجتماعی و زبانی است» و در ادامه به طرز شگفت‌آوری به این نتیجه می‌رسد که «اعدادِ پی و جی -ثابتِ جهانیِ گرانش- که پیش از این ثابت و جهانشمول به‌شمار می‌رفتند، اکنون به طورِ قطعی تاریخمند به‌شمار می‌روند و ناظرِ قانونی به طرز مهلکی هرگونه مرکزی را از دست می‌دهد و از هر نوع پیوندِ معرفت‌شناختی با یک نقطه‌ی زمان-مکان می‌گسلد، نقطه‌ای که دیگر نمی‌توان آن را فقط به کمکِ هندسه تعیین کرد.» و مابقیِ مقاله نیز به همین ترتیب پیش می‌رود. در عین ناباوریِ اولیه، نقیضه‌یِ سوکال در ژورنال چاپ می‌شود، آن هم در شماره‌یِ ویژه‌، که قرار بود به اثباتِ نادرستیِ انتقاداتِ دانشمندان از پست‌مدرنیسم بپردازد. بهتر از این ممکن نمی‌شد. وی بلافاصله حقه‌اش را برملا کرد و دیگران را از نیت‌اش مطلع ساخت. سیلی از واکنش‌هایِ مختلف به این اقدامِ هجوآمیز راه افتاد. چند روزنامه‌یِ مهم این اتفاق را رصد کردند و هجمهای از انتقادات به سراغ‌اش آمد، اما سوکال چه کرد؟ و آیا اساساً آیا این هیاهو قرار بود چیزی را نفی یا اثبات کند؟ سوکال بر این بود که: این، نویسندگانِ هدفِ فریب هستند که در آثارِ پرطمطراقِ خود، در انتهایِ هر جمله و یا حتی هر کلمه، انتظارِ تشویق را می‌کشند، و اگر او به آثار و روشِ آن‌ها چنین عریان تاخته، نباید شیوه‌یِ ناستوده‌ی همان‌ها را در پی گیرد. پس این‌بار مصمم‌تر از قبل و به همکاریِ ژان بریکمون مجموعه‌یِ بیشتری از برخوردهایِ این نویسندگان با علوم طبیعی را گردآوری کرد و در محافلِ تخصصی منتشر کرد، بسیاری از دانشمندان از این حجمِ مغالطه به واکنشی ترکیبی از خنده-هراس رسیدند. این دو اما لازم دیدند که باید در کتابی با زبانی معمولی اما شفاف و دقیق توضیح دهند که چرا عباراتِ جمع‌آوری‌شده یاوه هستند و در عینِ حال معتبـر. و این جملات بی‌معنی که بین خطاهایِ فاحش و لفاظی‌هایِ میان‌تهی در نوسانند، طیِ چه فرآیندی به این حد از مقبولیت در جوامع دانشگاهی رسیده‌اند؟ کل کتاب بررسیِ موردی و مصداقیِ این مسائل است.

ذکرِ یک نکته ضروری به نظر می‌رسد: شکی در این نیست که در جهان افکاری هم هستند که واقعاً دشوار و عمیقند و سخت بشود آن‌ها را با زبانی قابلِ فهم توضیح داد، اما از این طرف هم شکی نیست که شیادان همیشه و در عرصه‌های مختلف، فرم‌هایی به منظورِ پوشاندنِ جهل و صداقتِ فکری ابداع و استفاده کرده‌اند. حالا سوال این‌جاست که تفاوتِ این دو مقوله را از کجا بفهمیم؟ از کجا بفهمیم که یک پیچیدگی، ارجینال است و به هرحال در جهانِ خودش جای دارد؟ و آن دیگری لباسِ پادشاه است؟ خیلی خوب؛ کلی‌گویی آفَتِ ذهن است، سوکال و بریکمون فیزیکدان هستند، دقیقاً می‌دانند که چه می‌گویند و در موردِ چه امری قضاوت کرده‌اند. درجایی از کتاب متخصصانِ دیگر زمینه‌هایِ علوم و فناوری را به کاری مشابهِ آن‌چه در این کتاب کرده‌اند، دعوت می‌کنند. البته گفتنی‌ست جداً در مواردی از آثارِ این مشاهیر حتی نیازی به فیزیکدان بودن هم نیست تا قوامِ استدلال‌ها -اگر بشود نامش را استدلال گذاشت- سنجیده شود اما خوشبختانه سوکال و بریکمون را داریم تا مواردِ پرتعدادی از این دست سوءاستفاده‌ها و چراییِ غلط بودن این قبیل گزاره‌ها را برایِ‌مان روشن کنند.
البته برآنم که کارِ ساینتیست "حال آوردنِ جگرِ موافقان و کباب کردنِ آنِ دیگران نیست" :v اما زدنِ شیرجه‌ای دقیق و ظریف، بدونِ دورخیز -تخصص- شدنی نیست و وارد شدنِ بدونِ زمینه به این حیطه‌ها همانا و سقوطی در سطح همان. ارتفاع گرفتن و فیگورِ صحیح اما منجر به شیرجه‌ای ماهرانه و تاریخی خواهد شد. چنان که این‌بار اسبِ تروایِ سوکال و بریکمون خوب تاخته است.

مایه‌هایِ حقیقت در همان پروسه‌یِ به‌چاپ‌رسیدن نوشته‌یِ سوکال نهفته است، مقاله‌یِ سوکال نقیضه‌ای بود بر پایه‌یِ نقل‌قول‌ها و آثارِ روشنفکرانِ برجسته‌یِ فرانسوی دربابِ تعابیر ضمنی و ظاهریِ آن‌ها از علوم طبیعی و ریاضی. کارِ بزرگِ سوکال و همکارش اما تکه‌دوزیِ شیطنت‌آمیزِ این نقلِ‌قول‌ها به هم بود. درواقع ویراستارانِ مجله‌یِ «سوشال تکست» قاعدتاً درابتدا خیلی خوشحال شده‌اند وقتی چنین مقاله‌ای به منظورِ چاپ به آن‌ها سپرده شده، گو که از زبان خودِ آن‌ها باشد، و دقیقاً همان حرف‌هایی بوده که همیشه دوست داشته‌اند بشنوند، اما غافل بودند از خدعه‌ای که در راه بود به منظورِ ضربه زدن به جریان فکریِ مطبوع آن هم دقیق و خیلی تمیز. اقدامی به منظورِ رسوا کردن تمایز بینِ داوری‌هایِ ناظر به امورِ واقع با دیگر مراتبِ داوری. (ارزشی، فلسفی، سیاسی،...). مقاله‌یِ سوکال اگر قبل از چاپ به هر فیزیکدانِ معمولی هم داده می‌شد احتمالِ چاپ شدن آن صفر بود اما چون بر ایدئولوژیِ ویراستاران صحه گذاشت منتشر شد و هجویه‌یِ آلن سوکال مثلِ جاسوسی رفت و مأموریتش را به نحوِ احسن انجام داد و سپس رسانه‌ای شد.

در بررسیِ این خَلطِ دیسیپلین‌هایِ گوناگون باهم -علومِ طبیعی/ علومِ انسانی (فی‌المثل)- شواهد به‌عنوانِ واقعیتِ بیرونی، موجه‌ترین جایگاهِ داوری را دارا هستند. به همین سبب، ابهام و توو-خالی بودنِ گزاره‌هایِ این دست «همه‌چیزدان‌ها» بهتر و بیشتر از هرکجا در هم‌نشینی با مباحثِ علمی مشخص می‌شود. عبارتِ معروفی‌ست جمله‌یِ زیر:
Tell a lie once! and all your truths become questionable.
به این برداشت که وقتی این روشنفکران در علمی به اتقانِ ریاضی، چنین استدلالاتِ مشعشعی -که در کتاب موجود است- از خود صادر کرده‌اند، چطور ممکن است به بقیه‌یِ استدلالاتِ‌شان شک نکرد؟ نقلِ‌قول‌هایِ عجیب و غریب فراوان در کتاب آمده: این‌که دلیلِ پیشرفتِ مکانیکِ جامدات نسبت به سیالات، ماهیتِ مردانه داشتنِ جامدات هست. یا فرمولِ sexuation ِ لاکان. یا نفهمیدنِ فرقِ اعدادِ گنگ با موهومی. یا ایریگاری که E=mc^2 را معادله‌ای با ماهیتِ جنسیتی می‌داند... و مزخرفاتِ دیگر. کتاب را که بخوانید اصلاً در پاره‌ای از موارد شک می‌کنید که مسعودِ فراستی این حرف‌ها را گفته و مشهور شده یا کسانی چون: لاکان، کریستوا، ایریگاری، لاتور، بودریار، دلوز، گوتاری،... .

کتابِ «چرندیاتِ پست‌مدرن» با نام اصلی Intellectual Impostures سال ۸۴ توسط انتشارات ققنوس و با ترجمه‌یِ عرفان ثابتی منتشر شد، بعد از مدتی کتاب نایاب شد تا این‌که پارسال تجدیدِ چاپ شد. در نوعِ خود بسیار برانگیزاننده‌ست که در اِشِلی متفاوت، فرقه‌ای از خِیلِ انبوهِ حمله‌کنندگان به عقلانیت را، به تصویر می‌کشد. هرچه نوشتم کم است.
مطالعه‌یِ این کتاب شدیداً پیشنهاد می‌شود.:) ...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Marshall rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, politics, science

Oh, how badly the Left needs more books like this, boldly championing scientific objectivity and facts over political or spiritual ideologies that abuse science to gain legitimacy and further their agendas.

The story of the origin of this book is a playful one: the author submitted a parody article, called Transgressing the Boundaries, to a postmodern scientific journal. In it he demonstrates every abuse of science he's seen, conflating subjects that have nothing to do with each other, exaggerati Oh, how badly the Left needs more books like this, boldly championing scientific objectivity and facts over political or spiritual ideologies that abuse science to gain legitimacy and further their agendas.

The story of the origin of this book is a playful one: the author submitted a parody article, called Transgressing the Boundaries, to a postmodern scientific journal. In it he demonstrates every abuse of science he's seen, conflating subjects that have nothing to do with each other, exaggerating, distorting, misunderstanding, and mis-stating scientific facts. He even ended it with a little political rant that had nothing whatsoever to do with science. Not only was the paper accepted by the journal, it was featured, and lauded by postmodern intellectuals. Needless to say, it was quite embarrassing for the journal and its readers when they found out it was a parody.

He was trying to make a very serious point: science should not be abused as a tool to gain legitimacy for social, spiritual, or political agendas. The very fact that the paper was accepted and lauded shows how welcoming postmodern intellectuals are of such abuse. He points out that this isn't so much a danger to science as it is to the very social and political agendas it's twisted to serve. When concepts are abused like this, there tends to be a backlash when this comes to light, as it always does. Enemies of these agendas then use this as ammunition against them.

Conservatives are notorious for being anti-science, but the Left has its own antagonisms. They're so focused on equality and tolerance that they sometimes ignore the hard facts, twist those facts to suit their agendas, or even go so far as to claim that there is no such thing as objective reality or facts at all. Each person gets to have their own reality. This makes all debate or criticism meaningless, and any attempt to do so can be classified as bullying, as it doesn't respect other people's realities. This is what this book means by postmodernism.

This book basically picks up where the parody left off, displaying several examples of articles which abuse science in bizarre and sometimes meaningless ways. It meticulously examines these articles, and exposes the abuses. It's interesting to read the examples and feel confused and a little intimidated by all the jargon, and then watch the author pick it apart and show that, no, it really is meaningless, and probably written for the express purpose of intimidating or impressing readers. Seeing this done over and over really made me a more critical reader by strengthening my own ability to see through arguments that abuse science and distort the facts for the sake of ideology.

However, this book does have a tendency to over-quote, which he said he does because he doesn't want to be accused of taking things out of context. But after a few chapters, this whole exercise started to get tiring and dull. In fact, he's not a very engaging writer. Nonetheless, I highly recommend skimming the appendix, which includes the original parody article and the author's comments on it, as well as a chapter or two from the book. Then read the Epilogue, which is very engaging, beautifully written, and does a fabulous job at summarizing his points. Though difficult to read, I do believe this book is important. ...more

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Jul 17, 2012 Janet rated it did not like it

I wanted to like this, I really did. It was completely relevant to my interests. I'm sick of the contempt for the sciences communicated by the humanities even after their post-60s dialogue with scientific language. I think that actually understanding the concepts one uses to break down the convention of analogy is interesting. I don't think that the doubts and complexities of actual science are fundamentally responsible for political and social damage. Sokal could have been moderate, understandi I wanted to like this, I really did. It was completely relevant to my interests. I'm sick of the contempt for the sciences communicated by the humanities even after their post-60s dialogue with scientific language. I think that actually understanding the concepts one uses to break down the convention of analogy is interesting. I don't think that the doubts and complexities of actual science are fundamentally responsible for political and social damage. Sokal could have been moderate, understanding, and just as open to understanding the doubts and complexities of pomo gibberish.
Instead, here are these assholes, and here's the joke, flying over them beyond the orbit of the moon. See, the whole point of cultural theorists "abusing" (that sure is some strong language, sure glad it's sworn to protect and serve) math and science is not to actually draw analogies, but to manifest the underlying absurdity of analogies, to create greater confusion and that unique feel of incomprehensibility. They write ABOUT the sensation of encountering the arcane, the gaps between realms of knowledge, the incommensurability of intellectual (and otherwise) cultures. When Sokal laments that they seem to at least know the sciences they "abuse" but are deliberately obfuscating to "impress their readers", he could use that same recognition of their trans-disciplinary research to guide him into fucking Getting It.
I admit, I stopped reading when he started digging into Latour, a philosopher who has himself bridged the same gap, and sought to understand science in post-modern, intersubjective way, by moving from sociology of science through posthuman politics. Admittedly, he can be dry and Gallically smug, but Latour understands how science does and does not work, and how applying it to itself engages a worlds-enclosing-worlds-that-enclose-them dynamic that non-Euclidean mathematics has probably also gotten around to, no conceptual misuse accusations necessary. Claiming it to be outside of Latour's dissection and inversion of it indicates an enclosed dogmatism as thorough of that he thinks he sees in postmodern theory.
When Sokal holes the literarizing of meta-literature up to the standards of scientific analysis, it's worse than the structuralism shown earlier by some of his targets. Postmodern theory aimed to establish a place in an academy based on Enlightenment (and prior) rationalism for irrationality. The potentialities of nonsense are a larger infinity than those of rationality, itself, as Sokal univentively connected, undermined within mathematics. The concept of an intellectual institution without a place for and vigorous exploration of nonsense horrifies me, as does Sokal's highly unscientific failure to self-examine. I speak as someone who understands and appreciates science, here, dammit, and I don't like the reputation he's giving it.
When Sokal published his famous joke paper, the joke was really that he didn't realize it was all a joke already. ...more

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Sep 15, 2016 Петър Стойков rated it really liked it

Няма да навлизам в подробности относно философските течения на структурализма, постструктурализма и постмодернизма и повлияните от тях културни и политически течения, така или иначе ако се интересувате от тия неща сте поне малко наясно, а ако не - няма да ви стане ясно от 2 абзаца. Все пак, за всеки здравомислещ човек е очевидно, че 99% от "философията" на тия течения са пълни и абсолютни безсмислици, а сега даже истински професори са се захванали да докажат, че това е точно така.

Книгата произл Няма да навлизам в подробности относно философските течения на структурализма, постструктурализма и постмодернизма и повлияните от тях културни и политически течения, така или иначе ако се интересувате от тия неща сте поне малко наясно, а ако не - няма да ви стане ясно от 2 абзаца. Все пак, за всеки здравомислещ човек е очевидно, че 99% от "философията" на тия течения са пълни и абсолютни безсмислици, а сега даже истински професори са се захванали да докажат, че това е точно така.

Книгата произлиза от известният експеримент на Алън Зокал да "напише" статия в стила, в който този вид философи използват, с множество цитати от по-известните представители на гореспоменатите течения и да я изпрати за публикация в реномирано философско списание. Експериментът всъщност се състои във факта, че Зокал нарочно пише статията така, че да е абсолютно безсмислена, пълна с псевдонаучни, но помпозно звучащи дълги, сложни думи, с объркан и натруфен език и словоред. Статията не само бива харесана, но и публикувана и то точно в юбилейното издание на списанието, темата на което е да "развенчае критиките срещу постструктурализма".

В настоящата книга авторът навлиза п0-дълбоко в писанията на известни (френски, от там произлиза болшинството от тая гняз) пост-структуралисти като Дерида, Иригаре, Кръстева и т.н. и се занимава единствено и само с техните нескопосани опити да вмъкнат научни термини и концепции в обяснението на своите идеи, в болшинството от случаите изключително нескопосано, не на място и очевидно без да имат дори повърхностно разбиране за тях. Друга голяма част от писанията на тоя тип философи не толкова възприемат погрешна или детински повърхностна интерпретация на основни математически и физични концепции, колкото представляват просто дълги, объркани изречения без абсолютно никакъв смисъл.

Любимият ми пример е Иригаре която (макар че да цитирам нейни писания е като да ритам умряло куче вече) смята например, че формулата на Айнщайн за E=MC² е сексистка, защото "издига скоростта на светлината като по-важна от други скорости, които са жизнено важни за човека". Или как пълното физично описание на механиката на флуидите било "изостанало" от обяснението на механиката на твърдите тела, защото "флуидите се свързват с женственото, с менструацията, твърдите тела с мъжкия член", поради което учените "й обръщали по-малко внимание", защото, естествено, са сексисти. Щеше ми се това да са единствените примери от нейното "творчество", но за съжаление даже не са и най-смешните...

Знаех си аз, че не само аз мисля това https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... за претенциозно говно.

...more

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Apr 01, 2014 Brett Williams rated it it was amazing

Postmodern medicine that tastes good!

This book will keep you laughing for hours. It’s about The Sokal Hoax, a phony article made up of esoteric scientific jargon applied to social issues through convolutions of logic and obfuscated language. Sokal then infiltrated postmodernist turf when he got his paper published in one of their premier journals, “Social Text: A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies.” The paper was an instant smash throughout postmodern circles, later Postmodern medicine that tastes good!

This book will keep you laughing for hours. It’s about The Sokal Hoax, a phony article made up of esoteric scientific jargon applied to social issues through convolutions of logic and obfuscated language. Sokal then infiltrated postmodernist turf when he got his paper published in one of their premier journals, “Social Text: A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies.” The paper was an instant smash throughout postmodern circles, later to win the 1996 Ig Noble Award – more than Sokal could hope for.

Sokal, a professor of physics, canvassed what looks like hundreds of postmodern papers flushed in untreated torrents from academia. By pulling together this nasty set of aromas he creates a bouquet for those he drenches with praise throughout the hoax by applying Lodge’s maxim, “It is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one’s pears.” Like any good snake oil salesman, Sokal simply kludged the language into what postmoderns want to hear most, “that physical reality is at bottom a social and linguistic construct,” he writes. Thus science is mere politics, another Western bias, nothing whatsoever to do with the realities of nature. (Ignoring the curing of small pox, man on the moon, Voyager to Saturn, computers, TVs, cell phones, planes, trains and automobiles.) There is thus no objective truth, allowing postmoderns to tell us what it really is.

At some point Sokal could bare no more praise heaped high, nor references to his “ground-breaking work” among postmodern publications, so he revealed the article for what it was. Not only did the kings and queens have no clothes, but their bodies looked so funny under the optic of Sokal’s glare. They’d been duped and they knew it. Wheels of postmodern correctness squealed into reverse to say they’d always known Sokal was a fake.

Sokal makes postmodernism fun, and shows us there’s a good chance we’ve been misunderstanding these people for these last fifty years – they’re really comedians. And to think we took them seriously. If the public only knew what academic freedom protected at the university at their tax dollar’s expense, they might not be laughing. ...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Justin rated it liked it

Although this is an important book, it is not a very enjoyable one to read, for the simple fact that the authors felt compelled to quote at length from some of the most disfigured and meaningless jumbles of words that I have ever seen sewn together in the guise of sentences.

A major portion of the book is given over to reproductions of original 'postmodernist' sources that ramble for pages on end, with trifling comments by the authors on how the different scientific concepts have been misinterpre Although this is an important book, it is not a very enjoyable one to read, for the simple fact that the authors felt compelled to quote at length from some of the most disfigured and meaningless jumbles of words that I have ever seen sewn together in the guise of sentences.

A major portion of the book is given over to reproductions of original 'postmodernist' sources that ramble for pages on end, with trifling comments by the authors on how the different scientific concepts have been misinterpreted or misused. However, the long barrage of academic verbiage is such manifest nonsense to begin with that there is little left for the sagacity of Sokal and Bricmont to say.

If a reader is not convinced of the absurdity of the postmodern examples within the first two sentences of a quotation, they probably so completely lack of the discriminating facility that another twenty pages will not do them any more good.

There are only so many ways to call a fraud a fraud, so many ways to point to a syntactic confusion of adjectives and say, 'this is gibberish.'

Much more instructive were the sections between the criticisms of the individual postmodern authors, that dealt more broadly with the roles of science and reason in the humanities and politics. Despite what other reviewers have said, there is nothing in these parts which does not seem to me to be thoroughly reasonable and correct.

Most incomprehensible is how anyone could have ever taken these postmodernist authors seriously in the first place - how entire segments of the academic world could have so completely taken leave of their senses as to give even one of these imposters an academic post - let alone legions of them spanning several generations.

By sheer chance, I recently ran into this comment by Jonathan Swift which seems to have some bearing on the situation:

"There are certain common Privileges of a Writer,
the Benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no Reason to doubt;
Particularly, that where I am not understood, it shall be concluded,
that something very useful and profound is coucht underneath." (1704) ...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Luke rated it really liked it

I would have given it five-stars if not for all the semantically incoherent non-sequiturs quoted ad nauseum. But that's just me being post-postmodernism in seminal abrasiveness of the complacence of fashionable academia and all its derivatives (e.g. math, physics, chemistry; i.e. anything non contained within the set of non-humanities or social sciences {i.e. set of non-humanities conjoined with the set of non-social-sciences}). Neither complete or consistent due to the implications of Godel's t ...more

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Jun 13, 2015 احسان شاه‌قاسمی rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

کتابی انقلابی در علوم انسانی که هر دانشجو و پژوهشگری باید آن را بخواند

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Aug 07, 2009 Leila T. rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. as part of my online FUNDAEC course, i learnt about a hoax that was perpetrated against an American cultural studies journal in 1996. a physicist at the New York University, Alan Sokal, felt that the liberties the academic humanities and social sciences were taking with mathematics, science, scientific methodology, the history of science and reality itself were becoming postmodern parodies of postmodernism. he felt that offering advice, a critique, or a straightforward list of the mathematical a ...more

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Jul 01, 2017 Onek rated it really liked it · review of another edition

"Vaya, vaya, vaya..."

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Aug 02, 2011 ABYY rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Sokal and Bricmont launch a devastating critique of the pretentious and obscurantist tendencies of several authors in the pomo canon in this book. Their specific locus of attack is these philosophers' (and I use the term here in a very loose sense) misuse and deliberate abuse of scientific and mathematical concepts as a strategy to embellish and give an aura of credibility to very bad writing.

[A caveat: I'm not a philosopher, physicist, mathematician, literary theorist, psychoanalyst or even we Sokal and Bricmont launch a devastating critique of the pretentious and obscurantist tendencies of several authors in the pomo canon in this book. Their specific locus of attack is these philosophers' (and I use the term here in a very loose sense) misuse and deliberate abuse of scientific and mathematical concepts as a strategy to embellish and give an aura of credibility to very bad writing.

[A caveat: I'm not a philosopher, physicist, mathematician, literary theorist, psychoanalyst or even well acquainted with any of these disciplines so everything I say about this can reasonably be seen as suspect.]

Intellectual Impostures was an immensely enjoyable read. It confirmed what I've long suspected about the so-called "radical" thought of many pomo writers - that what appears prima facie to be incredibly profound ideas collapse under any sustained rational examination. While Sokal and Bricmont confine themselves to their areas of expertise (physics and mathematics), many of their observations are well taken and apply to the other works and to the other authors who 'do' pomo.

As Sokal and Bricmont very ably point out, many of the ideas pomo authors proffer are deliberately written very ambiguously such that they can be read one of two ways - as either trivially true or surprising but false (or a third possibility: hopelessly confused).

This book was published a decade ago. I wish I could report that their critiques are now merely of historical interest to a reinvigorated Left - but unfortunately I find their points to be as valid as they were when they were first published. I could go on in this vein for awhile but, to cut my vitriol short, suffice to say I'd strongly recommend to anyone with even a peripheral interest in science, pomo and the relation between them.

Intellectual Impostures remains a very timely contribution that serves (hopefully) as a remedy for a Left that has increasingly become politically regressive, intellectually dishonest and, perhaps worst of all, not even wrong. ...more

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Mar 06, 2011 Llew rated it really liked it

By themselves, the quotes used in this book are some of the finest examples of academic horseshit one might ever hope to come across. I still love a good meandering philosophy tome, but there is something highly important about what Sokal and company are doing here. This idea that, at a certain point, abusing science and math to continue your ideas is dumbing down the populace. That relativism may be used for cultural anthropology, but it needs to be abandoned when used in scientific understandi ...more

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Aug 15, 2013 Chris rated it liked it

On display is lots of nonsense written in the postmodern tradition, specifically by philosophers that can basically be classified as epistemic relativists. In the first several chapters, the responses by the authors to absurd passages from Lacan and Kristeva are quite detailed. As the book goes on, punctuated by several intermezzo chapters which give some background, much of the commentary becomes lazy. The authors begin to appeal to the self-evidence of the ridiculousness on display.

Occasionall ...more

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About Alan Sokal

Alan David Sokal (born 1955) is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in 1996.

Sokal received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1 Alan David Sokal (born 1955) is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in 1996.

Sokal received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1981. He was advised by Arthur Wightman. In the summers of 1986-1988, Sokal taught mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas were heading the elected government.

Sokal’s research lies in mathematical physics and combinatorics. In particular, he studies the interplay between these fields based on questions arising in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. This includes work on the chromatic polynomial and the Tutte polynomial, which appear both in algebraic graph theory and in the study of phase transitions in statistical mechanics. His interests include computational physics and algorithms, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for problems in statistical physics. He also co-authored a book on quantum triviality.

Sokal is best known to the general public for the Sokal Affair of 1996. Curious to see whether the then-non-peer-reviewed postmodern cultural studies journal Social Text (published by Duke University Press) would publish a submission which "flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions," Sokal submitted a grand-sounding but completely nonsensical paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity."

The journal did in fact publish it, and soon thereafter Sokal then revealed that the article was a hoax in the journal Lingua Franca, arguing that the left and social science would be better served by intellectual underpinnings based on reason. He replied to leftist and postmodernist criticism of the deception by saying that his motivation had been to "defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself."

The affair, together with Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's book Higher Superstition, can be considered to be a part of the so-called Science wars.

Sokal followed up by co-authoring the book Impostures Intellectuelles with Jean Bricmont in 1997 (published in English, a year later, as Fashionable Nonsense). The book accuses other academics of using scientific and mathematical terms incorrectly and criticizes proponents of the strong program for denying the value of truth. The book had mixed reviews, with some lauding the effort, some more reserved, and others pointing out alleged inconsistencies and criticizing the authors for ignorance of the fields under attack and taking passages out of context.

In 2008, Sokal revisited the Sokal affair and its implications in Beyond the Hoax.
...more

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Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

Random Walks, Critical Phenomena, And Triviality In Quantum Field Theory

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