Intellectual Impostures

by Alan Sokal

We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Deleuze have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification – note that we are not against extrapolating concepts from one field to another, but only against extrapolations made without argument – or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning. We make no claim that this invalidates the rest of their work, on which we suspend judgment.

Vast sectors of the humanities and the social sciences seem to have adopted a philosophy that we shall call, for want of a better term, ‘postmodernism’: an intellectual current characterized by the more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses disconnected from any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural relativism that regards science as nothing more than a ‘narration’, a ‘myth’ or a social construction among many others.

This relativist Zeitgeist originates partly from contemporary works in the philosophy of science, such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method,

For us, the scientific method is not radically different from the rational attitude in everyday life or in other domains of human knowledge. Historians, detectives and plumbers – indeed, all human beings – use the same basic methods of induction, deduction and assessment of evidence as do physicists or biochemists.

After all, the future is inherently unpredictable; rationality is always an adaptation to a new situation.

This emphasis on falsification (as opposed to verification) underlines, according to Popper, a crucial asymmetry: one can never prove that a theory is true, because it makes, in general, an infinite number of empirical predictions, of which only a finite subset can ever be tested; but one can nevertheless prove that a theory is false, because, to do that, a single (reliable) observation contradicting the theory suffices.

It may appear attractive to abandon the uncertainty of verification in favor of the certainty of falsification. But this approach runs into two problems: by abandoning verification, one pays too high a price; and one fails to obtain what is promised, because falsification is much less certain than it seems.

First of all, it must be emphasized that scientists, in their practice, are perfectly aware of the problem. Each time an experiment contradicts a theory, scientists ask themselves a host of questions: Is the error due to the way the experiment was performed or analysed? Is it due to the theory itself, or to some additional assumption? The experiment itself never dictates what must be done.

Likewise, quantum mechanics is often cited as the quintessential example of a ‘postmodern science’, but the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics – Schrödinger’s equation – is absolutely linear.