Fashionable Nonsense Quotes

“A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“The relativists’ stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“We have seen in this book numerous ambiguous texts that can be interpreted in two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false. And we cannot help thinking that, in many cases, these ambiguities are deliberate. Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“Why does it matter? The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster. (Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 1961a, p. 782) Why spend so much time exposing these abuses? Do the postmodernists represent a real danger? Certainly not for the natural sciences, at least not at present.”
― Alan Sokal, Intellectual Impostures

“Nevertheless, it seems to us that there are some criteria that can be used to help distinguish between the two sorts of difficulty. First, when the difficulty is genuine, it is usually possible to explain in simple terms, at some rudimentary level, what phenomena the theory is examining, what are its main results and what are the strongest arguments in its favour.247 For example, although neither of us has any training in biology, we are able to follow, at some basic level, developments in that field by reading good popular or semi-popular books. Second, in these cases there is a clear path – possibly a long one – that will lead to a deeper knowledge of the subject. By contrast, some obscure discourses give the impression that the reader is being asked to make a qualitative jump, or to undergo an experience similar to a revelation, in order to understand them.”
― Alan Sokal, Intellectual Impostures

“In this atmosphere of general discouragement, it is tempting to attack something that is sufficiently linked to the powers-that-be so as not to appear very sympathetic, but sufficiently weak to be a more-or-less accessible target (since the concentration of power and money are beyond reach). Science fulfills these conditions, and this partly explains the attacks against it.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“the emphasis on falsifiability and falsification is salutary, provided it is not taken to extremes (e.g. the blanket rejection of induction).”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“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.65”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“first of all, to give a criterion for demarcating between scientific and nonscientific theories, and he thinks he has found it in the notion of falsifiability: in order to be scientific, a theory must make predictions that can, in principle, be false in the real world.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“radical skepticism: “Of course there exists an external world, but it is impossible for me to obtain any reliable knowledge of that world.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“the mere fact that an idea is irrefutable does not imply that there is any reason to believe it is true.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“cognitive or epistemic relativism when one is dealing with an assertion of fact (that is, about what exists or is claimed to exist); moral or ethical relativism when one is dealing with a value judgment (about what is good or bad, desirable or pernicious); and aesthetic relativism when one is dealing with an artistic judgment (about what is beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant). Here we shall be concerned only with epistemic relativism and not with moral or aesthetic relativism, which raise very different issues.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“Roughly speaking, we shall use the term “relativism” to designate any philosophy that claims that the truth or falsity of a statement is relative to an individual or to a social group.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“They imagine,perhaps, that they can exploit the prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their own discourse a veneer of rigor. And they seem confident that no one will notice their misuse of scientific concepts. No one is going to cry out that the king is naked. Our goal is precisely to say that the king is naked (and the queen too).”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“But my main concern isn’t to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we’ll survive just fine, thank you). Rather, my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/social-constructivist discourse—and more generally a penchant for subjectivism—which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the Left.”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

“However, we have never met a sincere solipsist and we doubt that any exist.52 This illustrates an important principle that we shall use several times in this chapter: the mere fact that an idea is irrefutable does not imply that there is any reason to believe it is true.”
― Alan Sokal, Intellectual Impostures

“Of course, no work in this genre would be complete without an allusion to Gödel’s theorem: This drifting of figures and geometric figuring, this irruption of dimensions and transcendental mathematics, leads us to the promised surrealist peaks of scientific theory, peaks that culminate in Gödel’s theorem: the existential proof, a method that mathematically proves the existence of an object without producing that object. (Virilio 1991, p. 66) In reality, existential proofs are much older than Gödel’s work; and the proof of his theorem is, by contrast, completely constructive: it exhibits a proposition that is neither provable nor falsifiable”
― Alan Sokal, Intellectual Impostures

“In opposition to this old-fashioned way of thinking, they advocate a postmodern ‘nonlinear thought’. The precise content of the latter is not clearly explained either, but it is, apparently, a methodology that goes beyond reason by insisting on intuition and subjective perception.183 And it is frequently claimed that so-called postmodern science – and particularly chaos theory – justifies and supports this new ‘nonlinear thought’. But this assertion rests simply on a confusion between the three meanings of the word ‘linear’.184”
― Alan Sokal, Intellectual Impostures

“One could continue quoting Irigaray, but the reader is probably lost (so are we).”
― Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science