Fashionable Nonsense
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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 an article to the journal Social Text, a critical theory journal; although actually an ironic parody of a typical article, it was accepted and published as legitimate. The book was published in 1997 in France and 1998 in the United States.
The book is well known as a document of the conflict around postmodernism in academia and other places, and was part of the so-called science wars. Properly speaking the work attacks post-structuralism and the application of critical theory to science, with the work of Jacques Lacan and others basing their work on Lacan being a particular focus.
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[edit] The book's thesis
Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics:
- the allegedly incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by philosophers and other intellectuals;
- the problems of cognitive relativism, as seen in the Strong Programme in the sociology of science.
Note that the second claim has been more controversial and criticized than the first.
[edit] Incorrect use of scientific concepts
The book begins with a long list of extracts from the works of leading academics of philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences, where, according to Sokal and Bricmont, those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long — Sokal and Bricmont stated that they chose to make long quotations to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context. For each author, they explain why they consider his or her use of scientific terminology to be faulty.
Sokal and Bricmont claim that they do not intend to criticize directly the philosophical or sociological methods or conclusions of the authors they quote. They restrict themselves to explaining why they feel that each is misusing specific scientific concepts. They claim that:
- the authors use some advanced scientific concepts without understanding their scientific meaning.
- the authors cannot claim to be using those concepts as valid metaphor or imagery, since these are advanced scientific concepts that few in their readership are likely to understand. Imagery is normally used for explanations by illustrating some unfamiliar notion by a more familiar one, not the reverse.
Therefore, Sokal and Bricmont contend, the authors of those texts probably attempted an incompetent show of erudition in an attempt to impress their readers. The authors who are criticized include Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard.
Sokal and Bricmont criticize authors not only for pretension and for apparently discussing theories that they do not understand in the least, but also for making comments that they deem totally irrelevant. 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 [1]. (Fluid mechanics is actually an active research topic, while the mechanics of the solid body are now a closed topic; much scientific attention is devoted to the mechanics of soft matter, powders etc., intermediate between fluids and solids.)
[edit] The Postmodernist conception of science
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.
[edit] Criticism of Sokal and Bricmont's arguments
A variety of replies to Fashionable Nonsense have been put forward. Critics of Sokal and Bricmont have alleged their books reveal a wider incompetence on the topics they discuss, or even intellectual dishonesty. In their book, as well as in their articles and interviews, Sokal and Bricmont have repeatedly pointed out that they are only pointing out that Lacan et al are using terms borrowed from mathematics with no regard for their meaning, so that their writings make no sense to trained mathematicians like themselves; they make no claims to having any interest in Lacan's theories and philosophies as a whole.
[edit] Lack of comprehension of postmodernism
Insofar as Sokal and Bricmont were even taken seriously within the fields they were criticizing, they have received sharp criticism for their own misunderstanding of the concepts they are attacking. Bruce Fink (who wrote the major English translation of Jacques Lacan's Ecrits) offers one such critique in his book Lacan to the Letter, where he accuses Sokal and Bricmont of having "no idea whatsoever what Lacan is up to," (132) and accusing them of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings" (130). He points out several things that they accuse of being arbitrary or meaningless that in fact have well-established roots in the history of linguistics, and asserts that Lacan is explicitly using mathematical concepts in a metaphoric way, not claiming that his concepts are mathematically founded. (Fink also notes that the French style of lecturing frequently involves making obscure references on the assumption that a curious listener will look them up).
Although Fink acknowledges that Lacan is difficult to read, admitting that "most of us - 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," he takes Sokal and Bricmont to task for elevating what amounts to a disagreement with Lacan's choice of writing styles to an attack on his thought, particularly when they clearly do not understand it.
[edit] Lack of comprehension of science studies
Most scholars of science studies have argued that Sokal and Bricmont have deeply misunderstood science studies in general and the strong programme in particular. They accuse Sokal, Bricmont and many of their supporters of not properly distinguishing between the claim that scientific work is socially grounded and a belief that scientific hypotheses are arbitrary. While the strong programme, along with many other schools of the sociology of knowledge, emphasizes the central importance of the former claim, few if any scholars genuinely believe the latter[citation needed]. The strong programme, in its original form, merely claimed that the success of a theory or a line of scientific research needs to be explained in the same manner as a failure. In short, if we attribute the success of a false theory to social causes, we should also attribute the success of correct ones to social causes.
Since this approach makes it difficult to distinguish false theories from true ones on some external, natural basis, it superficially seems to suggest that science, while not ultimately arbitrary, partakes of arbitrary decisions in a wider historical context. For example: a scientific theory which makes utterly spurious predictions or offers a false guide to action is unlikely to gain social acceptance on a strictly utilitarian basis, although such utilitarianism ought not be taken as a sole or even normatively privileged criterion given that it, too, is a profoundly historical phenomenon of relatively recent vintage. Many sociologists of science, and adherents of the strong programme in particular, consider the social mechanisms by which these judgements are made to be a better guide to understanding science than references to whether or not a theory is, in some sense, true on terms marked off as "internal". While the utility and validity of this perspective may well be debatable, neither is it so ignorant of science or so unsophisticated.
The debate over sciences studies was reprised in another episode of the science wars, The One Culture?.
[edit] References
- Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (New York: Picador, 1998)
