Fashionable Nonsense

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (French: Impostures Intellectuelles, published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures) is a book authored by professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Sokal, in addition to his scientific work, was best-known for the Sokal Affair, in which he submitted a satirical article to the journal Social Text, a moderately important critical theory journal, and got it accepted as a legitimate article. The book was published in 1999 in France and the United States.

The book's thesis

Fashionable Nonsense broaches two related, but different topics:

• the allegedly incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by philosophers and related intellectuals;
• the dangers of the "strong program" in the sociology of science.

Note that the second claim has been more controversial and criticized than the first.

Incorrect use of scientific concepts

The book begins by a long list of extracts of texts by many leading academics working in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences, where, according to Sokal and Bricmont, those intellectuals incorrectly used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics. The extracts are intentionally rather long - Sokal and Bricmont claim that this is to avoid being accused of taking sentences out of context. For each author, they explain why they consider his or her use of scientific terminology to be abusive.

Sokal and Bricmont claim that they do not intend to directly criticize 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 come under fire include Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard.

The Postmodernist conception of science

Sokal and Bricmont assert that postmodern philosophy assigns scientific discourse, like all discourse, only a relative value which is dependent on social context. Sokal argues that a particular strain of science studies - the strong program in the sociology of science - asserts that the value of scientific discourse (or any discourse) is purely social, and that there is no absolute truth. Sokal and Bricmont explain that such a philosophy, which they believe denies the difference between science and pseudoscience, is ultimately dangerous.

Criticism of Sokal and Bricmont's arguments

Political arguments

A natural accusation against Sokal and Bricmont was that they had hidden political objectives. That is why they took the pain to point out that their own personal political feelings were rather left-wing too. In fact, they deplore the association of the left with radical postmodernist thought, which, they argued, undermines the left's political struggles.

Alleged lack of comprehension of postmodernism

The book was criticized by many as a rather gratuitous attack by the "hard sciences" on the "soft sciences". Many of Sokal and Bricmont's critics have argued that they have not made a good faith effort to understand postmodern philosophy and that their use of postmodern concepts has as many inaccuracies as postmodern philosophers use of scientific concepts. They further decry the fact that rather than attempt to build dialogue between the sciences and humanities, Sokal and Bricmont seem committed to making postmodernists look foolish and meaningless.

Alleged lack of honesty

Sokal and Bricmont's own honesty has come under fire in more recent years. They ultimately dropped a planned critique of Jacques Derrida from the book because they found that Derrida rarely ever talks about science, and does not generally use scientific imagery in his work. The use of Derrida in Sokal's original hoax drew primarily on quotes drawn unreasonably out of context. Furthermore, their attacks on Bruno Latour have proven considerably less defensible than they believed, in part because Latour - who is explicitly a researcher in science studies - might well expect his audience to be familiar with scientific concepts.

Alleged lack of comprehension of science studies

Most of the science studies community has argued that Sokal and Bricmont have deeply misunderstood science studies in general and the strong programme in particular. Indeed, Sokal, Bricmont and many of their supporters have difficulty 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 science philosophy, emphasise the central importance of the former, few if any scholars genuinely believe the latter. 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, physical basis, it superficially seems to suggest that science is arbitrary. However, this is not necessarily the case. A scientific theory which makes utterly spurious predictions or offers a false guide to action is unlikely to gain social acceptance. Many philosophers 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. While the utility and validity of this perspective may well be debatable, neither is it so ignorant of science or so unsophisticated.