Book Review: “Fashionable Nonsense” 20 Years Later

“Moreover, this also implies postmodern writers should be far more modest and careful when criticizing the virtues of science and reason, since it is not clear that they fully appreciate what it is that scientists actually do and believe.”

Details

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Picador Press, New York

1998

Introduction

In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published a seemingly pretentious but otherwise innocuous paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in the postmodern journal Social Text. After its publication, Sokal announced that the paper was designed as a deliberate parody of post-modernism’s appropriation of scientific jargon. It was filled with largely meaningless or even absurd claims that nevertheless “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Sokal immediately became infamous across the academic world, with some welcoming his efforts and parody and others accusing him of dishonesty and a lack of integrity. More importantly, Sokal’s parody immediately set off a political firestorm. Many on the Left accused him of lending ideological support to conservative efforts to repress critical and transgressive scholarship. And some on the Right were only too happy to use Sokal’s hoax precisely for that purpose. For his part, Sokal decried these efforts to either paint him as a conservative or to excessively politicize his work. He consistently claimed his primary motivations were intellectual; he wanted to criticize bad or misleading interpretations of scientific terminology and concepts by post-modern authors. Sokal observed that to the extent there was a political motivation behind his hoax, it was an “unabashed Old Leftist” who wanted to save progressive scholarship from a “trendy segment of itself.” He firmly supported efforts to undermine prejudices and inequalities in society and firmly believed that the Left would be better served by appealing to reason and evidence in support of these efforts rather than post-modern skepticism and obfuscation.

Whatever one thinks of his efforts, they certainly did not abet the production of post-modern scholarship—including about the sciences. One of the motivations behind the recent Sokal Squared hoax was to take another jab at the ascendancy of academic post-modernism. It naturally generated a tremendous amount of press. This conjured up many of the old debates about Sokal’s tactics and ambitions, with many of the familiar battle lines being drawn. Given this renewed attention, I thought it would be an ideal time to reexamine Sokal’s own extended discussion on these issues. These were presented most thoroughly in his book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, which was co-authored with Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont and published in English in 1998. This well-written and frequently-hilarious book presents a more sustained examination of the relationship between post-modern scholarship and science. Sokal and Bricmont discuss the reasons behind their critiques, examine the use of scientific terminology and concepts by several major post-modern authors, and conclude with some philosophical and political arguments for abandoning post-modern skepticism and leftism. In my mind, Sokal and Bricmont’s book remains the best popular argument along these lines yet put forward. I will discuss why below.

The Parameters of Sokal and Bricmont’s Critique

Unlike so many modern critics of post-modernism, from Jordan Peterson to Stephen Hicks, Sokal and Bricmont’s critique has genuine intellectual bite to it. This is for two interrelated reasons.