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"Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" Overview

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern thinking. Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed to be a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in erudite but impenetrable lingo. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and across many disciplines--psychology, sociology, feminist studies, history, literature, mathematics, and the hard sciences--about the use and abuse of scientific theories in fields outside the scope of science.

Now Sokal and fellow physicist Jean Bricmont expand from where the hoax left off. In a witty and closely reasoned argument, the authors thoroughly document the misuse of scientific concepts in the writings of some of the most fashionable contemporary intellectual icons. From Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard, the authors demonstrate the errors made by some postmodernists in their attempts to use science to illustrate and support their arguments. More generally, Sokal and Bricmont challenge the notion--held in some form by many thinkers in a range of academic fields--that scientific theories are mere "narratives" or social constructions.

At once provocative and measured, Fashionable Nonsense explores the crucial question of what science is and is not, and suggests both the abilities and the limits of science to describe the conditions of existence.

"Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" Specifications

In 1996, an article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was published in the cultural studies journal Social Text. Packed with recherché quotations from "postmodern" literary theorists and sociologists of science, and bristling with imposing theorems of mathematical physics, the article addressed the cultural and political implications of the theory of quantum gravity. Later, to the embarrassment of the editors, the author revealed that the essay was a hoax, interweaving absurd pronouncements from eminent intellectuals about mathematics and physics with laudatory--but fatuous--prose.

In Fashionable Nonsense, Alan Sokal, the author of the hoax, and Jean Bricmont contend that abuse of science is rampant in postmodernist circles, both in the form of inaccurate and pretentious invocation of scientific and mathematical terminology and in the more insidious form of epistemic relativism. When Sokal and Bricmont expose Jacques Lacan's ignorant misuse of topology, or Julia Kristeva's of set theory, or Luce Irigaray's of fluid mechanics, or Jean Baudrillard's of non-Euclidean geometry, they are on safe ground; it is all too clear that these virtuosi are babbling.

Their discussion of epistemic relativism--roughly, the idea that scientific and mathematical theories are mere "narrations" or social constructions--is less convincing, however, in part because epistemic relativism is not as intrinsically silly as, say, Regis Debray's maunderings about Gödel, and in part because the authors' own grasp of the philosophy of science frequently verges on the naive. Nevertheless, Sokal and Bricmont are to be commended for their spirited resistance to postmodernity's failure to appreciate science for what it is. --Glenn Branch

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