Intellectual impostures. postmodern philosophers' abuse of science. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont [Paperback]

Sokal and Bricmont, two professors of physics, show that fashionable French intellectuals in the fields of social and cultural studies - Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Luce Irigaray - habitually misuse scientific concepts and terms. Unable to produce genuine science in their own fields, Lacan et al import concepts from the physical sciences - typically, chaos theory, fuzzy logic and the uncertainty principle - to try to impress. They regard science, evidence, reason and knowledge as oppressive. Kristeva characteristically responded to criticism by calling Sokal and Bricmont Francophobes!

The two physicists attack relativism, the idea that a statement's truth or falsity is relative to an individual or social group. (Some US colleges run courses like 'queer studies', whose very subject is defined in relation to the interests of a social group, not by its field of study.) Relativists imply that modern science is just a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction'. This allows in the notion that, for instance, creationism is just as valid as the theory of evolution.

The editors of 'Social Text' accepted Sokal's famous spoof article, 'Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity', in which he wrote: "Physical 'reality', no less than social 'reality', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." The editors of 'Science and Culture' accepted the Madsens' supposedly serious article, 'Structuring postmodern science', in which they wrote "A simple criterion for science to qualify as postmodern is that it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth." Says it all really!

This book tears apart these postmodernist theorists. Sokal and Bricmont uphold the scientific approach, that knowledge is based on respect for the clarity and logical coherence of theories and on the confrontation of theories with empirical evidence. Knowledge in both natural and social science is cumulative; our understanding of the world grows as we constantly check our ideas against the reality.

This book grew out of the famous hoax in which Alan Sokal published a parody article in the American postmod journal Social Text. The article was filled with non sequiturs and nonsensical quotations about maths and physics by prominent French and American intellectuals, yet it was published unaltered. Sokal then revealed that it was a deliberate parody, to the great consternation of the editors.

Intellectual Impostures broadens the investigation to demonstrate how intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology. They have either used these ideas completely out of context without justification or they have thrown scientific jargon around with no regard for its meaning or relevance, obviously to try to impress their readers.

In the preface to the first edition, Sokal and Bricmont provide the background to the controversy whilst in the preface to the second edition they discuss the four types of criticisms of their book. These are: critics who tried to refute them, critics who attributed to them ideas that the authors themselves had rejected, name-calling and ad hominem attacks, and finally those who agreed but thought that the authors did not go far enough.

Here one is tempted to partly agree with Anne Applebaum who, in her review of the book, claimed that of course post-structuralist theory is rubbish and that we don't need a book to tell us that. I disagree with the second statement, because Intellectual Impostures is mostly an amusing read that will have you rolling on the floor and because it is vitally important that intellectual frauds be exposed. In this regard I also highly recommend The Illusions Of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton and The Anti Chomsky reader by David Horowitz and Peter Collier.

The introduction provides the history of the Sokal Hoax and the response to it. The major part of the book consists of an analysis of various texts by Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. Brief explanations of the relevant scientific concepts plus references to popular and explanatory texts are provided. The authors also investigate certain philosophical and scientific confusions behind much of postmodernist thinking, like cognitive relativism, certain misunderstandings concerning chaos theory and so-called postmodern science.

Appendix A is the full text of the famous hoax article: Trangressing The Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Appendix B consists of comments on the parody and Appendix C serves as an afterword on the hilarious incident. This amusing and illuminating book concludes with a 14-page bibliography and an index.

Alan Sokal was a physicist who submitted a spoof article in the post-modernist journal Social Text: a farrago of gobbledygook, incorporating all manner of scientific and mathematical references, but packaged in the style of postmodernists' `discourse.' He didn't expect it to get published but it was. The resulting `scandal' did more than just leave egg on the faces of the journal's editors: it exposed that a whole intellectual movement's foundation that had taken hold in many social science and humanities departments was based on nothing but hot air.

This book is the follow up - in which Sokal and collaborator Jean Bricmont examine several postmodern writers and expose them for being mere assemblages of pretentious verbiage. Their targets are those thinkers who use mathematical and scientific terms without knowing what they are talking about. The authors do not object to laypeople speaking or writing about science. They object to the misuse of mathematical and scientific language in the pursuit of pseduoprofundity.

The authors give their targets their due, and much of the book damns post-modernist thinkers in their own words. Their obfuscations, the authors assure us, were no more intelligible in the original French in which they were written. One can easily believe it.

However, science itself is couched in language and mathematics that the untrained layperson cannot understand. Does this fact put it then on the same footing as postmodernist writers' obfuscations? No, there is no equivalence. For the concepts and language of science can be explained in lay terms - as writers like Richard Dawkins, Simon Singh et al have clearly demonstrated (read Simon Singh's brilliant Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It if you don't believe me). This cannot be said of the writers Sokal and Bricmont examine, who depend on keeping the meanings of what they say obscure, because for them to be obscure means to be profound. In as much as the lay public do understand any of it, then it comes down to the sorts of platitudes and banalities one hears in casual conversation, such there is no such thing as objective truth, etc. etc, from people who have never read a single one of these writers. But this can hardly console the writers Sokal and Bricmont examine, wanting as they do to be thought of as deep thinkers, with insights into reality that surpasses those offered to us by science.

I drop one star of the rating because the extensive quotations that Sokal and Bricmont incorporate into the book from the authors they criticise. I accept that they do this legitimately, in the interests of fairness of representation, but for me this hindered the book's flow and readability, as one tries to wade through a swamp of verbiage. I felt that more space could have been added into a positive defence of the scientific method. The chapter in which the authors do just this is the finest of the book, as is their epilogue and their introduction to the book, where the authors answer their critics, both brilliant pieces of exposition. They are right to point out that those who talk about the myths of science cannot point to any experiments or discoveries that expose the theory of relativity (for instance) as `a myth.' They are right to stress the predictive power of science - it's not just about falsification. They are right to point out that paradigm shifts do occur in science but this is not to say that Einstein's physics displaces Newton's. The former complements the latter. When they roll up their sleeves and defend the glories of the scientific method, they shine.

But does any of this matter now - sixteen years after the original hoax? I am not sure if postmodernist thinking holds such appeal as it used to in some quarters of academia but I think the book is still worth reading. The style of mystification in which postmodernist writers have cloaked themselves is comparable to other forms of obscurantist thought that masquerades as science. Plus, as mentioned above, a lot of postmodernist cant has percolated down to everyday conversation, a pernicious consequence that needs to be countered. This book equips one to do this although it should be read with others - a couple of examples that come to mind are Lewis Wolpert's excellent The Unnatural Nature of Science (unaccountably a neglected classic, and out of print) and Ben Goldacre's Bad Science: just two of the many places one could start, alongside this book.