Fashionable nonsense
"In 1996, Alan Sokal Published an Essay in the hip intellectual magazine Social Text parodying the scientific but impenetrable lingo of contemporary theorists. On the heels of the fierce academic debate that followed the hoax, Sokal teams up with Jean Bricmont to expose the abuse of scientific concepts in the writings of today's most fashionable postmodern thinkers. From Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to Luce Irigaray and Jean Baudrillard, the authors document the errors made by some postmodernists using science to bolster their arguments and theories. Witty and closely reasoned, Fashionable Nonsense dispels the notion that scientific theories are mere "narratives" or social constructions, and explores the abilities and the limits of science to describe the conditions of existence. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.
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- My fault for not detailing what I meant: pg's article is about the antiquity kind of philosophy answering actually important questions almost anybody alive asks himself like "how should I/one live my/his life?". This puts it in a completely different world than 20th century philosophy which is more often about metaphysics, deconstruction, post-modernism, critical theory, etc... (disclaimer: I found "Fashionable Nonsense" entertaining and have a lot of disdain for most of this).
About Russel and Wittgenstein, I obviously wasn't saying anything about their contributions to hard science. Rousseau is indeed one of the more down-to-earth thinkers listed (though his noble savage remains one of the best jokes I've ever read about).
I'll be honest with you, I think pg's writings are hard to criticize because I think they're more often "right" than not, at heart. Sure, you can criticize the lazy style that clearly doesn't aspire to be scholarly, or the broad generalizations and hand-waving (in fact, every article gets it), but arguing against the core theses isn't as easy. Though I think this one isn't one of his best days, heh.
- For those interested in reading a great book exposing Deleuze and others like him, I recommend Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal & Bricmont.
- People who aren't familiar with the Sokal affair may miss the critical point that word salad was the author's whole intent, to expose the problem.
'a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal...to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies...[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
'The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
IMHO it is the most amazing academic comeuppance in history.
Edit: See the author's great book: Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1998), Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1st ed.), New York: Picador USA, ISBN 0-312-19545-1
- Yeah I agree, there are some particularly egregious examples. If you want a good laugh about this stuff, "Fashionable Nonsense" is a great book.
- FWIW, I don't think very formal methods are the crux of the matter (at least for the incipient stages of a scientific field).
Having said that, postmodernism is (in my view) totally misguided. The obfuscated language is intentional, as among its epistemological assumptions is that reason is not only limited, but has only limited access to reality (well, or creates reality), and at any rate is insufficient.
Recommended readings:
* The Sokal Hoax [1]
* Intellectual Impostors by Bricmont and Sokal (Fashionable Nonsense in the US) [2] for an expansion on the Sokal Hoax, and many examples on pretentious and preposterous abuse of scientific terminology by postmodern philosophers
* Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault by Hicks [3] on the history of postmodernism, arising from counter-enlightenment philosophy all the way from Rousseau via the insufferable German idealists, including Hegel with his dialectical reasoning, which supported both fascism and Marxism.
Postmodernists often take specific reasonable criticism of or problems with science or realism, and then blow them up and generalise them unjustifiably. It is worth taking some of the criticism to heart, but the postmodernists aren't even the ones formulating those problems in the most cogent way. So, my advice would be to waste some, but not too much time on postmodernism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-098325...
- Since it's trendy to recommend related books on HN, I'd nominate "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" by none other than Alan Sokal. It's a fascinating read and just as valid today as it was 20 years ago when it was published, which is actually a bit depressing in my opinion.
