Impostures intellectuelles

What Hacker News says

1. CritoFeb 2016
   If anyone is only familar with Sokal for his Social Text hoax, you owe it to yourself to check out his book Fashionable Nonsense (originally published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles).

   While Sokal's hoax exposed inadequacies in Social Text (and similar journals), his book is far more damning. In it he exposes numerous French philosophers/'intellectuals' for the misuse and abuse of scientific and mathematic concepts and terms to obscure the meaning of their texts. The examples he presents range from plausibly the consequence of well-meaning ignorance, to inexcusable outright quackery. Some of his examples may seem like pedantic nitpicking of flowery poetic language, but much of it is truly damning.

   Excerpt from the introduction:

   > Some readers will no doubt think that we are taking these texts too seriously. That is true, in some sense. But since these texts are taken seriously by many people, we think that they deserve to be analyzed with the greatest rigor. In some cases we have quoted rather long passages, at the risk of boring the reader, in order to show that we have not misrepresented the meaning of the text by pulling sentences out of context.

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2. carlobFeb 2013
   For the critique from the other end of the social constructionism spectrum, I strongly suggest you read the chapter devoted to him in Sokal and Bricmont's Impostures intellectuelles (I think it was translated as Fashionable nonsense).

   It's a little hard to find in print, even in libraries. But I'm sure one could source a digital copy from a less reputable source.

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3. svatDec 2020
   No doubt postmodernists have something interesting to say. But as the question is one of earnestness rather than importance or interestingness, consider some examples:

   > Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the √–1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (–1).

   This is from Lacan who elsewhere refers to point-set topology and uses terms from it (bounded, compactness, etc) with no connection to their mathematical meaning, and here he invokes √-1. I got this reference from “Postmodernism and its problems with science” by Jean Bricmont (the original link has been excluded from the Wayback Machine, but PDF here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publicati...).

   Bricmont co-wrote the book Impostures intellectuelles (French) / Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (English) with Alan Sokal (after the Sokal affair). Not repeating the criticism in the above PDF or in their book, but consider a couple of responses to the book:

   * (From https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fashionable_Nonse...) Bruce Fink accused the authors of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings."

   * Luce Irigaray, who argued that E=mc² is a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us […] privileged what goes the fastest”, and that the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed because it is a quintessentially feminine topic, has, in her entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/), an actual section titled “Opaque Writing Style”, which, if I'm reading correctly, says that it is intentional. The London Review of Books carried a review (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pau... , reference via https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html ; see also the many links on Sokal's page: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/) of Sokal and Bricmont's book that defends her by saying:

   > Irigaray’s invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont.

   My point is: in all fields you can find better and worse writers, you can find people “playing the game” or being unnecessarily obscure. Of course I don't know all the jargon of all fields, and my first instinct when something doesn't make sense will always be that it's me who has failed to understand, to trust that the authors are in fact saying something meaningful that a trained person in the field could understand with enough effort. But IMO a failure to be clear must at least be seen as a failure; when a field as a whole rejects clarity or correctness itself (even as at least an aspirational ideal), and considers it perfectly acceptable and defensible to abuse terminology from another field simply for prestige and effect (really, see the examples from Bricmont and Sokal, and responses thereto), then it seems a betrayal of this trust (the authors aren't failing to be clear; they aren't even trying! and everyone thinks this is fine!); it seems reasonable to suggest non-earnestness.

   (This is orthogonal to whether it is interesting and important—it may very well be—the point is only whether earnestness is considered a value.)

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   Edit: The short version of this post is that no physicist or mathematician or engineer accused of being unclear will ever have a section in their biographical entry justifying their “opaque writing style”, nor have it said that in their world it's better to be “wild” than correct. This IMO is a genuine value difference between the fields.

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