November 15, 1998
Is Paris Kidding?
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The authors ridicule the pseudoscientific blather of some famous
post-modern thinkers.
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By JIM HOLT
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FASHIONABLE NONSENSE
Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.
By Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
300 pp. New York:
Picador USA. $23.
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I n France (where it was published a year ago), this much-maligned
book has been likened to Kenneth Starr's report to Congress. Both
documents arise out of a peculiarly American spasm of ''rigorist
purism'' and ''hatred,'' according to a columnist for Le Monde. The
comparison, it must be said, is not altogether fair. ''Fashionable
Nonsense,'' though juicy in its own way, is not quite so
titillating as the Starr report. Moreover, only one of its two
co-authors (Alan Sokal) is American, so our culture can't entirely
be blamed for it. What ''Fashionable Nonsense'' and the Starr
report do have in common, however, is a certain confusion about the
gravity and nature of the sins of their targets.
Sokal, a physicist at New York University, caused an intellectual
row a couple of years ago when he fooled the editors of a modish
academic journal called Social Text into publishing a sham article
he had written. Bearing the title ''Transgressing the Boundaries:
Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,'' the
article was meant to be a parody of what is loosely called
post-modernist thought. It was crammed full of meaningless
references to esoteric ideas in mathematics and physics, from which
it leapt, in one breathtaking non sequitur after another, to
radical conclusions about politics and society. As deliberately
parodic as Sokal's pronouncements were, they seemed nowhere near as
silly as the bits he quoted from post-modernist icons like Jacques
Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray and from their numerous
American interpreters, who showed up in a cataract of footnotes.
It was a good joke. It had funny consequences too: academics wrote
indignantly to The New York Times to insist that, despite what the
parody implied, they did so believe in the existence of the
external world. But Sokal was up to more than mischief. The purpose
of his hoax, he declared, was to reveal the fraudulence of much
post-modernist thought, especially as it abused science. There was
also a political angle. Far from being a right-winger picking on
the lit-crit pinkos, Sokal said, he was ''an unabashed Old
Leftist'' (he taught in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas) who
worried that the post-modern assault on objectivity was depriving
the working class of the weapons needed to win the struggle against
oppression -- a view shared with comrades like Noam Chomsky and
Eric Hobsbawm.
''Fashionable Nonsense,'' which Sokal wrote with the Belgian
physicist Jean Bricmont, grew out of this hoax. The authors have
two stated aims. First, they wish to present the full dossier of
pseudoscientific nonsense masquerading as profundity that Sokal
discovered when he was composing his parody, and to explain to
nonscientists exactly why it is nonsensical. Second, and more
ambitious, they want to make a philosophical case against what they
call post-modern relativism: the notion that physical reality is
nothing but a social construct and that science, despite its
pretensions to truth, is just another ''narration'' that encodes
the dominant ideology of the culture that produced it.
The dossier part is intermittently amusing, but I'm not sure it
demonstrates what Sokal and Bricmont want it to. The passages cited
all come from French thinkers who cannot resist the urge to
name-drop. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan drones on about sexual
pleasure as if it were a branch of topology, the mathematical
theory of abstract spaces. The literary theorist Julia Kristeva
tries to ground her poetics in Godel's incompleteness theorem,
which she gets exactly backward. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
philosophers of S & M, among other topics, unbosom themselves of
endless bizarre reflections on Newtonian physics.
Technical terminology from quantum theory and mathematical logic
flows fast and furious, but it's mostly gibberish, as Sokal and
Bricmont painstakingly show. The Parisian thinkers have only the
foggiest understanding of science, and the metaphors they invoke
could scarcely be more arbitrary -- when they signify anything at
all. (The sociologist Jean Baudrillard, for one, has a habit of
simply making up his terms, like ''variable refraction hyperspace''
and ''fractal scissiparity.'') ''If the texts seem
incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean
precisely nothing,'' Sokal and Bricmont comment. Indeed, it's hard
to imagine how people could read the texts seriously. Perhaps the
lofty-sounding verbiage has an incantatory force for those innocent
of science. Some of these passages, if intoned in the plummy voice
of, say, Jeremy Irons, could well have the meaningless beauty of a
Mallarme poem.
But what is the crime here? At worst these French theorists are
bluffeurs. They do not hate science; they love it too well and try
to wrap themselves in its mantle. It is a tendency deeply ingrained
in the culture of the Ecole Normale Superieure, the elite Paris
institution where many French philosophers are trained. Its
students are encouraged to extend their erudition as widely, if
superficially, as possible -- to ''possess the world,'' as
Jean-Paul Sartre once put it. The philosophes of the Enlightenment
took a leaf from Newton; is it surprising that their contemporary
counterparts should try to take one from quantum theory and
relativity?
A more distressing abuse of science is to be found right here in
the United States. It arises not from an elitist, hyperrationalist
culture, like that of France, but from a home-grown antielitist,
antirationalist, anti-intellectual one. Traditionally, this science
war, as Sokal and Bricmont refer to it in the epilogue of their
book, has been waged by the religious right, but in recent decades
an element of the academic left has got in on the action -- the
''cultural studies'' crowd. Among its leading figures is Andrew
Ross, one of the editors of the journal that unwittingly
collaborated in Sokal's hoax. Now, Ross is a man with a keen sense
of irony, and when he complains about scientists undemocratically
excluding the New Age beliefs of the masses, he may just be pulling
our leg. But one gets the feeling that many of his allies are dead
earnest when they denounce science as patriarchal and
authoritarian, and call for its subordination to progressive
interests.
The American cultural-studies types and the Parisian theorists do
have something in common -- something, that is, besides a woolly
way of expressing themselves. Both camps are skeptical of the
notion of objective truth, that there is such a thing as a world
independent of our minds that science alone can represent ''as it
really is.'' Sokal and Bricmont regard this attitude as daft, not
to say dangerous. The gravamen of their book is a defense of
scientific realism against its relativist enemies.
This defense is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go very
far. It is the work of a moment to refute someone who claims that
there is no such thing as scientific progress, or that the content
of scientific theories is dictated exclusively by cultural
interests. But there are other, more sophisticated arguments that
the authors do not bother to address. They have been framed by
philosophers of unimpeachable scientific credentials (like Hilary
Putnam and W. V. Quine) and are based on powerful findings in the
area of mathematical logic known as model theory. They make the
authors' ''realist'' explanation for the success of science -- that
its theories uniquely latch on to the way the world is -- seem like
empty metaphysics.
T hese arguments are difficult, but their flavor can be conveyed by
a simple example. As a theory whose correspondence to the world is
so evident that ''it has become irrational to doubt it,'' Sokal and
Bricmont cite atomism. But what is an atom? To the greatest
physicist of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell, an atom was ''a
body which cannot be cut in two.'' This is certainly not true of
what we now call atoms. It may turn out that nothing in the world
fits Maxwell's description -- in which case, when he theorized
about atoms, he was referring to nothing at all. By the same token,
''superstring'' -- the theoretical term today's physicists use to
refer to the basic constituents of reality -- may also turn out to
designate nothing at all a hundred years hence. Physics will
doubtless be more potent then, but not because it more accurately
pictures some supposedly theory-independent ''furniture of the
world.''
As physicists, Sokal and Bricmont have done reason a modest service
by exposing a species of intellectual quackery. As philosophers,
they have not pursued reason far enough -- all the way to its
sometimes unreasonable-sounding conclusions.
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Jim Holt writes about science and philosophy for The Wall Street
Journal and Lingua Franca.
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Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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