Intellectual Impostures

"This is an entertaining book. It’s very different. The theme is still pseudoscience. Alan Sokal is a scientist, perhaps best known for the Sokal hoax. He became increasingly irritated by the way in which scientific jargon was being used by postmodern writers in a nonsensical or ridiculous way in their publications, so he decided to expose this by writing a spoof postmodern article called ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. He peppered it with scientific gobbledygook, and included all of the relevant sexy buzzwords as far as postmodern philosophy was concerned. The leading journal of postmodern philosophy, Social Text, accepted his submission and published it. Many felt this was an emperor’s new clothes moment for the postmodern philosophical movement. The small boy had now pointed and laughed and everyone could see the truth, that the postmodern emperor had no clothes. This book was written after the hoax, and looks at the work of a number of different postmodern thinkers including Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze. Sokal explains and illustrates very patiently how they’re using scientific terminology in a way that is either wrong, or else, in many cases, nonsensical, often creating the illusion that they have some deep and profound insight when the truth is that they don’t. There’s a nice quotation from him about Jean Baudrillard’s work which is full of references to chaos theory, quantum mechanics, non-Euclidian geometries, and so on. Sokal and Bricmont write: ‘In summary, one finds in Baudrillard’s work a profusion of scientific terms used with total disregard for their meaning, and above all in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology, or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard’s thought if the verbal veneer covering it was stripped away’. (p.143) It’s certainly partly that. It’s clear that science has been extraordinarily successful at revealing fundamental truths about reality. No doubt some philosophers would like to make similarly impressive claims. If they can harness the scientific vocabulary, some of the credibility and the authority of science may then rub off on their own work. You can see the attraction of employing that vocabulary, even if it’s in a muddled-headed way."