Alan Sokal - Intellectual Impostures: postmodern philosophers abuse of science

INTELLECTUAL IMPOSTURES

Alan Sokal is Professor of Physics at New York University. In 1996 his infamous article Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity, parodying postmodernists use of scientific language, was published in all seriousness by the American cultural-studies journal Social Text.

Jean Bricmont is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Louvain (Belgium).

Postmodern philosophers abuse of science

Alan Sokal
and
Jean Bricmont

First published in 1997 in French by

ditions Odile Jacob

15 rue Soufflot

75005 Paris

First published in Great Britain in 1998 by

Profile Books Ltd

58A Hatton Garden

London EC1N 8LX

www.profilebooks.co.uk

This edition published in 1999, 2003

This English translation Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont 1998, 1999, 2003

Typeset in Sabon by MacGuru Ltd

info@macguru.org.uk

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

St Edmundsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 86197 631 3

TO MARINA
TO CLAIRE, THOMAS AND ANTOINE

APPENDICES

The publication in France of our book Impostures Intellectuelles We would like to explain briefly why neither is the case, and to answer both our critics and our over-enthusiastic supporters. In particular, we want to dispel a number of misunderstandings.

The book grew out of the now-famous hoax in which one of us published, in the American cultural-studies journal Social Text, a parody article crammed with nonsensical, but unfortunately authentic, quotations about physics and mathematics by prominent French and American intellectuals. However, only a small fraction of the dossier discovered during Sokals library research could be included in the parody. After showing this larger dossier to scientist and non-scientist friends, we became (slowly) convinced that it might be worth making it available to a wider audience. We wanted to explain, in non-technical terms, why the quotes are absurd or, in many cases, simply meaningless; and we wanted also to discuss the cultural circumstances that enabled these discourses to achieve such renown and to remain, thus far, unexposed.

But what exactly do we claim? Neither too much nor too little. We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Deleuze have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification note that we are not against extrapolating concepts from one field to another, but only against extrapolations made without argument or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning. We make no claim that this invalidates the rest of their work, on which we suspend judgment.

We are sometimes accused of being arrogant scientists, but our view of the hard sciences role is in fact rather modest. Wouldnt it be nice (for us mathematicians and physicists, that is) if Gdels theorem or relativity theory did have immediate and deep implications for the study of society? Or if the axiom of choice could be used to study poetry? Or if topology had something to do with the human psyche? But alas, it is not the case.

A second target of our book is epistemic relativism, namely the idea which, at least when expressed explicitly, is much more widespread in the English-speaking world than in France that modern science is nothing more than a myth, a narration or a social construction among many others. Besides some gross abuses (e.g. Irigaray), we dissect a number of confusions that are rather frequent in postmodernist and cultural-studies circles: for example, misappropriating ideas from the philosophy of science, such as the underdetermination of theory by evidence or the theory-ladenness of observation, in order to support radical relativism.

This book is therefore made up of two distinct but related works under one cover. First, there is the collection of extreme abuses discovered, rather haphazardly, by Sokal; these are the impostures of our title. Second, there is our critique of epistemic relativism and of misconceptions about postmodern science; these analyses are considerably more subtle. The connection between these two critiques is primarily sociological: the French authors of the impostures are fashionable in many of the same English-speaking academic circles where epistemic relativism is the coin of the realm. There is also a weak logical link: if one accepts epistemic relativism, there is less reason to be upset by the misrepresentation of scientific ideas, which anyway are just another discourse.

Obviously, we did not write this book just to point out some isolated abuses. We have larger targets in mind, but not necessarily those that are attributed to us. This book deals with mystification, deliberately obscure language, confused thinking, and the misuse of scientific concepts. The texts we quote may be the tip of an iceberg, but the iceberg should be defined as a set of intellectual practices, not a social group.

Suppose, for example, that a journalist discovers documents showing that several highly respected politicians are corrupt, and publishes them. (We emphasize that this is an analogy and that we do not consider the abuses described here to be of comparable gravity.) Some people will, no doubt, leap to the conclusion that most politicians are corrupt, and demagogues who stand to gain politically from this notion will encourage it. But this extrapolation would be erroneous.

Similarly, to view this book as a generalized criticism of the humanities or the social sciences as some French reviewers did not only misunderstands our intentions, but is a curious assimilation, revealing a contemptuous attitude toward those fields in the minds of those reviewers. As a matter of logic, either the humanities and social sciences are coterminous with the abuses denounced in this book, or they are not. If they are, then we would indeed be attacking those fields en bloc, but it would be justified. And if not (as we believe), there is simply no reason to criticize one scholar for what another in the same field says. More generally, any construal of our book as a blanket attack on X whether X is French thought, the American cultural left or whatever presupposes that the whole of X is permeated by the bad intellectual habits we are denouncing, and that charge has to be established by whoever makes it.

The debates sparked by Sokals hoax have come to encompass an ever-wider range of ever-more-tenuously related issues, concerning not only the conceptual status of scientific knowledge or the merits of French poststructuralism, but also the social role of science and technology, multiculturalism and political correctness, the academic left versus the academic right, and the cultural left versus the economic left. We want to emphasize that this book does