M. Kerns 2008-09-13

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I have nothing against humanities or social sciences. I even understand that they cannot be held to as much logical rigor as Mathematics and the physical sciences. But there is a frightening trend (Frightening) of these studies being held to no rigor or rational thought.

For example Jacques Lacan tries to use the mathematical topic of Topology to describe the human mind. He describes the Neurotic mind as a torus. Why? When called to question he doesn't even argue this statement to be an analogy instead asserting with all the pomo idiots swooning at his words that the neurotic mind is a torus.

There is also a feminist Hayles who claims fluid mechanics is not well understood because it is a study dominated by men whom have rigid sexual organs. What? This is coming from an individual who more than likely has never even modeled the heat or wave equations let alone something as chaotic as what is described by Navier-Stokes.

Luce Irigaray claims the equation E=mc^2 is a sexed equation. Her reasoning for this is because of the square that is present above the 'c'. She claims that any other important physical speed could easily be used instead of the speed of light. She's right, we could write this equation in terms of Michael Phelps' average swimming speed, but the problem is that the speed of light has a special signifigance. It's like saying how many dollars it takes to buy a car. Now a dealer could mark up the price by how many oranges you need to trade for it, but it is too inappropriate and stupid to do so in the fairness of oranges.

Sokal also voices his concern with the fact that these irrational leftists mix politics with absolute garbage. Sokal seems to have great left wing credentials but these morons have a knack for cheapening the message. Although I'm a libertarian I could respect Sokal's political beliefs because he will argue them from a view of rationality. The biggest mortal sin commited by the authors in this book is their refusal to reason.

Charles Ashbacher 2008-03-20

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

In the depth and breadth of my reading, one of the topics that I find infuriating is when a writer cites a mathematical or scientific principle in a manner completely beyond the scope of the principle. When this is done, they are clearly demonstrating their ignorance of the concept and in many cases their inability to mount a solid argument for the point they are trying to make. I have seen the uncertainty inherent in quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem used in ways that would be laughable if the writer was not so serious. I generally feel sorry for the author when such things appear in print, as in some cases it is an oozing sore of failure in what could have been a good book.
Given this backdrop, it is clear that this book would tilt me towards a state of depression. One of the authors (Sokal) is well known for having had a paper accepted by the cultural studies journal "Social Text" that was a nonsensical parody containing scientific absurdities. All he did was adopt the jargon used by others in the social sciences field and use it to surround scientific statements. In this book, the authors print excerpts from some of the more ridiculous writings where people cite mathematical or scientific principles in improper ways.
The tone and content of these writings can be summed up by the following excerpt, written by Luce Irigaray:

"Is E = Mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest . . . "

The idea that one can apply social mores and gender bias to what is a natural law of the universe is so absurd that I am shocked that anyone could utter such a comment with a straight face or even have the courage to make it public. It is also a demonstration of how science must always stay above the emotional fray, for when it drops down into that cauldron; science and the entire human condition suffer.
As the excerpts make clear, there are some people, supposedly educated, who cite mathematical and scientific concepts without really having any idea what they mean. The only hope for mankind is that those who do understand the concepts continue to speak out and demonstrate these colossal failures. Sokal and Bricmont have done the world a great service in compiling this book and it is one that all mathematical and scientific people should read.

platypus 2008-01-31

7 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

I'm sorry, but as a philosopher trained in the analytic tradition (which tends to oppose much of what is often referred to as 'postmodernism'), I cannot help but cringe at the argumentation in this book. I can assure you that 'Lacan & Co' know a lot more about the natural and formal sciences than these bozos know about the history of ideas. You might as well take Creationist accounts of geological processes seriously if you're going to take these guys seriously. We have a tendency, especially in the U.S., to equate the rational with the scientific. This is no small mistake. Scientists utilize reason to advance their scientific projects. But their SPECIALTY is not in developing good rational argumentation (as it is, for the most part, in philosophy); it is in making science. I think that Sokal and Bricmont may not even have the capacity to understand the people they're 'critiquing', if one could call it that. These guys are upset, and that's fine. But if you're interested in these issues, read philosophical critiques. It's the difference between a good boxing match and watching a couple of hysterical women scratch and pull hair.

Brett Williams 2007-11-02

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

If you're familiar with bloated postmodern verbosity, masking political agendas and gaining tenure to the humanities department, this book will keep you laughing for hours! It's largely about The Sokal Hoax (see appendix) as well as abuses of scientific and mathematical language dominating postmoderns, dismantled one after another in the body of the book. Sokal, a professor of physics (real science, not social "science") canvassed what looks like thousands of postmodern papers flushed in untreated torrents from academia. By pulling together this nasty set of aromas Sokal creates a bouquet for those he drenches with praise throughout the hoax (applying Lodge's maxim, "It is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's pears"). The hoax itself is a postmodern paper incorporating popularized exploitation of esoteric scientific jargon and scientific illiteracy in service to postmodern fantasies. Sokal then got it published in one of their premier "journals", where it was an instant smash ("Social Text" - "A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies", which went on to win the 1996 Ig Noble Award for their work). As a physicist, Sokal, with a real grasp of the lingo, then like any good snake oil salesman or faith healer, simply connected esoteric language to what postmoderns want to hear most, i.e. "that physical reality is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." Thus science is mere politics (another Western bias), with nothing whatsoever to do with the realities of nature. (Ignoring minor matters like curing small pox, man on the moon, Voyager to Saturn, computers, TV, cell phones, planes, trains and automobiles.) There is thus no objective truth, allowing postmoderns to tell us what it really is. Such as feminist "theorist" Sandra Harding's claim (formerly Cornell, now UCLA - yes, universities compete for these people) that Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica is "in fact" a "rape manual"... Huh? The mental acrobatics these people perform is a sight to make even old, stuffy Oswald Spengler blanch (who said, "Modern art is mental acrobatics as a substitute for talent"). At some point Sokal could bare no more praise heaped high on his efforts, nor references to his "ground-breaking work", so he revealed it for what it was. Not only did the kings and queens have no clothes, but their bodies looked so funny under the optic of Sokal's glare. They'd been duped and they knew it. Wheels of postmodern correctness squealed into reverse to say they'd always known Sokal was a fake.

Sokal's hoax makes clear that postmodern "science", like feminist "science", is no different than "proletariat science" applied to agriculture in China's "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-1962 resulting in 40 million deaths to starvation (i.e. they're not science). "If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be true", writes Sokal, it wouldn't work at all, nor would scientists from different cultures, times, political regimes come to the same conclusion, nor create the same explanations independently. Apparently the human brain is quite capable of grasping the way nature really is.

Notice postmodern parallels to Creationism (Intelligent Design). Sokal notes, "a tendency to confuse technical meanings of words such as `uncertainty' and `discontinuity' with their everyday meanings." (Creationists use scientific "theory" to mean guess or hunch.) A postmodern "fondness for the most subjective writings... interpreted in a radical way that goes far beyond [intended meanings]". (Likewise, Creationists take remarks out of context for the same purpose and to argue for descent among scientists about evolution when it is details that generate debate, not the fact of evolution itself.) Postmodernists on the radical, fringe Left never knew they were so cozy with Creationists on the radical, fringe Right.

Contrary to reactions to Sokal and Bricmont, they know exactly what postmoderns are up to (imposters longing to be scientists are rarely hard to unravel), as both examine the output of this sect, verbatim. Noam Chomsky generously labeled these people "amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans", but more, they've discovered a means to swindel the civilizations they inhabit and loath often for its wealth and power, to gain wealth and power. As Andreski is quoted, "The recipe for authorship in this line of business is as simple as it is rewarding: just get hold of a textbook on mathematics, copy the less complicated parts... without worrying unduly about whether the formula [have any bearing]" and give it a good sounding title. To know these people are "adults", supposedly "educated" adults - it's astonishing. But thanks to Sokal and Bricmont, delightful.

Sokal and Bricmont make postmodernism fun, and shows us there's a good chance we've been misunderstanding these people for these last fifty years - they're really comedians. And to think we took them seriously. If the public only knew what academic freedom protected at the local university at their tax dollar's expense, they might not be laughing.

Mr. Bloom 2006-12-15

25 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

Alan Sokal, physics professor at New York University submitted an essay, `Transgressing the Boundaries,' to the prestigious journal Social Text, in 1996. The article was a deliberate hoax intended to mimic the deliberate obscurantism of the Post-Modernist/Post-Structuralist French intellectual community that had coalesced since the 1960's. This book, coauthored with Jean Bricmont, attempts to expose the post-modern movement for their asinine misappropriations of science and mathematics in a vain attempt to consolidate their academic positions. The authors under scrutiny are psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, literary theorist Julia Kristeva, feminist Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio, and `Epistemic Relativism in the Philosophy of Science' and the misappropriation of Godel's theorem, and abuses in the field of astrophysics.

In all fairness, the authors are able to land a couple of substantive blows against Lacan's abstruse use of mathematics in psychoanalysis, and Irigaray's unwise talk of `white male science,' but Sokal and Bricmont don't have their logic together, they make to many critical leaps in the inquiry. Without wanting to get into an involved exegesis of the divisions between analytic and continental philosophy that have existed since the beginning of the 20th century, I will simply say that as a general a priori principle of the human mind, the former believes in objective truth, and the latter is more skeptical, particularly of the principles of the enlightenment. But I am not so sure that Bricmont and Sokal are aware of the history of this division, and the key thinkers that have impacted the division. For example, in a tirade against Epistemic Relativism, the authors writes: "This relativist zeitgeist originates partly from contemporary works in the philosophy of science, such as Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend's Against Method, and partly from extrapolations of these philosophers' work by their successors" (51). Sokal and Bricmont go on to write in a footnote that "There are, of course, many other sources of the relativist zeitgeist, from Romanticism to Heidegger, but we shall not deal with them here" (ibid). Yes, never mind Heidegger, arguably the most important philosopher of the 20th century and the leading figure in the existentialist/post-modern movement in continental philosophy. Never mind his essay `Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics' which outlines a number of problems with reviewing the accomplishments of philosophy from a scientific point of view.

The authors of this text constantly misunderstand the achievements of `Enlightenment' philosophers that they believe the post-modern movement has digressed from, like Descartes and Hume. They write: "The universality of Humean skepticism is also its weakness. Of course, it is irrefutable. But since no one is systematically skeptical (when he or she is sincere) with respect to ordinary knowledge, one ought to ask why skepticism is rejected in that domain and why it would nevertheless be valid when applied elsewhere for instance, to scientific knowledge" (55). What are we supposed to take from this sentence? That we should believe that modern science objectively seeks the truth because...no one actually is a skeptic? Hume argues cogently in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that knowledge of causality can never truly be attained or demonstrably proven, it is merely an appearance based on the properties of a close relation in time and contiguity which deludes our senses. Why then, should we believe in the empirical sciences? The authors merely revert to (often incorrect) digressions on Popper's writings on falsifiability which the authors still seem to think is obsolete and the irrelevance of Cartesian rationalism. In short, they don't answer the problems philosophy has posed to the natural sciences. Sokal and Bricmont don't bother to mention anything about Foucault's archeology of the human sciences in `the Order of Things,' nor do they address any of the classical problems of epistemology and human knowledge raised by Kant or Hegel.

The largest problem with `Fashionable Nonsense' is that the authors take some legitimate criticisms and deduce too much from them. It is worth exposing a thinker for being unclear, meaningless, or irrelevant. However, they go entirely too far in attempting to write off the whole of post-modernity as sheer charlatanism based on a moderate amount of legitimate criticisms. What of the writings of Roland Barthes? What of Levinas? And what about the achievements of post-modern anthropologists like Pierre Bourdieu? After all, the vast majority of the work that is being done in these intellectual domains are more focused on the humanities, on literature, on politics and history, and purely philosophical activities like ontology or phenomenology that have nothing to do whatever with science. Sokal and Bricmont don't have their logic together. They write in their epilogue: "1. It is a good idea to know what one is talking about" (185). Yet I doubt they know anything about the history of philosophy outside of what they have read in Bertrand Russell. They seem to believe in the objective principles of truth established in the Enlightenment, but their political tirade does not mention a word of Rousseau or Nietzsche. They pay no attention to the intellectual bombs dropped on structuralism by Derrida, or by the Marxist analyses of Althusser. In short, they don't know what they are talking about. How ironic.