The Sokal Affair - Now a Double Affair.
(Stale news from 1998)
1. The background: A physicist's experiments with the post-modern dogmas of social science.
2. The Impostures intellectuelle
- Fashionable Nonsense - Eleganter Unsinn
3. A critique of the critics:
those critical physicians made the same mistakes in philosophy as the uncritical
philosophers in physics.
4. Links
5. Summaries of the
chapters of Fashionable Nonsense - German only:
"Eleganter Unsinn" (Zusammenfassungen)
1. The background. 
Recently
Alan Sokal an American professor of physics at the University
of New York proved by a simple experiment that antirealism, relativism
and anti-objectivism are nowadays handled as postmodern common wisdom
and are proliferated with great eagerness. The interest in this postmodern
ideology is great enough to sacrifice scientific honesty. Especially if
a physicist is ready to support postmodern ideas members of the social
sciences will be inclined to accept articles even if they are peppered
with absurdities. All this happened when Alan Sokal gave his text Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
to Social Text (see Social Text 46/47, pp.217-252, spring/summer
1996).
Later he revealed his text as a hoax in: A Physicist's Experiments
With Cultural Studies in: Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, pp.
62-64. Otherwise he possibly would have become the new guru of postmodernism.
Recently I translated this text into German language see
E-journal Sic-et-Non - hjn
2. The book of
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
IMPOSTURES INTELLECTUELLES
Paris (Odile Jacob) autumn 1997
Enlightening insights into the
philosophical workshops of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray,
Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari,
and Paul Virilio. Sokal/Bricmont: "....But what
exactly do we claim in our book? Neither too much nor too little. We show
that famous intellectuals such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray,
Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze have repeatedly abused scientific concepts
and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context,
without giving the slightest empirical or conceptual 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 to their non-scientist readers without any regard for
its relevance or even is meaning. We make no claim that this invalidates
the rest of their work, on which we are explicitly agnostic."
The book is now translated into English and German:
Fashionable
Nonsense
Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
New
York (Picador) 1998
Eleganter Unsinn - Wie die
Denker
der Postmoderne
die
Wissenschaften
mißbrauchen
München
(C. H. Beck) 1999
3. Critique
of the critics.
Even
if I agree completely with this successful criticism of postmodern misuse of
science I have to blame the authors of serious faults.They also are stumbling
into the realm of philosophy without knowing much. They repeat just those
mistakes which they are critisizing so sharply if done by others. And their
critique - let me stress this - was accurate, intellectual, and scientific.
Neverthelesse in the chapter about
Popper without knowing much they are talking much. They are talking a lot of
nonsense about Karl Popper. Popper as a life long fighter against relativism was
made a kind of unwillingly grandfather of relativism. (The fathers are Kuhn and
Feyerabend; in this point we agree.) He is made responsible of the faults of
Kuhn and Feyerabend. Rubbish. It seems to be another hoax. But our authors did
not intend to make another hoax. They just stubled into it. They did not know
what the were writing.
I had some emails about this topic
with Alan Sokal, but he seemed being not too much impressed of my
criticism. Because I feel the scientific habit of philosophy is at
stake (philosophy is no science but it should urgently brought back to behave
scientifically), I wrote about all of this stuff in CONCEPTUS No. 80
(2000):
Summary. "Ambiguities and inadequacies in Popper's
epistemology combined with stubborn denial of the method of confirmation in
science are to have provoked exaggerated criticism and thus the postmodern
relativistic irrationalist drift. The physicists Sokal and Bricmont gave their
criticism import, because in the same book they present competent and laudable
critics of the irrational abuse of science in the writings of postmodern French
thinkers. In addition they seem to confront Popper's epistemology with the
actual doing of real scientists. Unfortunately they neither do reveal their new
inductive method nor let us learn which problem is solved by it, for physics can
manage without any inductive method. It will be shown that Popper was not
"taken literally" and what he is alleged to have meant (meanwhile a
cliché petrified during several decades) he has not. The refutation of the
renewed criticism of Popper is combined with a comparison of the quite different
standards in physics and philosophy. Finally some proposals are made in order to
transfer the scientific standards of physics into philosophy."
- Hans-Joachim Niemann, Die "Krise in der Erkenntnistheorie"
- Sokal, Bricmont und die wissenschaftlichen Standards in der Philosophie, CONCEPTUS Nr. 80 (2000),
in print.
4.
Links 1998 WebPages about the sokal affair (if they yet work):
Alan
Sokal Articles on the "Social Text" Affair
Deja
News Query Results
More
connections to the Sokal discussion
Furor over
Impostures Intellectuelles
Paul
Boghossian
1998 and
3.4.00. Hans-Joachim Niemann - back
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