Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1998; UK: Intellectual Impostures), first published in French in 1997 as Impostures intellectuelles, is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. As part of the so-called science wars, Sokal and Bricmont criticize postmodernism in academia for the misuse of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing.
The book was published in English in 1998, with revisions to the original 1997 French edition for greater relevance to debates in the English-speaking world. According to some reports, the response within the humanities was "polarized"; critics of Sokal and Bricmont charged that they lacked understanding of the writing they were scrutinizing. By contrast, responses from the scientific community were more supportive.
Similar to the subject matter of the book, Sokal is best known for his eponymous 1996 hoaxing affair, whereby he was able to get published a deliberately absurd article that he submitted to Social Text, a critical theory journal. The article itself is included in Fashionable Nonsense as an appendix.
Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics:
the allegedly incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; and
the problems of cognitive relativism—the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others"—as found in the Strong programme in the sociology of science.
The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general", but rather "to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism." In particular, the authors aim to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and complicated ideas: "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing.
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The science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world. HighBeam Encyclopedia, citing the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, defines the science wars as the discussions about the "way the sciences are related to or incarnated in culture, history, and practice[...] [which] came to be called a 'war' in the mid 1990s because of a strong polarization over questions of legitimacy and authority. One side [.
Alan David Sokal (ˈsoʊkəl; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
The strong programme or strong sociology is a variety of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) particularly associated with David Bloor, Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, Donald A. MacKenzie, and John Henry. The strong programme's influence on science and technology studies is credited as being unparalleled (Latour 1999). The largely Edinburgh-based school of thought has illustrated how the existence of a scientific community, bound together by allegiance to a shared paradigm, is a prerequisite for normal scientific activity.
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