Fashionable Nonsense

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.