The abuse of thought

I've just finished "Fashionable Nonsense:  Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science," by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.  What a treat!  And if you're not inspired to order the book, you should be able to get a hoot out of the highlighted reviews, especially the review posted by "Laon" and the many comments attached to it.

Sokal submitted his absurd thesis, "Transgressing the Boundaries:  Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," to a journal called "Social Text" in 1996 and was surprised to find they were prepared to publish it.  Meticulously footnoted with nonsensical but unfaked quotations from postmodernists (heavy on the fawning citations to members of the Social Text editorial board), Sokal's masterpiece begins with this introduction:

[D]eep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the facade of "objectivity."  It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality," no less than social "reality," is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge," far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relationship of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.  These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the culture fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular

Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step further, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity:  the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded.  In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science -- among them, existence itself -- become problematized and relativized.  This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.

It's hard to see how the editorial board could get past "exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics" with a straight face, but they ate it up with a spoon.  Sokal outed his own hoax in an article published simultaneously in another journal:

Like the genre it is meant to satirize -- myriad exemplars of which can be found in my reference list -- my article is a melange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. . . .  I also employed some other strategies that are well-established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre:  appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words.

Now, Sokal is no conservative.  He describes himself as an "old Leftist," and decries the weakness of the left in abandoning the whole notion of truth.  He quotes approvingly from Stanislav Andrewski in his 1972 work "Social Sciences as Sorcery":

So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society.  Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order.  Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.

I found that I could not sustain any focused attention on lengthy explanations of the writings of such luminaries as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who wrote:

You can perhaps see that the sphere, that old symbol for totality, is unsuitable.  A torus, a Klein bottle, a cross-cut surface, are able to receive such a cut.  And this diversity is very important as it explains many things about the structure of mental disease.  If one can symbolize the subject by this fundamental cut, in the same way one can show that a cut on a torus corresponds to the neurotic subject, and on a cross-cut surface to another sort of mental disease. . . .  It is not an analogy.  It is really in some part of the realities, this sort of torus.  This torus really exists and it is exactly the structure of the neurotic.  It is not an analogon; it is not even an abstraction, because an abstraction is some sort of diminution of reality, and I think it is reality itself.

Okey dokey.  Here's is Luce Irigaray's discourse on Einstein and sexism:

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. . . .

You see the difficulty in parodying this sort of thing:  it's hard to go any further over the top.

Sokal and Bricmont make a plea for some ground rules in applying abstruse scientific or mathematical principles to social science.  If they are to be used as metaphors or analogies, for instance, writers should remember that these rhetorical devices normally use the familiar to illustrate the unfamiliar, not vice versa.  The authors also encourage their readers to use common sense in evaluating the more extraordinary claims set forth by masters of other disciplines:

At this point [my critic] may object that I am rigging the power game in my own favor:  how is he, a professor of American Studies, to compete with me, a physicist, in a discussion of quantum mechanics?  (Or even of nuclear power -- a subject on which I have no expertise whatsoever.)  But it is equally true that I would be unlikely to win a debate with a professional historian on the causes of World War I.  Nevertheless, as an intelligent lay person with a modest knowledge of history, I am capable of evaluating the evidence and logic offered by competing historians, and of coming to some sort of reasoned (albeit tentative) judgment.  (Without that ability, how could any thoughtful person justify being politically active?)