Indeed I found Alan Sokal’s work to be a useful and enjoyable refutation of postmodernist pretensions. True, I don’t agree with everything he said, as he is a mechanical materialist, and I think that modern science illustrates the truth of dialectics. But it is one thing to criticize him for being a mechanical materialist, and another to recoil from the refutation of the fashionable, self-righteous, know-it-all views of modern anti-materialist subjectivism, such as post-modernism.

I include below the introduction to an article on Sokal’s book
that I wrote, and a URL where the entire text can be found. In this
article, I express what I found positive in his work, as well as defend
dialectics against the mechanical views he puts forward. In doing so, I
point to the role of historical materialism, as well as the existence of
contradictions in physical nature and mathematics. In the latter regard, I point to a couple of scientific errors that Sokal himself makes in his book, errors that flow from his disregard of dialectics. For example, he proclaims that infinitesimals have been banished from mathematics, whereas the late Prof. Abraham Robinson rehabilitated infinitesimals in his “nonstandard analysis”.

The article can be found at
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalLong.html

A shorter and more pithy review of Sokal’s book, by Tim Hall,
the editor of “Struggle”, a magazine of proletarian literature,
can be found at
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalShort.html

———————————————-
On Sokal and Bricmont’s book ‘Fashionable Nonsense’
Postmodernism versus materialism

by Joseph Green
(from Communist Voice #20, Mach 28, 1999)

Subheads:
One, two, three, many realities
Ad hominem attacks–the new “rationality”
Postmodernism’s charlatanism
Relativism and science
The “strong program” in the sociology of science
The paradigms of T.S. Kuhn
Overcoming the crisis of the left
The Enlightenment
Historical materialism
The dialectics of nature
Does science teach anything but technical lessons?
Dialectics, motion, and infinitesimals
The Enlightenment and the masses
The rise of Marxism
The current crisis
In defense of materialism

Text:

The left-wing scientist Alan Sokal became the center of controversy
in 1996 when his spoof on postmodernism, an article with the pompous title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was accepted as a serious article by the postmodernist journal Social Text and published in its Spring/Summer 1996 issue on the “science wars”. This article denied, in the name of “science”, the basic materialist view that people live in an external world, whose existence and features are independent of the desires and feelings of human beings. It was full of pseudo-profound assertions about science that were ludicrously wrong. But as it repeated all the postmodernist catchwords and referred in glowing terms to various postmodernist authors, the editors of Social Text couldn’t tell it from an ordinary postmodernist article. Indeed, they were so impressed by the
article that, even after Sokal revealed that it was a hoax, one of the
editors, Bruce Robbins, still felt it was a serious contribution to
postmodernist philosophy.(1)

The next year Sokal, now joined by Jean Bricmont, a theoretical
physicist from Belgium, continued to poke fun at postmodernist ignorance of science. They published in France a book entitled Impostures Intellectuelles which showed the many leading postmo dernist writers, including the famous psychologist Jacques Lacan and the sociologist of science Bruno Latour, were spouting nonsense in the name of “science”. For many postmodernists it is a point of honor to write in an obscure language that is difficult to understand. Sokal and Bricmont showed that the passages about science in various works of these authors were incomprehensible not due to their depth of thought, but because they were mistaken or even meaningless. A good deal of serious postmodernist writi ng is indeed hard to distinguish from Sokal’s spoof of 1996.

Impostures Intellectuelles brought the debate to a new level,
spreading it from the U.S. to France, and the book is currently being
translated into about a dozen languages. Many postmodernists were
outraged that their favorite authors were being judged by the standards of rational thought and objective knowledge whose relevance postmodernism denies. Meanwhile the book finally appeared in English last year in Britain; and at the end of year it was published in the U.S. under the title Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.

The book centers on two subjects. Besides puncturing postmodernist windbaggery about science, it also sets forward some basic materialist views about the nature of science and its relation to the external world. Mind you, Sokal and Bricmont rarely use t he word “materialism”, although it is not clear whether they are simply bowing before the general prejudices of academic circles against such an allegedly crude doctrine as materialism or whether they themselves share these prejudices. They avoid the term “materialism” by instead emphasizing that they are attacking “a potpourri of ideas, often poorly formulated, that go under the generic name of ‘relativism’ ” (p. 51). “Relativism” however is a rather broad term that covers many different concepts. Sokal and Bricmont distinguish between “moral or ethical relativism” about value judgements, “aesthetic relativism” about beauty, and
relativism about the existence of an external world (“cognitive or
epistemic relativism”), which is the only relativism that the y analyze
in this book. They criticize the views on science of such “relativists”
as T.S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Bruno Latour.

Sokal and Bricmont limit their analysis of postmodernism to these two points: pseudo-scientific jargon, and “relativism” about the existence of scientific truth. For example, they don’t discuss or pass judgment on the general psychological theories of L acan, only his mathematical claims, such as “psychoanalytic topology”. But for now, their narrowness serves a useful purpose. Their object is not to assess everything that a postmodernist author may have said or done, and certainly not to oppose every pol itical cause that a postmodernist may have championed, but to focus attention on some basic theoretical issues. They accomplish this with an admirable flair for irritating the high priests of obscurity.

Fashionable Nonsense is certainly not the last word on the “science
wars”. Sokal and Bricmont ignore the question of dialectics; they have
little conception of how to apply materialism outside the sphere of the physical sciences; they don’t know how to deal with the crisis in the left other than to urge rational thought; they don’t deal with how the official scientific establishment bends before the bourgeoisie and does its will; etc. But it is long overdue that two scientists should
demolish the scient ific pretensions of the postmodernist philosophers; indeed, Sokal and Bricmont laughed at them. For myself, I found the book not just useful, but rather enjoyable as well.(2) It will be welcomed by all those who have felt oppressed by the high-flown verbiage and double-talk with which postmodernism has sought to silence criticism. It has also come as a great relief to some people who had made a serious attempt to understand the supposed scientific basis of what the postmodernist authors have been saying.

Notes:
(1) Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross responded on behalf of the editorial board of Social Text to Sokal’s revelation that his article was a hoax in a statement published in the July/August 1996 issue of the journal Lingua Franca. They pointed out that one of the editors “suspected that Sokal’s parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve.” Bruce Robbins, writing in the eptember/October 1996 issue of Tikkun, went still further and approvingly cited someone who wrote that Sokal’s article had “proposed that superstring theory [a speculative new theory in physics--JG] might help liberate science from ‘dependence on the concept of objective truth’.” In reference to this, Robbins claimed that the editors of Social Text had thought that Sokal had a good point in this interpretation, “*and we still do*.” (emphasis added)

(2) Of course, having a basic grounding in mathematics and physics is helpful, or even essential, for understanding a number of the examples that Sokal and Bricmont use; the more background one has, the more ludicrous the examples will appear. Sokal and Bricmont try hard to help the reader by providing, for example, simple explanations of a number of technical terms which are misused by Jacques Lacan and other postmodernist authors. But this is hard to do in a few words. Those readers who can’t verify for themselves various of the technical examples in the book may, however, be interested in the fact that no one has disputed these examples, not at least in the debates that I have seen. Based on my own assessment of these examples, I am not surprised by this in the least.

For the rest of the article, see
http://www.communistvoice.org/20cSokalLong.html

—Joseph Green
mail@communistvoice.org