Rating: 
Summary: This good book could have been better
Review: Sokal and Bricmont's project was long overdue: exposing the fraudulent use of scientific jargon by a number of our most prominent contemporary theorists. Of course, even without references to science, the language of post-modernism would still be a hopelessly turgid mish-mash of pretentious jargon, but you have to start somewhere, so I welcomed the appearance of this book.Having just finished it, I think Fashionable Nonsense is well worth reading, but it's not quite the triumph I had pictured. The chapters vary greatly in quality and in general Sokal and Bricmont should have spent less time quoting and more time explaining and analyzing. The sections on specific intellectuals are more sucessful when they follow this approach. I thought the demolitions of Bruno Latour and Luce Irigay were quite convincing. However, as a couple of readers have already pointed out, the chapter on Deleuze & Guattari is a decided letdown: interminable quotations followed by almost no substantive commentary. I know Sokal and Bricmont aren't professional writers, but it doesn't appear that they had much editorial help, either. In a way, the more general chapters are the most impressive ones here: the first "Intermezzo" has a useful analysis of the shortcomings of Karl Popper's work and the overreaction it produced (by Feyerabend and others). The "Epilogue" is in many ways the strongest and most convincing statement Sokal has yet made about the damage and mistrust created by the aggressive mindlessness of postmodernism. After all, Sokal and Bricmont are really doing two different things in this book: exposing those who appropriate scientific ideas without knowing what they are discussing (i.e., Lacan, Kristeva, et al), and arguing against those advocating the "strong program" in the Sociology of Science (i.e., Latour). It's in the "Epilogue" where I think they make a plausible case that these things are not only related but harmful intellectual practices. In sum, then, Fashionable Nonsense is enjoyable enough, but should have been more smoothly developed. Sokal and Bricmont are in a position of great strength, but didn't take full advantage of it.
Rating: 
Summary: Well needed return to reality
Review: The physicists who wrote this book have set out to expose the folly of those social scientists and humanists who adopt the methods of mathematics and pure science in their work. They target such luminaries - mostly form the French School - as Lacan, Kristeva and Latour and show that not only is their understanding of the mathematics they use dubious but that this very approach to psychoanalysis, sociology and literature is completely irrelevant. In many cases Sokal and Brincmont - who often cite the original untranslated text - make very clear that the Lacans and Kristevas deliberately fail to even attempt to show or explain the connections they purport to suggest.
I found the book entertaining and, despite the subject matter, the authors do their best to explain to the non-scientific reader where and why the mathematical usage is fallacious. I only hope that soon someone will show how fallacious it is to use mathematics to explain economics - econometric fantasies -, rational choice and sociology. An Excellent book that will have you gasping in incredulity and laughing out loud.
Rating:
Summary: Face it, the emperors are stark naked
Review: Who does not secretly (or not so secretly) enjoy watching a pompous windbag (or several) be put in his (or her) place by the utter destruction of their ridiculous arguments? I do. So too, I suspect, would a great many people who read Fashionable Nonsense, an accounting of the hoax that hammered another nail in the coffin of Postmodernism. In 1996, NYU physics professor Alan Sokal (a co-author of this book, along with Jean Bricmont) published Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity in the journal Social Text. It is a long, detailed, heavily footnoted account of the connections between modern physics and social patterns. It is also, by design, total nonsense. It was page after page of semi readable junk, some of it quite hilarious, whose only redeeming value was that it agreed with the editorial staff of Social Text that science is a social construct, no more or less valid than any other, while apparently also claiming that scientific theories from very advanced physics had useful things to say about societal interactions. Why did Sokal do this? The answers are to be found, in part, within these pages. Roughly half of the book directly concerns the writings of specific postmodernist intellectuals, mostly French, and their blatantly inappropriate use of advanced mathematical concepts in realms where the terms have no meaning. We start out with Jacques Lacan's claim that mental disease is a torus (a doughnut shape). Not metaphorically, but actually. And this is just the first example. As I read through the chapters, I came to the realization that Sokal and Bricmont were listing their authors in increasing strangeness. If anything, this actually became a bit tedious after a while. If a passage is wrong in many ways, we can dissect the writings and find the errors. If an entire passage is one long non sequitur or worse, the comedic value eventually wanes. Even so, I just can't finish this paragraph without giving special mention of a quote by Guattari, of which I only give two sentences: "We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously." Sokal and Bricmont believe that only a genius could have written this, but they don't intend this as a compliment. I agree. The other half of the book contains more general writings on science and philosophy by Sokal and Bricmont as they pertain to the postmodernist abuse of science. There are, overall, two main ideas. One is that the postmodernists are wrong to claim that science is just a social construct. This is what I expected when I bought the book, but it is probably less than half of the subject (see Roger Newton's The Truth of Science for an excellent longer work more focused on this subject). The other main idea is that many postmodernists have appropriated many mathematical and scientific terms and mangled them. They use words from math to discuss psychoanalysis without explaining them. If they redefine the word (which they have every right to do), they don't explain the re-definition. They quote abstract theories from topology and set theory that have nothing at all to do with sociology. We're not talking about sloppy statistical analysis here. We're talking about a systematic misuse of terminology and theories, a likely deliberate use of equivocation to confuse the reader and make themselves look smart. Some structural and literary points should be made here. Obviously I enjoyed this book tremendously, but it is not perfect. Sokal and Bricmont write like physicists, something I know about. I don't think I've ever seen as many qualifications, caveats, and gentle reminders as I found in chapter one as the authors explain in intricate detail precisely what they are going to say. It seems likely that this is done to try to pre-empt much of the likely criticism that surely will be (or was, this came out in 1998) directed at them by the postmodernist community. Certainly there are a great many sociologists that have a vested interest in suppressing the ideas Sokal and Bricmont present here. One would think the postmodernist abusers of science were embarrassed enough to try to fight against some of these assertions, although my understanding is that some of them refuse to accept that the original article was even a hoax. This is certainly laughable. I mean, when Sokal claimed that the new theory of complex numbers is quite speculative compared to the older and better established theories of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and hadron bootstrap theory, it was all I could do not to fall off my couch laughing. It's like he wanted to get caught. Finally, I have to finish with some speculations of my own about the hoax and this book. In a strict epistemological manner, one cannot say for certain whether the postmodernist writers so liberally quoted are honestly in error or whether they are deliberate charlatans. Certainly Sokal and Bricmont make it explicitly clear, perhaps for legal reasons, that they aren't going to say one way or the other what they think on this question. Fine. But we, the readers, are perfectly free to do so. If you're like me, you will probably come away thinking something like 'Thank god someone finally exposed those charlatans.' Even if you've never heard their names before (except Bruno Latour, they were all brand new to me), one cannot read the lengthy examples of gibberish and believe that any of it is serious. It can't be. These emperors have no clothes on at all, but they weren't fooled into doing it the way Hans Christian Anderson's hapless dupe was. Three cheers for Alan Sokal.
Rating:
Summary: Breath of fresh air
Review: Sokal and Bricmont do a tremendous job in accurately and rightfully skewering and exposing the intellectual hucksters who preach deconstructionist/post-modernist nonsense like fraudulent carnival barkers.
"Fashionable Nonsense" will be read and widely debated for decades to come. The negative reviews of this book are most likely by "intellectuals" who have invested a great deal of time into memorizing post-modern/deconstructionist gibberish. Tough to have your world turned upside down. Of course that's exactly what S&B do in this enjoyable and controversial masterpeice.
It's also quite an amusing book, with hilarious examples culled from the works of the authors they criticize. S&B do a fantastic job in comparing the pseudo-math and pseudo-scientific jargon to the reality; making the complicated relatively easy to understand for the layman.
What a welcome book that probably should have been written ten years earlier -- 1998 is the copyright year. The fact that the intellectuals S&B exposed are often considered (by rightwingers looking to beat up progressive leftists any way they can) to be of the left, is just one more reason this book was so desperately needed. Anyone among the progressive left who has half a brain cell certainly realizes "Fashionable Nonsense" is a gift wrapped book to them that helps to clear up just who's committed to anti-imperialism and worker, racial and environmental justice, and who's committed to using jargon laden prose to bolster their own careers and reputations. One of the examples in the book cites a poetry expert throwing in the 'axiom of choice in set theory' into a poetry analysis!
Readers with the slightest bit of interest in philosophy, sociology and political studies should definitely pick up this book.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant critique of 'postmodernist 'rubbish
Review: Sokal and Bricmont, two professors of physics, show that fashionable French intellectuals in the fields of social and cultural studies - Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Luce Irigaray - habitually misuse scientific concepts and terms. Unable to produce genuine science in their own fields, Lacan et al import concepts from the physical sciences - typically, chaos theory, fuzzy logic and the uncertainty principle - to try to impress. They regard science, evidence, reason and knowledge as oppressive. Kristeva characteristically responded to criticism by calling Sokal and Bricmont Francophobes! The two physicists attack relativism, the idea that a statement's truth or falsity is relative to an individual or social group. (Some US colleges run courses like 'queer studies', whose very subject is defined in relation to the interests of a social group, not by its field of study.) Relativists imply that modern science is just a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction'. This allows in the notion that, for instance, creationism is just as valid as the theory of evolution. The editors of 'Social Text' accepted Sokal's famous spoof article, 'Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity', in which he wrote: "Physical 'reality', no less than social 'reality', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct." The editors of 'Science and Culture' accepted the Madsens' supposedly serious article, 'Structuring postmodern science', in which they wrote "A simple criterion for science to qualify as postmodern is that it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth." Says it all really! This book tears apart these postmodernist theorists. Sokal and Bricmont uphold the scientific approach, that knowledge is based on respect for the clarity and logical coherence of theories and on the confrontation of theories with empirical evidence. Knowledge in both natural and social science is cumulative; our understanding of the world grows as we constantly check our ideas against the reality.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious
Review: This is a hilarious book to read and quite devastating to the reputations of those intellectuals in question. Some of Sokal's arguments are weak and miss the point, but these are by far the exception to the rule. However, the book is somewhat compromised in two ways: 1) The authors seem to make their own point (against pontificating on subjects which one has only a limited knowledge) when they launch an attack on the "relativism" of Popper, Kuhn, and Quine. They are physicists, not philosophers after all, so their unenlightening criticisms of these figures and obvious proclivity towards logical positivism is perhaps unsurprising. While their attacks on the misuse of mathematics and science by contemporary philosophers are wonderful and decisive, once they step outside this line of argument they begin to show off their own intellectual fallibility. 2) I'd advise readers to skip over the epilogue, which is rather snobbish, harshly condescending of viewpoints that contradict Science, and full of Sokal's personal political viewpoints. For example, Sokal makes a big deal out of the fact that while most people would answer in the affirmative to the question "is the world composed of atoms?" very few would have an answer to the question "why is this so?". That is pure intellectual pretentiousness and I found it rather irrelevant to the rest of the book. Moreover, it tarnished a bit what I had considered a fabulous book up to that point. Still worth a read though.
Rating: 
Summary: what the postmodernism critics fail to see is that ...
Review: ... in the end, my friend, postmodernism worships the god of the free market.
Rating: 
Summary: unfortunately bad
Review: I was looking forward to an engaging critique of postmodernism. Aside from pointing out the most absurd examples of French Theory, this book does little else. Let me stress, I'm no fan of post structuralism, but the propagandistic quality of this work is too crude to convince anyone already sympathetic to French theory, and one is left wondering what Sokal's motives real are. Lastly, it might interest readers to know that two French brothers have recently (2001) pulled off a similar stunt, but this time the target seems to be theoretical physics. Not only have these brothers been able to publish several nonsense articles in scientific publications, they were also awarded a PHD! Poetic justice perhaps?
Rating:
Summary: Good but not good enough
Review: When Alan Sokal revealed his hoax on the postmodernists he was subjected to a great deal of hostile criticism, including claims that he disparaged the social sciences at large and that he was a stooge for the rightwing cultural establishment. In the introduction to this book the authors carefully defuse many of these criticisms. They explain that their criticisms of the social sciences and social scientists are confined to carefully designated examples (Kristeva, Lacan and others), with lengthy quotes from primary sources. Derrida, for example, is not in the dock because he has not indulged in the abuse of scientific theories and terminology which is their prime target. Against the charge of rightwing political bias, Sokal has a strong track record as a Marxist, hardly a recommendation in my view but a handy rejoinder to leftwing critics. Given their carefully limited aim, their critiques are devastating and their book deserves to be read with close and critical attention by all students who are concerned about the standards of scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. In general they do not stray into the philosophy of postmodernism, that is not an area where they have the qualifications or the motivation, to engage with the likes of Derrida. The area of philosophy where they do chance their arm is the philosophy of science and, ironically, this is the Achilles heel of the book, though it is not likely to be targeted by their major critics. They wrote: "At a time when superstitions, obscurantism, and nationalist and religious fanaticism are spreading in many parts of the world--including the 'developed' West--it is irresponsible, to say the least, to treat with such casualness what has historically been the principal defense against these follies, namely a rational vision of the world. It is doubtless not the intention of postmodern authors to favor obscurantism, but it is an inevitable consequence of their approach." (p.208) The rational view of the world that they favour is of course the worldview of modern science. This is supposed to derive its authority from the so-called inductive methods championed by the logical positivists and logical empiricists. They consider that the rationality of science is not only under attack from the postmodernists (the barbarians at the gate) but from other misguide folk, especially T S Kuhn and Karl Popper, who have subverted the rationality of science from the inside. That may be the case with Kuhn but it is not a valid criticism of Popper. His theory of conjectural objective knowledge provides a defensible rejoinder to relativism and nihilism in a way that the logical empiricists and other forms of positivism do not. The stakes are high in this contest and the authors are well aware of this. For more, do a google search on Rathouse+Popper. It is a cultural disaster of the first magnitude that Popper's ideas have been so thoroughly angled,misunderstood and generally sidelined in the mainstream of philosophy, the social sciences and the humanities.
Rating:
Summary: An Overreach
Review: Readers should look carefully at the book's Introduction, where S&B state their intentions. I want to quote one passage from that section which, I believe, encompasses both the book's major strength and a key weakness, (The numbering is mine). (1) "We make no claim to analyze postmodernism in general; (2) rather our aim is to draw attention to...the repeated abuse of concepts and terminology coming from mathematics and physics. (3)We shall also analyze certain confusions of thought that are frequent in postmodernist writings and that bear on either the content or the philosophy of the natural sciences." (p.4) As it stands, the passage is both a clear and a consistent declaration of intent. Moreover, the authors are devastatingly successful in carrying out (2) much to the embarassment of pomo's reputation which was already strongly suspect in many quarters. The problem lies in carrying out (3) in such a way that the integrity of (1) is not fatally compromised in the process. And here I believe that despite the authors' good intentions, they subvert their own preset limits by dismissing pomo in ways that at least imply a critical denial of (1). Consider the following key passage from the Epilogue, where the authors summarize a major effect of pomo's, namely its impact on not only science but on contemporary culture as a whole. "At a time when superstitions, obscurantism, and nationalist and religious fanaticism are spreading in many parts of the world--including the 'developed' West--it is irresponsible, to say the least, to treat with such casualness what has historically been the principal defense against these follies, namely a rational vision of the world. It is doubtless not the intention of postmodern authors to favor obscurantism, but it is an inevitable consequence of their approach." (p.208) Now "an inevitable consequence of their approach" certainly appears to be a functional denial of (1). Yet to reach such a sweeping condemnation as expressed in the above would require a far lengthier, more philosophically sophisticated book than Fashionable Nonsense with its straw-man characterization of relativism. After all, in the US the ground for pomo was prepared not only by philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Lakatos, but by thinkers concerned with problems surrounding realist theories of reference, people like Rorty, Quine, and the later Wittgenstein. Of course, I wouldn't hold that any of the three are full-blown relativists, though Rorty comes close. Nonetheless, threads of their reasoning aid the case for what might loosely be labeled relativism. Moreover, approaches such as theirs cannot be refuted either directly or indirectly on the cheap, and certainly not by facile, albeit entertaining, comparisons with criminal investigation procedures.
In sum, had they remained within the bounds of their original intent, the authors would have delivered a withering, though not fatal, blow to aspects of pomo and more than a few of its pompously deserving exponents. However, by exceeding those bounds, the book pretends to a scope for which it does not furnish sufficient grounds--demonstrating, I suppose, that, despite the work's considerable merits, overreach is not an exclusive property of the French.
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