Rating: 
Summary: The truth about French 'intellectuals' - absurdity abounds.
Review: The authors go a great job shredding the nonsense passed (and accepted) as 'science' by social scientists. One would despair of our future if it wasn't for people like Sokal - a scientist of the true 'I can demonstrate' variety. Here, he demonstrates the vacuous editorial skills of a particular periodical - and by association, the gullibility of it's readership in general.
Rating:
Summary: Remarkable book
Review: A little acknowledged fact is that cultures exist which develop rules of their own that anyone outside would think are absurd. These cultures persist because the participants have so little contact with the rest of the world, and vice versa. The authors turn over the rock on one such culture -- postmoderist thought. Sokal/Bricmont aim at a very narrow target -- the abuse of science and math. In doing so, they are devastating. The text they quote and then attack is an astonishing combination of error and gibberish. Indeed, the point of this book is also its greatest drawback. The quote attacked are so painfully difficult to read that one is tempted to skip over them after a few pages. In the end there is almost a feel of beating a dead horse. Let us not forget, however, that these horses have tenure.
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Summary: Battle vs. Nonsense Makes Strange Bedfellows
Review: My political and social views are very, very different from Sokal's and Bricmont's (and I really don't care how much postmodernism damages the Left), but I have to appreciate their attempt to call on the carpet those who have misappropriated the terminology, ideas, and results of math and physics in their work.The lengthy quotes from French intellectuals that Sokal and Bricmont present in their book remind me of a weird combination of Mad Libs, the nonsense-talking inmate Damon Wayans played on "In Living Color", and a Babelfish translation attempt gone awry. (But, of course, translators can't be blamed for the nutty things these French(wo)men say, because their words apparently don't make any more sense in the original. _Fashionable Nonsense_ itself was originally published in France as _Impostures Intellectuelles_.) If my math students wrote like this, I'd probably not only fail them but also arrange for them to receive psychiatric treatment. Why only 4 stars? While the book starts out fun, after a couple hundred pages it gets a little bit tiresome. You only have to read so many page-long excerpts of gibberish followed by commentary on the order of "Well, that didn't make any sense" to get the point. Sokal and Bricmont's attempt to be patient, fair, and scholarly is understandable and laudable, but I have to say I that I found myself longing for the poison-pen approach that Norman Levitt took in _Prometheus Bedeviled_.
Rating: 
Summary: Thank God objectivity can go without Sokal an Bricmont ideas
Review: Throughout my reading of this book I kept asking myself a few questions. Are Sokal and Bricmont giving an account of postmodern intellectuals' abuse of Science or attacking their assumed radical skepticism? At some point they just want to correct errors, but at other moments they want to do much more than just to correct mere errors. But if they are doing both, what is the connection between them? Sokal and Bricmont do a good job on pedagogical correction regarding the use of scientific terms out of their respective contexts, but to undertake a philosophical critique require much more than a correction of terms and much more than cleverly formulated logical attacks. To enjoy other logical tricks that Sokal and Bricmont's attacks missed we could say: Scientists like them state that postmodernists can't stop admitting scientific evidences at a practical level, but those postmodernists can reply that scientists can't stop being subjective in their objective approaches. Scientists like Sokal can say that one can't be sceptical fully without contradicting oneself, but philosophers like Derrida can say that one can't be objective fully without contradicting oneself either. I am not agreeing with postmodernists, but just making clear that logical tricks most time boomerang against oneself. The main premise of Sokal and Bricmont's attack to their opponents is quite clear: Whatever their opponents say that is true is banal and whatever their opponents say that might sound interesting is nonsense. Maybe, that is a good catch line to demolish a philosopher argument in a Court Room battle with a scientist, but unfortunately for Sokal and Bricmont philosophical solipsism or relativism can't be demolish in a philosophical way by insisting in calling them nonsense. Idealism is part of a philosophical heritage that can't be rigorously analysed by hasty logical outburst from scientists prompting for objective understanding. If Sokal and Bricmont are demanding more respect and rigorousness in the use of scientific words, they should also be more respectful of the tradition of philosophical terms, which they easily oversimplify and translate either into banal language or scientistic assumptions. They utterly neglect to give a fair account of the abuse by many scientists of terms borrowed from non-scientific fields, which would make the errors of postmodernists not just a case of intellectual dishonesty, but part of the natural ongoing process of the redefining dynamic of disciplines. Sokal and Bricmont keep stating that science has no monopoly on the use of words but throughout the book they fail to give a different impression. If Sokal and Bricmont are attacking Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard or Deleuze on the basis of the use they make of scientific terms, their so-called attack is not an attack but a pedagogical correction. However, if they are attacking them on the basis of their own philosophical bias, they should be aware that in some cases philosophical objectivity can't be filter with the same bias of scientific objectivity. They are somehow right in their critique, but they mix up an understanding of the misuse and abuse of scientific terms with plain blindness and inability to comprehend certain philosophical styles, which, as usual, have also been abused and dimmed by followers. They also show inability to understand a basic human tendency to metaphysics and the making of general statements that although necessary at times overshadow or overrun facts. They wrongly take that overrunning as dishonesty and gross error. To correct a philosophical enterprise doesn't require of another philosophical posing, but just to make clear where the amendments should be done. However, Sokal and Bricmont, are not just amending, but attacking the philosophical bases of postmodernists and they do so not by making a rigorous philosophical undertaking, but by using in their attack non philosophical terms borrowed in a sloppy way either from their own scientific bias or the so much useful common sense. True, they are not philosophers, but the same thing can be applied to Derrida's scientific sloppiness, he is not a scientist. If the only objectivity Sokal and Bricmont can make head or tail is that of science and assume that science is a refined use of common sense at the same time that they acknowledge the limits of science, they are just assuming that the limit of science are the limits of our objective understanding of the world. However, science, as we can witness in the current state of affairs in the world, is just part of it and it is just another important contributor of our objective understanding of the world and doesn't have the last word in such understanding.
Rating: 
Summary: Keep the aspirin handy!
Review: What an ordeal the authors of this book must have endured in researching the material for it! Even wading through the snippets and samples used to illustrate their arguments is a mind-warping exercise. Describing the phenomenon of "postmodernism" as "nebulous Zeitgeist," they expand on the definition with characteristics of postmodernist writings. These elements are abuse of scientific terms and use of meaningless terminology, offering empty opinions on how science works and its impact on society. Manipulating science for philosophic ends might be considered harmless, if it was but an ignorant assault on the discipline alone. Instead, the deconstructionist view wants the whole of society to reconsider its roots in their lights - it is an intellectual revolution. Unlike other revolutions, however, postmodernism is purely destructive having no discernible aims. The authors make a sincere effort to limit their diagnosis to a limited scope. They avoid judgment on the philosophies in general. By offering lengthy original quotes, countered by an analysis of the scientific principles clumsily interpreted by the PM writers, they invite readers to arrive at their own assessment. The reader is given brief but informative passages on the scientific topics in support of this exercise. It takes, however, a dedicated reader to wade through the morass of "profound prose" the PMs have conceived without querying its fundamental validity. What is interesting in their presentation is the focus on French sources. In this approach, they attack the contagion at its source. A diagnosis of its infection among North American academics isn't presented. That has been done elsewhere. Yet the authors understand that the postmodernist movement has strong adherents in North America. This reaches far outside the university community to reach government policy makers, educators at all levels and even the business community. Among educators, postmodernist impact on feminist thinking has outstripped its role in other humanist issues. Feminists may not address specific scientific topics as such, but are given to broad sweeping statements castigating half of the human species. Luce Irigary is given much space in this book due to her outrageous assertions and her impact on North American feminism which adopts them gleefully. Sokal and Bricmont, in their conclusion, see this resulting in a violation on educational standards. It is, in truth, a raping of young minds. This book, then, is a sharp warning to those who force artificial standards on behaviour and school curricula. Read it, difficult as the postmodernist passages are, with the intention to look at the issues further. They are before you now and require action. It is your children who will benefit from what Sokal and Bricmont have offered.
Rating: 
Summary: Ponderous
Review: They make their case about the pseudo-scientifc bafflegab of the pomos, but the book is marred by a few irritating things. First they disclaim everything, over and over. "Do not assume we mean to criticize all of X .." etc, over and over. They lack wit and sparkle; this could be a lot more fun! And the last part of the book has a lot of tendentious political soap-boxing. Sokal deserves praise for his hoax though.
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Summary: News from cloud-cuckoo-land
Review: Many thinkers have 'transgressed the boundaries'. Chomsky took what he needed from mathematics; philosophers from Popper to David Albert pondered quantum physics and relativity. But, ignorant or contemptuous of the postmodern dispensation, they labored under a grave disadvantage: what they wrote took the form of rational propositions, and readers could test whether or not they agreed with them. The thinkers cited in this book are more advanced. Strictly speaking, they are impossible to refute. What they have to say is so deep that, where it impinges on one's small area of competence, naturally it has the appearance of nonsense, or at least lacks enough mundane sense to disagree with. Sokal and Bricmont's area of competence is physics and math, and they stick to it. They disentangle gross errors and more subtle confusions arising from a kind of cargo-cult approach to science practiced among the left-bank tribes. They detect an uncritical scientism that would have embarrassed Wells. ('It is not an analogy ... this torus really exists and it is exactly the structure of the neurotic' - Jacques Lacan.) They catch Deleuze and Guattari indulging in a prolix grope at the foundations of calculus, muddying the waters with mystifications that were out of date two centuries ago (but of course readers of philosophico-literary theory aren't expected to know that - and at a pinch, the masters may be up to something completely different). And so it goes on, in the old, old style. The book is not a collection of finger-pointing schoolyard jibes. It's meticulously researched and a model of clear exposition. It raises serious points, which some speed-readers are quite determined to miss, about the current fault-lines of intellectual communication. It asks how we got here and what can be done, even essaying some answers. It's amazingly restrained (compare Gross & Levitt); and, with due respect to one reviewer, all the stronger for that. The tone is drily humorous, and there are downright funny bits: don't miss Irigaray quarreling with E=Mc^2 (it's sexist), or the sociologist Latour lecturing Einstein on elementary relativity. These people, we are told, are 'creating concepts'. They may be beyond parody, but here's a good try: Sokal's Hoax, that concoction of pseudo-scholarship and pomo-babble, reprinted with commentary in an appendix. No, I don't believe the authors did it for the megabucks; it's the hegemony, stoopid. Does any of this matter? Are Sokal and Bricmont wasting trees? The best the critics can say is: they wish they'd shut up. One school of thought argues that this is all nit-picking and irrelevant to real pomo (they always knew these particular luminaries were full of merde). Another school insists that these, or some of them, or one of them (opinions differ) are great, maligned thinkers. They can't both be right; indeed they may both be wrong. By all means, as a reviewer admonishes, read Lacan, Latour, Deleuze and their Anglophone wannabes. Also read this book and some Popper, ideally 'The Open Society and its Enemies'. See which you think treats your intelligence with seriousness and respect. 'But for those whose minds have been formed by this material, it may be too late' - Thomas Nagel.
Rating: 
Summary: Selective Misreading
Review: Whenever I come across people who characterize Jacques Lacan as a radical postmodernist, I smile and immediately recognize that they have either never read Lacan's writings directly or have not bothered to engage them within their larger context: Lacan's self-proclaimed continuation of the Enlightenment project of rationality, initiated by Descartes and others, that thoroughly informs Freud's entire psychoanalytic project. Such an undertaking hardly qualifies one as "radical" and certainly not as "postmodern". What Sokol, Bricmont and their readers can't seem to deal with is Lacan's willingess to treat topology and knot theory as metaphoric constructs that enable us to gain certain insights into human subjectivity that are not readily apparent using the earlier Euclidean and mechanistic metaphors available to Freud and his contemporaries. Nowhere in my reading of Lacan have I encountered claims that he is a mathematician or that he is engaged in the teaching of mathematics. One need not, I should hope, be required to show a coherent understanding of quantum mechanics to apply metaphors derived from chaos theory or indeterminacy to certain realities which fall within the range of our own areas of expertise or understanding. I suspect that each of us does so on a regular basis. One important lesson to be derived from Sokol's work is that every reader has an obligation to engage the text with a certain level of seriousness and commitment. Unfortunately, we Americans often lack the necessary attention span or critical impulse to engage with primary sources. How much easier to accept the dismissive ridicule of "experts" who, thank heaven, do the heavy reading for us... perhaps. My challenge to everyone is to pick up Lacan's writings on topology and judge for yourselves whether or not they shed any light on your own understanding of human subjectivity. I myself have found them particularly instructive in this regard, and I am neither a mathematician nor a psychoanalyst, though I have read extensively in both fields. I should add that Lacan was trained in the sciences, being both an MD as well as a psychoanalyst, and presumably possessed the requisite intellectual ability to formulate a workable understanding of topology and non-Euclidean geometries.
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Summary: Science is Good; Purpose of Book Causes Problems
Review: Scientists who criticize postmodernism at least are interesting, informative and insightful when they talk shop. Other critics of postmodernism, as well as defenders of it, usually criticize their target, but can only offer as their own ideas arguments that may be less ridiculous than their targets', but no less illogical. The problem is that, as a "postmodernism is not good, redux," the book is a waste of time and trees. It hasn't noticed or improved on the problematic aspects of criticisms of pomo.
One problem is the tenor of the book, which conveys to me the sense that the authors either are using strawmen fallacies or just being disrespectful. If postmodernists really are this stupid, wasn't Sokal's hoax the ethical equivalent of teasing the mentally handicapped? It is true that some people don't deserve respect, but when your ideal is a world in which humanity understands and appreciates science, who isn't in your audience? An audience can't even perceive disrespect, because they will close ranks rather than become introspective. The fault is largely with them, but to a significant degree there is fault in the authors' action, and if you are the better person you bear this culpability to the fullest.
Two things wrong with the observations of postmodernism. First, pomo is misunderstood in a way that renders the book an attack on really badly iterated pomo. There's no point exposing the weakness of an intellectual concept as used by its least sincere and aware practicioners, unless the point is that the worst practicioners are the most influence, in which case the spotlight should be not on science, but on "good postmodernism". Scientists should recognize that they are not the victims; good postmodernists are. If good postmodernism is useless, though, then let's show how to discard it, which is better achieved through a forum other than, "Hey, you don't get science" (postmodernists don't jump off cliffs thinking that they can fly; so it's not a misunderstanding of science but an inconsistency in the intellectual conception of science versus the understanding of science in 'real life').
Anyway, good pomo does not say that everything is a story, and that every story is equal to every other story. This is closer to multiculturalism, although that actually calls for not equality of stories, but equal opportunity for stories to be assessed, lest an idea be dismissed simply by the hue of its source or the lack of achievement of its cultural source (assuming that that culture is not 'primitive' because of willful anti-intellectualism. But again to know that there is willful anti-intellectualism there would require a fair assessment). Good pomo says that truth cannot be directly experienced, which should be no more remarkable than the insight that the word "tree" is not an actual tree. Instead, truth can be grasped through the discovery of a narrative that is contiguous to the truth. The way in which we understand something never fully understands that thing, but with intellectual rigor we can be fairly sure that the degree to which we don't understand something is relatively benign, while always keeping in mind that, tomorrow, we might learn that the blindness in our understanding is catastrophic, and we should change how we understand it. An example from science: an atom is not a little ball, and electrons are not little balls with minus signs in the middle going around a circle. How unremarkable, eh?
So what a postmodernist should do with science is either point out the problem of a scientific concept (which should require that you be a trained scientist, granted. But is the book talking about this?) or use an existing scientific concept as a useful analog for understanding something else. If you take a scientific concept and alter it before using it as an analog, you should clearly state what you are doing. Otherwise you may appear sloppy, and other aspects of your thinking might be sloppy, and you might not actually be a postmodernist. Paul Feyerabend's example of this postmodern technique as used in science is when Lamarckian theories of evolution--discredited as actual theories of evolution--were used to explain and identify the transition of the mitochondria from separate entity to part of the human cell makeup. I think the intense denunciations of Feyerabend by scientists, which might lead to a blindness to his good insights, are a more important problem, with higher stakes, than the postmodernists misuse of science. After all, the misuse of science is part of and primarily part of a misuse of postmodernism. And, postmodern humanists don't do science. Neither do non-scientists assured of their personal worth because they understand science and aren't postmodern. The latter are friends of the scientists, but both the former and latter act the same when it comes to real science--that is to say, they do not act at all. This is the locus of the false victimization issue.
At any rate, the people discussed are not postmodernists, but intellectual frauds. If postmodernism really was about utter relativism, postmodernists should expect their replies to their requests to have a publisher publish their work to read, "The unstable nature of language made your memo impossible to read." Postmodernists don't expect this extreme a result; so either S & B use strawmen or S & B are identifying frauds. But postmodernism needs to be cleaned up to help the useful functions within it. Good postmodernism provides tools for detecting what is overlooked in traditional and highly persuasive intellectual concepts and institutions. For example, a postmodernist sensibility should be better able to detect the unwitting use of the appeal to ignorance fallacy with shocking regularity by Skeptics than Skeptics are able to detect their oversights by an in-house inspection. That is all it is. The rest is fraud. If people don't understand science enough, teach science.
Rating:
Summary: Swat the flies, miss the point
Review: As another review noted, pretty much everything has been said that needs to be said about this book, but what the hell, here's my two cents. The startling discovery that postermodernism has generated some sloppy and mistaken theorizing is hardly earth-shattering. So has every other attempt to understand complex experience, including the hard sciences (let's remember that Newton never did give up on alchemy, and Einstein resisted quantum physics till the day he died). Postmodernism has attracted the kind of belligerent attacks found in books like this because it challenges certain assumptions which, especially in the current political climate, are perceived as too dangerous to be allowed. So Sokal and Bricmont demonstrate what everyone who has ever studied anything in depth knows already - most of what gets written and published is dreck. Give it time and the dross will wash away and the useful stuff will remain. But of course what these writers want you to believe is that it's *all* nonsense, since that suits their ideological agenda, which predictably enough positions itself as beyond any ideology at all ("we're simply telling the truth"). This attempt to shut down debate is a classic hangover from the so-called culture wars, and it's a bit dull to keep encountering it over and over again. So anyway, the book accomplishes its severely limited goal successfully enough, and as most of these reviews demonstrate, manages to triumphantly preach to the choir. People who hate the very idea of postmodernism (as they more or less understand it) have their position confirmed. Anyone who has a more sophisticated understanding of po-mo is forced to acknowledge the authors have a point, but finally that point is essentially trivial in that the dragon being slain would have died all on its own in good time. Given the pathetic reality of academic salaries, I hope Sokal and Bricmont made the odd buck in royalties, and don't feel the need to state the obvious in another book.
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