Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but maybe too narrow
Review: This book has interesting examples of abuse of science and intelectlual sloppiness which alone makes it worth reading. However, its effectiveness is probably somewhat limited as the authors define their scope rather narrowly and consider only examples from their own fields. As such, they explicitly leave out the broader questions of whether postmodernism contributes anything of value to the social sciences or the hummanities as the authors criticized (presumably) would claim. Sometime I wonder whether the analogies to mathematics and science are actually worth taking as seriously as the authors do.
Rating: 
Summary: The postmodern emperors have no clothes
Review: I'm a reader of Lingua Franca and was interested to see Jim Holt's full page review of this book in the NY Times Book Review (Holt writes for Lingua Franca). Sokal and Bricmont have been at the center of the ongoing debate about relativism and whether science can accurately describe certain aspects of the world. In this book they argue against bad science, and specifically against the use of science as "proof" of concepts,theories, metaphors, and shaky arguments about social sciences, psychology, literary studies, and so on. They also argue for the ability of science to establish a truth, to literally prove something (this in response to the postmodern notion that truth is simply a social construct, and is therefore relative to the perspective, language, culture, circumstance, etc. of the person seeking to establish a given truth.) I found the book to be well argued, often funny, at times dense (because the authors take pains to explain why the science of Kristeva, Baudrillard, Latour, etc. is bad),overall lively and interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Alan's thesis: If I don't understand it, it must be nonsense
Review: As with the French edition, I was excited when this book came out: finally we would get to see an actual argument from Sokal; as he promises in the introduction, he's now going to tell us *why* all these French philosophers are charlatans.But what we get is... nothing. Nobody could have guessed just how little Sokal has to say about the subject -- or how easily he is baffled by philosophical discourse. The chapter on Deleuze is particularly embarrassing: what we get is long, long excerpts followed by Sokal's three-sentence "analysis": "The scientific concepts employed here are not necessarily wrong, but the passage is clearly nonsense." End of paragraph. After one such extended excerpt, Sokal explains that although he can't say exactly why it is meaningless, the reader can "judge for himself." End of paragraph. I'm not kidding. This is the book's mode of "analysis". Another example: of an excerpt taken from *Difference and Repetition*, Sokal rhetorically wonders about the "point" of bringing in "banal" scientific ideas. If the "point" of such excursions is lost on a smart man like Sokal, the book suggests, they clearly have no point at all. Yet, to most scholars, the minimum prerequisite of such a thesis is a demonstration that the critic can *at least* paraphrase the thesis of the book under critique -- so that one can judge whether a randomly extracted excerpt does or does not speak to that thesis. Sokal does not report the thesis of *Difference and Repetition* at all, anywhere -- and for good reason. Rather than acknowledge that the book participates in a philosophical conversation (going back to the Greeks, and moving importantly through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) in which Sokal is simply not prepared to participate, he forwards the implicit thesis that there simply can be no scholarly conversation that is beyond his ken -- that nothing requires him to have even a simple *reading* knowledge of the intellectual history in which Deleuze's book participates.
Rating:
Summary: Conceptual Deliriums
Review: This is a most necessary book, which shows with overpowering force that the apostles of postmodernism are naked emperors.
It is deadly devastating for Jacques Lacan (Freud is much more important than Darwin), Julia Kristeva (the novel as a text), Luce Irigaray (the sexual charge of E=Mc2), the tandem Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (science promotes accelerations), Paul Virilio (a dromocrat) and Jean Baudrillard (the war space became non-Euclidian).
It shows blatantly that structuralism and other postmodernism are not more than conceptual deliriums (the words of Jean Fourastie, who criticized vehemently the hype pseudo-intellectuals). Their high-brow phraseology is not more than bluff to hide outspoken banalities. Europe and France in particular lost (and are still losing) generations of students by forcing them to swallow this debilitating idiotologies.
On the literary front, this pseudo-movement culminated in the impotent 'nouveau roman', which reduced literature to texts ... to be explained by structuralism. The French novel sank in the morass of linguistics.
What is most shameful is the fact that the whole leftist community incensed those false apostles, that the authors incensed themselves mutually (others were also involved, like Foucauld, Derrida, Barthes or Serres), and that the whole leftist press spread the incense over the whole population. Whorenalism as its worst.
This book should constitute a warning for all European universities: stop the conspiracy of the pseudos. On the other hand, in a period where George Orwell's doublespeak (war is peace) is again the main sinister message (which became reality), when obscurantism, religious fanaticism and nationalism are the basis of party politics, we should return to at least some sort of rationalism.
Therefore I strongly disagree with the author's attack on cognitive relativism and more specifically Popper's critical rationalism.
I believe that, when we don't know 90 % of the matter in the universe, perhaps only 1 % of all virusses on earth, when 'I' exists only by comparison (V. Ramachandran) and when 'is' is an illusion (L. Smolin), some kind of critical rationalism (and testing) is more than needed. Popper's proposition of falsification instead of inductivism with its illimited corroborations gave scientific research a jump of lightyears. Nevertheless, this book is a brilliant exposure of phraseologies and a most painful blame for European philosophy.
Rating:
Summary: True Natural Sciences versus False, Phony, Sham Humanities
Review: True Natural Sciences versus False, Phony, Fraud Humanities
Anyone who has been to a good college knows that the domain of human knowledge are in three broad categories.
#1. Natural Sciences (Nature, true knowledge from observation and/or experiment.
#2. Social Sciences or "soft" sciences, social studies. (Scientific study of human society.)
#3. Humanities. (Human creation. i.e. art, music literature. etc.)
We all know the only true form of human knowledge is in the Natural Sciences.
Natural Scientists uses public experiment, public facts and public evidence to make their case for the true-false-undetermined nature of their claims.
However, when it applies to social studies and humanities, there has not been nor will there ever be an "objective" method to ascertain the true-false nature of any claims. Take politics, if you ask 20 people about politics, you will get 20 answers.
Take basic mathematics, if you ask twenty people, you should get 20 identical answers if they are experts in mathematics.
Alan Sokal is an academic trained in the most vigorous, fundamental of all the sciences: Physics. You cannot be a dummy and be an expert in physics. However, the coffee-house, deconstruct pinhead crowd cannot tell the difference between true physics from witchcraft.
Hence, we have Alan Sokal exposing the literary, arts, farts, pompous, arrogant, hubris-laden, literary crowd for what they are: a group, illiterate, know-nothing pinheads.
This a great book for all those studying humanities and social sciences: you are being brainwashed. Not to mention that a degree in humanities has no market value. You will most likely be working at Taco Bell or Burger King.
This book is great read on how the humanities pinheads of the academy have misguided us.
Rating:
Summary: A funny encounter with the postmodern pompous fools
Review: Alan Sokal became famous for his hoax - a ridiculous article about "Hermeneutics of quantum gravity" that was accepted for publication in Social text, a renowned postmodernist journal published by Duke University. His article included many funny comments: for example, the value of pi became a result of political pressures - and other facts in physics were interpreted as consequences of the interactions between the genders, and so on.
It was accepted because it sounded cool to the editors of that journal - in fact, they found the article flattering - and the fact that it was nonsense did not change anything about their decision to accept the article. In another journal, Sokal had simultaneously announced that his article was a hoax.
The full text of this article is contained in this book as an appendix and some explanations of the article and its meaning have been added. However the book by Sokal and Bricmont, two mathematical physicists, contains much more interesting material about all these marvelous people such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, and many others. Many of them, but not all, are French.
You will see how these authors misuse scientific concepts. For example, one of these postmodernist intellectuals will explain you that neurosis is connected with the topology of torus. It's just incredible how much weird stuff they could find - and most likely, there exists much more of it. Sokal and Bricmont provide you with elementary explanations of the relevant scientific concepts, and they will make you sure that the social scientists have no idea what they're talking about, even though they deny it.
It seems extremely unnatural for me to call these people "social scientists". Let me call them simply morons. You will see that these morons are only capable to use the scientific terms as sequences of letters, but they can't imagine any objective or verifiable reality behind these letters. In fact, these morons don't believe any objective reality - they imagine that science is analogous to the dances of primitive tribes in Polynesia. They believe that our conclusions whether a scientific theory is correct or not has "social causes". This book, however, will show you much more. It will show you what sort of "social causes" they mean, and you will have to laugh. Various theories in natural sciences have been accepted because of their male and racial features, for example.
Alan Sokal wrote his hoax article - and also this book - because he was deeply concerned with the fact that the political left wing is penetrated by these far-left anti-scientific bigots. Alan Sokal himself is a left-wing person and he feels that it's exactly these postmodernist bigots who make the Left much weaker.
Well, he's definitely right - but their book has not changed much in the long term. The cargo cult soft scientists and feminists continue to pursue their "theories". The scientists as well as the ordinary people with common sense know why these "theories" are ludicrous, and these extreme far-left weird intellectuals may have contributed to Kerry's loss in 2004. Sokal and Bricmont are definitely correct, but the people who are uncapable to understand why they're correct will never understand it - that's a tautology.
Rating:
Summary: Intellectual Morons
Review: Fashionable Nonsense grew out of the famous hoax in which Alan Sokal published a parody article in the American post-modern journal Social Text. The article was filled with non-sequiturs and nonsensical quotations about maths and physics by prominent French and American intellectuals, yet it was published unaltered. Sokal then revealed that it was a deliberate parody, to the great consternation of the editors of Social Text.
This book extends the investigation to show how intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology. They have either used these ideas completely out of context without justification or they have thrown scientific jargon around with no regard for its meaning or relevance, obviously to try to impress their readers.
The introduction provides the history of the Sokal Hoax and the response to it. The major part of the book consists of an analysis of various texts by Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. Brief explanations of the relevant scientific concepts plus references to popular and explanatory texts are provided. Sokal and Bricmont also investigate certain philosophical and scientific confusions behind much of postmodernist thinking, like cognitive relativism, certain misunderstandings concerning chaos theory plus so-called postmodern science.
Appendix A provides the full text of the famous hoax article: Trangressing The Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Appendix B consists of comments on the parody and Appendix C serves as an afterword on the hilarious incident. This amusing and illuminating book concludes with a 14-page bibliography and an index. Intellectual Impostures is an amusing read that will have you rolling on the floor at times. I also highly recommend The Illusions Of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton, The Anti Chomsky reader by David Horowitz and Peter Collier, and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas by Daniel J. Flynn.
Rating: 
Summary: Why shoot them for making money off what we already knew?
Review: A book that preaches to the converted, hints at the great debates in the philosophy of science, exposes most of the 'philosophers' in the book as attempting to be authorities by quoting science as support rather than mere metaphor, inflaming supporters of said 'philosophers' to respond angrily...it does it all.
Does it encourage me to read more into the philosophy of science and forgive Popper his truly dodgy book 'The Open Society and Its Enemies'? Yes it does. It has popularised this topic, and about time.
For that 4 stars, minus one for attempting to start a second book i.e. a discussion on rationality and truth without delivering and for the danger it will put some off reading the writers (I liked early Baudrillard's ideas of virtual reality and advertising taking over cultural meaning for example). I am not convinced many readers will reread 'Sokal and Bricmont' though, once will suffice for many so consider that before you buy it.
Unfortunately my friends who whiz around on their rhizome mobiles won't read it. I am truly sick to death of a quote being seen as a premise, an MD being seen as gateway to talk about cosmology. And too many of these writers have done the opposite of what they say, i.e. refer to the metanarratives of past philosophers for authority while attacking them for the very same thing (this includes science).
Perhaps its critics should have made the point their writers are not responsible for the sloppiness of the students who quote them. But the defence that the writing under attack was only for metaphor is a sham. They were appeals to science to support the babble. The Nazis did the same thing so yes I do think it is highly dangerous.
Does it prove postmodernism is a sham? No, it does not and does not want to. Charles Jencks' label is just that, a label. 'Pomo' only has one unifying attribute-those described as such almost invariably dislike the categorization. Sokal's hoax is itself pomo (in the long multi alias tradition of an 'Hilarius Bookbinder' or 'Anti Climacus' Kierkegaard) so we should be amused by the anger of those 'wring from the margins' that are in turn being parodied from the margins.
I enjoyed the defending of Feyerabend by another reviewer but I believe it to be mistaken. Certainly science was often created by accident. But do you want a crazed sloppy vacillating scientist to work in a nuclear reactor lab or Nietzsche to operate on you as an open-heart surgeon? No I did not think so.
I would look forward to a book on Heraclitus Nietzsche and Bergson. And one called 'How to quote scientific concepts for dummies and literature critics'. And on philosophy not quite scientifically accurate but interesting. And one on scientists with dodgy but interesting philosophical claims. For example, Gödel's book on time travel. Hawking on God and the end of Time. And yes Dawkins, I do want to see some proof for memes.
Rating:
Summary: Conceptual Deliriums
Review: This is a most necessary book, which shows with overpowering force that the apostles of postmodernism are naked emperors.
It is deadly devastating for Jacques Lacan (Freud is much more important than Darwin), Julia Kristeva (the novel as a text), Luce Irigaray (the sexual charge of E=Mc2), the tandem Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (science promotes accelerations), Paul Virilio (a dromocrat) and Jean Baudrillard (the war space became non-Euclidian).
It shows blatantly that structuralism and other postmodernism are not more than conceptual deliriums (the words of Jean Fourastie, who criticized vehemently the hype pseudo-intellectuals). Their high-brow phraseology is not more than bluff to hide outspoken banalities. Europe and France in particular lost (and are still losing) generations of students by forcing them to swallow this debilitating idiotologies.
On the literary front, this pseudo-movement culminated in the impotent 'nouveau roman', which reduced literature to texts ... to be explained by structuralism. The French novel sank in the morass of linguistics.
What is most shameful is the fact that the whole leftist community incensed those false apostles, that the authors incensed themselves mutually (others were also involved, like Foucault, Derrida, Barthes or Serres), and that the whole leftist press spread the incense over the whole population. Whorenalism as its worst.
This book should constitute a warning for all European universities: stop the conspiracy of the pseudos.
On the other hand, in a period where George Orwell's doublespeak (war is peace) is again the main sinister message (which became reality), when obscurantism, religious fanaticism and nationalism are the basis of party politics, we should return to at least some sort of rationalism.
Therefore I strongly disagree with the author's attack on cognitive relativism and more specifically Popper's critical rationalism.
I believe that, when we don't know 90 % of the matter in the universe, perhaps only 1 % of all virusses on earth, when 'I' exists only by comparison (V. Ramachandran) and when 'is' is an illusion (L. Smolin), some kind of critical rationalism (and testing) is more than needed. Popper's proposition of falsification instead of inductivism with its illimited corroborations gave scientific research a jump of lightyears.
Nevertheless, this book is a brilliant exposure of phraseologies and a most painful blame for European philosophy.
Rating:
Summary: Good hoax. Leave it at that.
Review: I'm not one to tangle with pomos, poststructuralists, and semioticians. Listen politely, aim for the gentleman's C, and move on. In their minds, something, somewhere is being fed that rings the dinnerbell for them. Good for them. However, I am a sucker for reading about cons, and Sokal smacked down a good one. What is priceless about this book for me was the reportage on the actual con, vs the laundry list attack on the Academes that frankly reads more like the incomplete notes for a potentially interesting critique of retarded pomo blather. The response from the aggrieved magazine editors (granted it's filtered through Sokal)is so wounded and whiney and LAME that you wonder just how much real dog eat dog interaction these folks put their poor cloistered lily necks out for. They must go through a lot of tissue at those MLA conventions! So if your expecting a thorough thrashing of postmodern theory, this aint it. But, if you are looking for a tale of a pin for pomposity, this should do.
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