Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

A dive into the book "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" written by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont where we summarize the main criticisms of specific academics, most of them belonging to the postmodern tradition. We do not go into the chapters where Sokal and Bricmont talk about epistemic relativism or "Postmodern science".
The book does not take aim at philosophy, the social sciences, or the humanities in general rather its stated goal is to warn against "manifest cases of charlatanism" present in these disciplines.
Sokal and Bricmont wanted to point out mistakes and misuses of concepts and terminology coming from physics and mathematics in the philosophical literature.
The authors critiqued are Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Latour, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari and Virilio.
The video at CCK philosophy's channel that talks about the book: • Did the Sokal affair "...
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[@j5679]

"diarrhea of the pen" swear to god, philosophers come up with the best burns

[@ESJARB]

I spent so many years in my degree thinking I was just to simple to understand this jargon in these texts, honestly it just sounds like the kind of stuff you spew when you've had one too many brownies

[@he1ar1]

The problem of living in a culture where a particular branch of philosophy is too popular to be useful to anyone who reads it. The philosopher has a book deal and his publisher is demanding a book. Writing philosophy is difficult. Most of the time you end up writing meaningless nonsense or writing a book about the history of ideas. It was never intended that philosophy should be written. In its purest form it is spoken face-to-face and you can gauge in real time whether or not what you have said has been understood.

[@arekayin]

I've been waiting for this for way too long. Its a book that I share with all my friends and no is willing to spend time reading it. You are a messiah, Mon0.

[@MediaFaust]

My immediate business idea is to train a language model AI in only this kind of stuff, then ask it to write erotica. It could get interesting.

[@jipangoo]

Already been done

[@Nai-qk4vp]

​@@jipangoowhere?

[@pshehan1]

There was an earlier book along the same line: Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science is a 1994 book about the philosophy of science by the biologist Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt.

[@monkeykingeater]

I think there's an interview with Sokal where he says he wrote his hoax paper after reading Higher Superstition and checking its sources

[@PunishedFelix]

Oh you mean the one that literally denies climate change in chapter 6?

[@pshehan1]

@@PunishedFelix I think i would have recalled such a denial. I don't but it does not alter my comment.

[@4thesakeofitname]

This was really very good. In the age of advertisement through social media, every concept is abused to fool the typical ignorant crowd, so as to gain fame, or earn money (since fame equates money)... Someone has to say the truth, with an authoritative and legislative power to protect humanity against such charlatanism at all levels, from bottom to up.

[@roberthipolito1351]

I've tried reading some of these postmodernist and holy shit it's a bunch nonsense jargon. No kidding, I've found it easier to get through and understand books about physics and calculus than their "diarrhea of the pen"

[@Bestmann3n]

well who did you read then?

[@AnandKulkarniPlusOne]

Oooh serendipity 😁 Was talking to a friend just yesterday about how Capital as Power footnotes took me to Sokal and this book.

[@Nai-qk4vp]

Capital As Power by Shimshon Bichler and Jonatham Nitzan?

[@Appleblade]

My nephew asked me about Lyotard... I read what he sent... responded that it was written by a Ryotard.

[@michaelroberts1120]

It seems that Oswald Bates, on the TV series "In Living Color" missed his calling. If you listen to his diatribes, he had the potential to be one of the greatest post modern philosophers of our time!

[@lewiscoacher7781]

The Argentine giant Jorge Luis Borges did an analysis of Post Modernism's foundations back in 1940. He fleshed out his observations by weaving them into a short story called Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, in which the authorship of Cervantes' masterpiece was to be shared across the centuries by a process of "non-plagiarism", a concept that doesn't obscure the plagiarism at all. This story is like a tour of European society, with hilarious asides noting the intellectual schemes of crack-pots. At one point Pierre suggests a change in the rules of Chess: the removal of one of the Rook pawns before starting the game. Could the "singularities" which "possess a process of auto-unification" be very far into his future?

[@Mon000]

Thank you for this, knew nothing about it.

[@lewiscoacher7781]

@@Mon000Latour's anachronism, that requires of immunologists that they invent the viruses they study, encourages me to share a favorite one of my own. Borges published the Menard in 1940. Its real subject matter is not the soon to emerge Post Modernism, but the salon society that birthed it. This is (was) my anachronism and I should own it. My bad. We should continue this discussion.

[@blairhakamies4132]

Fantastic. Congratulations 🌹

[@apiro1000]

Lacan was a really funny guy dude. He didn’t always or even often make his point straightforward, but he rather hinted at deep ideas that are sometimes hard to put into words. The sqrt(-1) being a penis thing is hilarious.

[@samsusaran09]

Oracular speech, like Cassandra. I kinda feel like this book, 👆, fails to even attempt to see the bigger picture. (In this case the very long inter-textual relationships any “philosophical” thinker is ensconced in.)

[@morgengabe1]

Anti Structuralism was a set back for scientific progress, imo. Sokal and Chomsky should be participating in the process, not discouraging others from trying, showing them how.

[@morgengabe1]

Seriously, a rigorous take down of a bad idea is a great starting point for making good ideas.

[@morgengabe1]

Simply saying you can't be bothered to try and understand makes you no better than those you criticize. Live up to your own standards. Don't just scoff at people who don't.

[@morgengabe1]

They laugh at the quotes mined by Dawkins precisely because they understand and just choose to ridicule it. If your response bares no genuine refutation, hold your peace.

[@jipangoo]

They do

[@jipangoo]

I mean Chomsky invented X Bar theory.... What more would you like?

[@jefftheriault3914]

All these people, developing these claims on their laptops. There should be a level of irony that is nearly fatal.

[@davea136]

Economics and retail finance also engage in "the repeated abuse of concepts and terminology coming from mathematics and physics." Bird of a feather.

[@uzefulvideos3440]

hmm, not sure, all the examples I can think of just mean the same, and make intuitive sense in math, physics, economics

[@science212]

Very good. Stephen Hicks are good too.

[@voidzennullspace]

As a mathematician....I am appalled.

[@TheSandkastenverbot]

I always thought postmodernism is just another philosophical school of thought that is devoid of value. Decades (even centuries) of being allowed to spew nonsense disguised by hard to grasp language might have led to this

[@tanjiasiang]

Unfashionable Truth: Modern Intellectuals' Abuse of Mathematics - Critiques to specific sciences

[@abyssssbmusic1370]

I don't get exactly what he means, but with the latour thing i could interpret it as being that ramses II did not die of the bacteria (at the time), because the bacteria for tuberculosis as it is conceptualized did not exist in that way at the time. We can now refer to the cells that were in his body as bacteria that cause tuberculosis, and the combination of symptoms/bodily response/impact from the bacteria as the disease of tuberculosis. So his death was the result of what we could and would now refer to as a bacteria and tb, but because those concepts did not exist at the time, what resulted in his death was not "actually" bacteria and tuberculosis ? (i dont mean a distinction between what we refer to as the bacteria and the disease, and the concepts of the bacteria and disease, separated from the real things/abstracted, but a distinction between what we refer to as the bacteria and the disease, what we refer to as the bacteria and the disease, being referred to as the bacteria and the disease) (this is with me having no knowledge of ramses ii and assuming that his death was indeed caused by what we refer to as tb) (also with me having not read anything by latour, so if anyone has corrections i would appreciate them.) (also i dont study/know philosophy so any words i use might not be used in ways that they are usually used in philosophy)

[@abyssssbmusic1370]

Another interpretation is maybe that because we did not have a conception of the bacteria that causes tuberculosis at the time ramses ii died that we could not have proved that he had it/tb, I dont know enough about medicine to know whether we could/would be able to retroactively prove that he had it

[@abyssssbmusic1370]

Admittedly, while I can understand that the idea of a bacteria is not the only way the real thing can be conceptualized, so that you do not need to refer to it with the concept of bacteria to make an absolutely true statement, I cannot grasp the idea of something objectively not being referrable as the concept because it existed before the concept

[@abyssssbmusic1370]

If its the second interpretation of not having been able to prove that it was a concept that did not exist at the time, I dont get the comparison with something like a machine gun, because in contrast with a machine gun what we refer to as the bacteria that causes tuberculosis presumably was not created by people, though maybe its a matter of lineages of bacteria evolving over time and our referring to some range in the lineage as a particular species wouldn't necessarily include the bacteria that ramses ii had? Idk?

[@abyssssbmusic1370]

also, while i'm interested in deleuze, i havent actually read anything by him (maybe a very short amount but i didnt understand anything), and i can't really comment on specific usage of scientific or mathematical concepts/terms (any of the specific instances here) but i have heard (or at least it was my interpretation of what the person was saying) that he would use the term black hole, not in a strict sense, but in a metaphorical sense. if someone is coming from one discipline, like science i can definitely understand them having a particular way of thinking about the term, based on specific information from their discipline, and seeing someone else who takes the term (or at least their understanding/interpretation of it) and uses it in a metaphorical way, and the metaphorical way not really reflecting the way that the person within the discipline really thinks about it, like the metaphor not accurately reflecting the actual scientific term.(to be clear im not trying to make a case that any examples in the video necessarily are cases where the person is using a term in a metaphorical way, understanding them; again,i dont know enough about any of the specific examples in the video to say much about them one way or another). while i could understand that there might be potentially problems with using a scientific term(or whatever other discipline) metaphorically (that people might get a wrong impression of the way the term is used in the original discipline), i do think that there's actual reasons for adapting something like that as a metaphor or adapting the word and giving a different meaning to it. at least in my experience, i've had cases where i really wanted a word for a specific concept (partially because i'm trying to explain the nature of something and it takes two or three sentences to say it, I'd rather have just a word to name it and not have to write out the whole concept every time i tried to use the idea in a sentence (like saying whether something is x or isn't x would be awkward to me if x is multiple sentences) and unfortunately if there isn't an existing word, i cant really make one up and expect people who i dont know to understand what i mean when i say it... though if I was writing everything down and publishing it, with the text defining something and then using the word later on then I think it would make sense to be able to do that. but anyway i'm just trying to make the case that I can understand if someone's writing ends up like deleuze's or guattari's, because if someone is interested in particular things, and those things don't have words for them, i could imagine the text being full of words like that (Just looking at the text, I don't really have any reason to think it's nonsense if I don't know what they're saying. and even if it is kind of a hassle to read, it does make a difference in my experience to just read it even if i don't understand it, and i can gradually pickup some of the meanings of the words that way (as i understand it, how people learn meanings of words/what the meanings of words are is tied at least to some extent on what words they see next to other words, so if I read something intently, even if i don't understand it, it would make sense to me that i would at least gain some kind of understanding of the words. Other philosophy that I've tried reading kind of feels the same way to me anyway, because the way that philosophers (and people in general) use words seems to me to be very particular, so the deleuze and guattari thing, at least in my understanding, doesn't seem very unusual. It could be that dense-ness of how many words they coined is a problem for conveying the ideas, though without actually spending much time reading stuff by them i don't really feel like I could personally have any thoughts on that one way or the other. anyway again, with the metaphors thing, I could understand having some concept in mind and wanting to come up with a word for it, and if there's an existing word that in some way could convey the idea or is relatively similar it makes sense to me that someone would want to use that as opposed to a completely new set of letters/word

[@abyssssbmusic1370]

i haven't read the book and I haven't read any of the texts it's critiquing, but if the intent is to point out misuses of terminology from physics and math, and what i've heard about deleuze's use of black holes being kind of like a metaphorical adaptation is accurate, then I wouldn't personally exactly describe that specific case as a "misuse" but just another use/different word maybe that doesn't completely or accurately reflect the term in physics, and I could see that there could potentially be problems with that (at least it seems that way to me), but I can also see advantages to doing that, and could understand if someone intentionally adapts a scientific term and gives it a different meaning, even while they accurately understand the original scientific meaning.

[@mongoose6685]

Socrates would simply bring this back to basics: you take the paragraph and start isolating each sentence as a proposition (P1, P2, P3) and then finish with the conclusion (C1). Do the propositions support the conclusion? It's really as easy as that to debunk this crap or anyone that makes an overly complex argument. The more complex the argument, the easier it is to make a mistake and have a weak conclusion. On another note, it is interesting that Chomsky laughs at French intellectuals faking it, he has pushed a few left leaning agendas that were "rationally weak" philosophically in his career. He doesn't use overly complex science, he just tow's the party line despite contrary evidence.

[@roundninja]

So is their position that postmodernism went wrong at a certain point and was infiltrated by pseudointellectuals, or do they think postmodernism was a misstep from the very beginning? EDIT: I checked the other video, and it looks like Sokal was quite hesitant to make broad statements about postmodernism's overall validity.

[@BSMArtnLit]

chomsky is one of those “intellectual”, he would be supporting hamas if he were around.

[@Anabsurdsuggestion]

Then again, critiquing these people was also fashionable for S&B. Much of the work they take issue with has more than stood the test of time. For instance, I would suggest that Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari are far superior contributors to philosophy and politics than their detractors.

[@Bestmann3n]

absolutely. this pomo hate is just a lazy refusal to actually engage with the continental tradition.

[@marksnow7569]

​@@Bestmann3n One of the most basic philosophical concepts, as expressed by Jonathan Swift: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it"

[@tomhalla426]

Alternatively, Lacan et al were pompous poseurs, who had no idea of what they were writing, or deliberately insulting their readers, who they presumed were too ignorant to catch the insult.

[@childintime6453]

It's really hard to see what Lacan has contributed to outside Lacanian psychoanalysis, so called post-modernism and cinema and literature studies. Working in any major field of philosophy today - metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of politics/science/math/logic/language/mind/religion etc. you will hardly find any Lacan. Pre Socratics may have more relevance to some of those fields then him

[@joelthomastr]

I don't understand the business model here. What do these people eat? Who is giving these people money? How are these people living in houses instead of under bridges?

[@vap0rtranz]

The square root of "-1", saying Goedel's theorem proved the opposite, that E=mc2 privileges the speed of light and "solid things over fluid"?! hah! Seriously?! I had a SJW professor and his world view was postmodern even if he never said the phrase. He argued that everything was about political power, such as the genders/sexes, which implied science was also about power. Very postmodern, like the quotes from Sokal's critique. One day he wrote 'relativism' on the board, and tried to back down on how it didn't mean the objective view that defines relativism, aka. that relativism means anything subjective. Have these postmodernists studied math and science? Even undergraduate work? I'm sure if we ask how many mathematicians and physists adopted postmodernism, the counterargument will be that the sciences brainwash the scientists. Mmm, perhaps postmodernism brainwashes these postmodernists. I think my professor was partly right about political power that backfired on postmodernists -- the great task for us is to detect *subtle* postmodernism that is not blatant in scholarly monograms but trickles down to everyday society by postmodernist politics.

[@pbritotube]

I saw the CCK video, and I was disappointed. Not really a defense, instead of directly addressing the criticism, it seemed to deflect. Even quoting Derrida ad hominem response that did not refute any of the criticism by Sokal. Also it downplays the use of "scientific" terminology merely as metaphorical ignoring the "status" that it gives to the narrator.

[@Mon000]

I understand your feelings, but I do not know about any other defenses really so I linked the best I could. If you find something more convincing let me know!

[@johncongerton7046]

like the output of a particularly poor and ill-trained AI

[@shreyas5886]

I was about to write the exact same thing. Then saw you beat me to it.

[@davidmiller4078]

So if i understand it correctly its all bollocks ?

[@NSBarnett]

Modernism, from Descartes up to Kant and down to, well, now, I suppose, has flaws exposed by Heidegger and Husserl. Anyone writing in an awareness of those exposed flaws is therefore a post-modernist; postmodernism is a post, not an ism.

[@lloydgush]

So, basically, if you listen to the idiots, not the wise.

[@SandhillCrane42]

Dang. I was really hoping for an attack on philosophy and the social sciences. That stuff is whack.

[@Bestmann3n]

Nobody takes this book seriously, except for those who don't have any clue about what's going on. It's best use is as toilet paper. Sokal and Bricmont never made an effort to engage with the traditions these philosophers are working in and they even admitted as much. So it follows that they don't have any worthwhile contribute. There are many critiques of all of these philosophers from other you know actual philosophers within the same tradition, why not engage with that instead? You wouldn't ask your dentist for advice on heart surgery after all would you? But with philosophy people have the arrogance to take their janitors word over actual professionals.

[@lloydgush]

Actually, the books shows how post-modernism is a joke.

[@zinnksother]

Yeah, there are a lot of videos on the S&B book and very few engage with any of its criticisms. Linking the CCK Philosophy video at the end is a good start, but there was no attempt made to address anything Ceika actually said.

[@lewiscoacher7781]

The authors' intentions were set out very clearly from the outset. When we have direct reference to actual lapses in understanding across disciplines, why look elsewhere for their meaning? Physics envy and Poetry envy are blights upon our species, and I have not yet begun to diagnose.

[@jipangoo]

So tell me: what aspects of their physics do you agree or disagree with?

[@jipangoo]

But let's just take Derrida. The basis of his arguments were ironed out hundreds of years ago. If the physical sciences worked under the problems that Derrida claims to be true in language, nothing would function. Math would simply fail. Binary logic would fail. No more Microsoft. Blip. Gone. But in fact, the physical sciences has moved on while the social sciences STILL rags on about nature/nurture. The Australian Govt now only reluctantly funds that aspect of university learning. Most people just regard it (sophism) as a complete waste of time. As do I

[@kimshaw-williams]

Always figured this was happening in the art departments of the universities I went to.....: "diarrhoea of the mind".

[@παυροεπής]

Arrogance and pretentiousness are the vices of the critics themselves.

[@ytrichardsenior]

I would have used a list of three as a rhetorical device.. for example 'Arrogance, hubris and pretence, are the vices of..' As alluded to in my example.. 'Pretentiousness' is cumbersome and breaks up the rhythm of your comment. The addition of 'themselves' is superfluous. I would have used something like 'the hallmark of critics'. Etc. 6/10.. must try harder.

[@Nai-qk4vp]

​@ytrichardsenior William Sheakespeare ovah here!

[@user-nb3mq3cg8k]

This is comedy

[@VaSavoir2007]

The book is Intellectual Impostures not Impostors, contrary to how you're pronouncing it.

[@PunishedFelix]

"Most rigorous critique"? Really? They repeatedly forget basic citations, confuse authors and their argument is literally taking snippets out of context. I'm a filthy casual and i could do better. Stop perpetuating this dumb meme

[@donaldfarmer8421]

A lot of this sounds suspiciously similar to critical race theory and woke ideology we're witnessing today.

[@jipangoo]

In a word: Poo

[@jipangoo]

It amazes me how little Americans understand of Chomsky. I note that most people who comment on him know virtually nothing about structural linguistics

[@jgrif7891]

If he talked more about his theories instead of criticism of others that might help. To put it succinctly, he's an older version of Niel DeGrasse Tyson.

[@jipangoo]

Do you know anything about X Bar theory? No.

[@jipangoo]

Do you know anything about i-language or the debates most linguists don't even bother with? No.

[@jipangoo]

Theta roles? No.

[@jipangoo]

In fact, have you ever looked at his work on syntactic structures? No

[@jipangoo]

The fact is: the Greeks laid the structures from which Parisian elites prospered. They invented NOTHING. AND NOTHING CAN BE DERIVED FROM IT