Is Paris Kidding?

The authors ridicule the pseudoscientific blather of some famous post-modern thinkers. (New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1998)

By JIM HOLT

FASHIONABLE NONSENSEPostmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.By Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.300 pp. New York:Picador USA. $23.

n France (where it was published a year ago), this much-maligned book has been likened to Kenneth Starr's report to Congress. Both documents arise out of a peculiarly American spasm of ''rigorist purism'' and ''hatred,'' according to a columnist for Le Monde. The comparison, it must be said, is not altogether fair. ''Fashionable Nonsense,'' though juicy in its own way, is not quite so titillating as the Starr report. Moreover, only one of its two co-authors (Alan Sokal) is American, so our culture can't entirely be blamed for it. What ''Fashionable Nonsense'' and the Starr report do have in common, however, is a certain confusion about the gravity and nature of the sins of their targets.

Sokal, a physicist at New York University, caused an intellectual row a couple of years ago when he fooled the editors of a modish academic journal called Social Text into publishing a sham article he had written. Bearing the title ''Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,'' the article was meant to be a parody of what is loosely called post-modernist thought. It was crammed full of meaningless references to esoteric ideas in mathematics and physics, from which it leapt, in one breathtaking non sequitur after another, to radical conclusions about politics and society. As deliberately parodic as Sokal's pronouncements were, they seemed nowhere near as silly as the bits he quoted from post-modernist icons like Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray and from their numerous American interpreters, who showed up in a cataract of footnotes.

It was a good joke. It had funny consequences too: academics wrote indignantly to The New York Times to insist that, despite what the parody implied, they did so believe in the existence of the external world. But Sokal was up to more than mischief. The purpose of his hoax, he declared, was to reveal the fraudulence of much post-modernist thought, especially as it abused science. There was also a political angle. Far from being a right-winger picking on the lit-crit pinkos, Sokal said, he was ''an unabashed Old Leftist'' (he taught in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas) who worried that the post-modern assault on objectivity was depriving the working class of the weapons needed to win the struggle against oppression -- a view shared with comrades like Noam Chomsky and Eric Hobsbawm.

''Fashionable Nonsense,'' which Sokal wrote with the Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, grew out of this hoax. The authors have two stated aims. First, they wish to present the full dossier of pseudoscientific nonsense masquerading as profundity that Sokal discovered when he was composing his parody, and to explain to nonscientists exactly why it is nonsensical. Second, and more ambitious, they want to make a philosophical case against what they call post-modern relativism: the notion that physical reality is nothing but a social construct and that science, despite its pretensions to truth, is just another ''narration'' that encodes the dominant ideology of the culture that produced it.

The dossier part is intermittently amusing, but I'm not sure it demonstrates what Sokal and Bricmont want it to. The passages cited all come from French thinkers who cannot resist the urge to name-drop. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan drones on about sexual pleasure as if it were a branch of topology, the mathematical theory of abstract spaces. The literary theorist Julia Kristeva tries to ground her poetics in Godel's incompleteness theorem, which she gets exactly backward. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, philosophers of S & M, among other topics, unbosom themselves of endless bizarre reflections on Newtonian physics.

Technical terminology from quantum theory and mathematical logic flows fast and furious, but it's mostly gibberish, as Sokal and Bricmont painstakingly show. The Parisian thinkers have only the foggiest understanding of science, and the metaphors they invoke could scarcely be more arbitrary -- when they signify anything at all. (The sociologist Jean Baudrillard, for one, has a habit of simply making up his terms, like ''variable refraction hyperspace'' and ''fractal scissiparity.'') ''If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing,'' Sokal and Bricmont comment. Indeed, it's hard to imagine how people could read the texts seriously. Perhaps the lofty-sounding verbiage has an incantatory force for those innocent of science. Some of these passages, if intoned in the plummy voice of, say, Jeremy Irons, could well have the meaningless beauty of a Mallarme poem.

But what is the crime here? At worst these French theorists are bluffeurs. They do not hate science; they love it too well and try to wrap themselves in its mantle. It is a tendency deeply ingrained in the culture of the Ecole Normale Superieure, the elite Paris institution where many French philosophers are trained. Its students are encouraged to extend their erudition as widely, if superficially, as possible -- to ''possess the world,'' as Jean-Paul Sartre once put it. The philosophes of the Enlightenment took a leaf from Newton; is it surprising that their contemporary counterparts should try to take one from quantum theory and relativity?

A more distressing abuse of science is to be found right here in the United States. It arises not from an elitist, hyperrationalist culture, like that of France, but from a home-grown antielitist, antirationalist, anti-intellectual one. Traditionally, this science war, as Sokal and Bricmont refer to it in the epilogue of their book, has been waged by the religious right, but in recent decades an element of the academic left has got in on the action -- the ''cultural studies'' crowd. Among its leading figures is Andrew Ross, one of the editors of the journal that unwittingly collaborated in Sokal's hoax. Now, Ross is a man with a keen sense of irony, and when he complains about scientists undemocratically excluding the New Age beliefs of the masses, he may just be pulling our leg. But one gets the feeling that many of his allies are dead earnest when they denounce science as patriarchal and authoritarian, and call for its subordination to progressive interests.

The American cultural-studies types and the Parisian theorists do have something in common -- something, that is, besides a woolly way of expressing themselves. Both camps are skeptical of the notion of objective truth, that there is such a thing as a world independent of our minds that science alone can represent ''as it really is.'' Sokal and Bricmont regard this attitude as daft, not to say dangerous. The gravamen of their book is a defense of scientific realism against its relativist enemies.

This defense is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go very far. It is the work of a moment to refute someone who claims that there is no such thing as scientific progress, or that the content of scientific theories is dictated exclusively by cultural interests. But there are other, more sophisticated arguments that the authors do not bother to address. They have been framed by philosophers of unimpeachable scientific credentials (like Hilary Putnam and W. V. Quine) and are based on powerful findings in the area of mathematical logic known as model theory. They make the authors' ''realist'' explanation for the success of science -- that its theories uniquely latch on to the way the world is -- seem like empty metaphysics.

hese arguments are difficult, but their flavor can be conveyed by a simple example. As a theory whose correspondence to the world is so evident that ''it has become irrational to doubt it,'' Sokal and Bricmont cite atomism. But what is an atom? To the greatest physicist of the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell, an atom was ''a body which cannot be cut in two.'' This is certainly not true of what we now call atoms. It may turn out that nothing in the world fits Maxwell's description -- in which case, when he theorized about atoms, he was referring to nothing at all. By the same token, ''superstring'' -- the theoretical term today's physicists use to refer to the basic constituents of reality -- may also turn out to designate nothing at all a hundred years hence. Physics will doubtless be more potent then, but not because it more accurately pictures some supposedly theory-independent ''furniture of the world.''

As physicists, Sokal and Bricmont have done reason a modest service by exposing a species of intellectual quackery. As philosophers, they have not pursued reason far enough -- all the way to its sometimes unreasonable-sounding conclusions.

Jim Holt writes about science and philosophy for The Wall Street Journal and Lingua Franca.