Intellectual Impostures [Paperback]

Alan Sokal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2003

When Intellectual Impostures was published in France, it sent shock waves through the Left Bank establishment. When it was published in Britain, it provoked vicious debate. Sokal and Bricmont examine the canon of French postmodernists - Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Latour, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari - and systematically expose their abuse of science.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'A splendid book.' Richard Dawkins, Nature 'A delicious revelation that even the perpetrators of postmodern philosophy often have no idea what they're saying.' The Observer 'The exposure of ignorance, pomposity and pseudo-science in this book are truly breathtaking.' Sunday Telegraph 'A forensic examination of sackloads of ordure from the postmodern stable.' Financial Times

About the Author

Alan Sokal is Professor of Physics at New York University. In 1996 his infamous article 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity' which parodied postmodernists use of scientific language was published in all seriousness by the American cultural journal Social Text, thus becoming one of the great academic hoaxes of all time. Jean Bricmont is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Louvin in Belgium.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Profile Books (April 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861976313
• ISBN-13: 978-1861976314
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,754,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Raises some interesting questions about academic honesty, December 4, 2004

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intellectual Impostures Pb (Paperback)

Have you ever been tempted to write pure nonsense? Maybe on some rainy first day of April? I once felt like writing:

"I sure made a mistake when I told the Goddess Minerva that She couldn't square the circle. In response, She drew a circle next to me, a truly beautiful and perfect circle. And right in front of my panicky brown eyes, She turned pi into four! Not just the circumference divided by the diameter, but the series expansion as an inverse tangent as well. What would She do next, make me unwell by dropping the first letter from my first name? i tried to apologize, but it was too late."

I was not the only one to dream of mangling pi. In "Contact: A Novel," Carl Sagan went me one better when he had aliens send messages to each other at infinite speed by hiding them in a numerical representation of pi and then, you guessed it, changing pi everywhere!

Still, Alan Sokal went beyond even this, getting the following published in the journal "Social Text:"

"In this way the infinite-dimensional invariance group erodes the distinction between the observer and the observed; the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally decentered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a spacetime point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone."

Sokal put this and many more whoppers into his hoax, which defended an equally absurd thesis: that "physical 'reality,' no less than social 'reality,' is at bottom a social and linguistic construct."

While this joke may not prove much, it does raise the issue of whether a few people in academia are misusing the vocabulary of science to create absurd statements in defense of an antirationalist point of view. This book shows that they are.

The authors show that Jacques Lacan makes completely arbitrary analogies between topology and psychoanalysis. We then see some of the same irrelevance and superficial use of topology in the early works of Julia Kristeva. After an interlude in which Sokal and Bricmont seriously discuss the philosophy of science, there are more examples of academic nonsense. The next victim is Luce Irigaray, who in what I agree is about as ridiculously antifeminist a statement as one could make says:

"Science always displays certain choices, certain exclusions, and these are particularly determined by the sex of the scholars involved."

That's rich: objective truth is different depending on whether one is a Woman or a man! I must admit that I half expected Irigaray to say that pi was different for Men and women.

After that, we see Bruno Latour's idea that Einstein's Theory of Relativity has implications for sociology. The authors point out that this is manifest nonsense. Were we to discover tomorrow that the ratio of the mass of a particle to its energy were slightly different from what relativity predicted, there would be a revolution in physics, but no need to alter theories of human behavior.

Later, we see Jean Baudrillard say, "It is a sign that the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-Euclidean." And there are more, um, words, from Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio.

Sokal and Bricmont conclude that all this inanity is a threat. That either it will lead to even more irrationalism in academia or to an academic abandonment of social critique. And I think it's worth warning us to avoid such a future. But I also think we simply need social journals to get scientists to review (and reject) papers that use big scientific words instead of making coherent statements.

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For those whose minds have been formed by this material ..., August 22, 2005

By 

Suetonius (England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intellectual Impostures (Paperback)

... it may be too late. Let me start by addressing a misconception you may get from another review. Sokal, in his famous hoax, did not write "a bunch of nonsense and falsely attribute it to prominent French intellectuals". Indeed, much of it was not nonsense - to postmodernists - which is why it was snapped up by 'Social Text'. It appeared to touch all the right bases, with scientific bells on. Physical reality is at bottom a social and linguistic construct. Postmodern science has freed itself from dependence on objective truth. A truly liberatory mathematics is what we need. Etc, etc. The article starred in a special issue on the so-called 'Science Wars', and one editor refused to believe it was a parody even after Sokal said so.

In itself that showed not much more than the tenuous intellectual grip of some cultural studies grandees. So Sokal and Bricmont followed up with this book. Their stated intention was far from producing a critique of the entire oeuvre of Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida and a dozen others, all between two covers:

"We make no claim to analyse postmodernist thought in general; rather, our aim is to draw attention to the repeated abuse of concepts and terminology coming from mathematics and physics."

"We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Deleuze have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology ... throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning."

"There is nothing shameful in being ignorant of calculus or quantum mechanics. What we are criticizing is the pretension of some celebrated intellectuals to offer profound thoughts on complicated subjects which they understand, at best, at the level of popularizations."

That's what the authors say they will do in this book, and that's what they do. As for the hoax with its 219 references:

"The parody was constructed around quotations from eminent French and American intellectuals ... the passages may be absurd or meaningless, but they are nonetheless authentic."

All this is spelt out carefully and at length in the Introduction, which a reviewer above seems to have missed.

If you want to know what ruffled so many feathers, read the book. It's well researched and well written. But be warned that despite the authors' light touch, reams of inanity and bafflegab, which can give you a mild high at first, will eventually rot the brain. You never thought that E = Mc^2 was a sexed equation because it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us? You haven't kept up with Irigaray. From Lacan we learn, along with much else, that the torus - a topological figure like a doughnut - is exactly the structure of the neurotic *and this torus really exists* (I know, I know, Lacan wasn't post-anything). Did we teach Einstein anything, asks the sociologist Latour? Er, no. This may be a French intellectual joke, or more likely it reflects a misreading of a popular introduction to relativity. I bet you didn't know that acceleration and deceleration are what physicists call positive and negative velocities. I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and I didn't know. But that's what Virilio, the philosopher of speed, tells his readers. And so on, and on. Several hundred errors, from the venial to whoppers, are documented and patiently explained in terms that non-specialists can understand. In addition, there is a long and sensible chapter on epistemic relativism, an extreme form of which fertilized the ground for this, and an interesting epilogue with suggestions on the way forward. The parody is reprinted with commentary in an appendix.

Reactions to the book come in a variety of flavors:

1. It's the wrong book. The authors should have written an in-depth appreciation of the philosophy of Deleuze.

2. The errors are illusory. For example, Lacan was an M.D. so he was perfectly capable of mastering topology. If he said that the neurotic torus really exists, then it does. This has been seriously argued, and not just by Woody Allen.

3. The errors are peripheral. They arise mainly in mathematics and physics where, unfairly, words and concepts are used with precise meanings, and rhetoric (usually) carries no weight. In feminist theory, continental philosophy and cultural studies, on the other hand, these thinkers can 'create concepts' with the best. In short, the vessel is leaking but only in parts where it is easy to detect; the rest is watertight.

4. The errors are endemic. For a theory to be worth the name, it is not enough to have a repertoire of theoretical-sounding jargon, perhaps tricked out with mathematical decoration. There is a missing ingredient: reality (whatever you understand by that). If you believe that 'there is nothing outside the text' or that 'truth is determined by social convention', you have a problem. This is painfully apparent when soft practice blunders innocently or otherwise into hard science, but it is also, less obviously, present in all the other fields, with the possible exception of literary theory.

Maybe Kuhn was right, at least as regards the humanities and social sciences, and it will take another generation for this paradigm to die out along with its practitioners. Meanwhile, what a waste: not for the practitioners but for students who are paying to have their brains addled.

It's instructive to compare this book with Gross & Levitt's 'Higher Superstition', an earlier and more scathing attack on some of the same targets. Quote: "When such solecisms as we find in these writings are confidently put forth as scholarly discoveries, with every assurance that something profound is being uttered, one must wonder about the system - and the ideology - that nurtures and rewards them." You won't find anything like that in Sokal & Bricmont but they caught most of the flak. There wasn't a Gross hoax, you see.

44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The merde hits the fan, September 12, 2004

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Intellectual Impostures (Paperback)

This book grew out of the famous hoax in which Alan Sokal published a parody article in the American postmod 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.

Intellectual Impostures broadens the investigation to demonstrate 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.

In the preface to the first edition, Sokal and Bricmont provide the background to the controversy whilst in the preface to the second edition they discuss the four types of criticisms of their book. These are: critics who tried to refute them, critics who attributed to them ideas that the authors themselves had rejected, name-calling and ad hominem attacks, and finally those who agreed but thought that the authors did not go far enough.

Here one is tempted to partly agree with Anne Applebaum who, in her review of the book, claimed that of course post-structuralist theory is rubbish and that we don't need a book to tell us that. I disagree with the second statement, because Intellectual Impostures is mostly an amusing read that will have you rolling on the floor and because it is vitally important that intellectual frauds be exposed. In this regard I also highly recommend The Illusions Of Postmodernism by Terry Eagleton and The Anti Chomsky reader by David Horowitz and Peter Collier.

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. The authors also investigate certain philosophical and scientific confusions behind much of postmodernist thinking, like cognitive relativism, certain misunderstandings concerning chaos theory and so-called postmodern science.

Appendix A is 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 Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie (Revised and Updated Edition)