Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science

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The original version of this review was first published in 2006

In which Alan Sokal takes on some big arguments, swats some flies but loses hands down. He persuades us that there were fakers and charlatans in Social Sciences departments in the ’90s. Anyone who’s been to university and didn’t know that deserves a clip around the ear and to be sent to the back of the class. Now either Sokal didn’t know that (~clip~), or he spends half his book shooting fish in a barrel.

While it’s a cheap thrill, I doubt the titillation of seeing thick French feminists taken apart is what made Fashionable Nonsense such a splash: it’s more likely because Sokal purported to undermine cognitive relativism, especially as it associated with modern philosophy of science, in particular the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.

This is the battle: Sokal aligns with those who say scientists are the exclusive purveyors of a shining light called truth; the Barbarians at the gate are these simpering postmodernists who want to tear the temple down.

While most of the poseurs cited in this book are phoneys and idiots, Thomas Kuhn was neither, and while Feyerabend overplayed his hand, he had some important things to say too.

So, to the first point: Proving that one writer (or a hundred, or a thousand) who purports to adhere to relativism is a charlatan doesn’t establish anything about *the idea* of relativism. All you have established is that you have found yourself a charlatan. Give yourself a star.

But while you’re pinning it on, remember that relativists do not have a monopoly on illogical, bamboozling, balderdash. Modern cosmology is full of it.

Secondly, Sokal and Bricmont (quite deliberately) refuse to engage on certain topics, in particular on cultural or aesthetic relativism, which they say (without providing a reason) “raise very different issues”. Take that star away, for this statement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about relativism. They raise different manifestations of exactly the same issue: Cognitive relativism, is simply a cut closer to the quick: indeed, the aesthetic and moral brands of relativism rely for their plausibility on cognitive relativism anyway (i.e. if the truths we understand about the physical universe are contingent on our language, then it follows that ideals of right and wrong and beauty must be similarly contingent on our language).

Thirdly, Sokal provides the following account of cognitive relativism:

While scientists ... try to obtain an objective view ... of the world, relativist thinkers tell them that they are wasting their time and that such an enterprise is, in principle, an illusion.

Now that is a very punchy version of relativism, and not one that any credible relativist philosopher I know of (and certainly not Kuhn, who spent a whole book explaining how and why the process scientific discovery works) subscribes to.

That is, in the trade, known as a straw-man argument: You set it up to knock it over. Here goes:

P1: Relativists say science is a waste of time.
P2: Science helps us reliably predict and react coherently to phenomena occurring in the world.
P3: Things which help to predict and react to such phenomena have genuine utility.
C1: Therefore, science has genuine utility.
C2: Ergo, science is not a waste of time.

Case closed. Is relativism dead?

No: the problem is, most relativists would agree with all of the above (except for premise 1). All reasonably stated relativism says is that you can’t know that your theory maps onto the actual configuration of the outside world; it may, it may not: logically there will always be some other possible explanation for the same set of data, however implausible or difficult to imagine, and in part that difficulty in imagination may be a function of the historical contingency of our belief system in, and description of the world in terms of, the current “paradigm”.

Relativism simply says the best you can do is to know that, for now, your theory works, not that it is true. The criteria for value under this approach is not truth but usefulness. It is not hard to imagine that “usefulness” might be culturally constructed (how else could it be constructed?)

Though Sokal and Bricmont may disagree, I don’t think this is controversial amongst philosophers nor, really, scientists.

At the end of the day, properly stated cognitive relativism is not a threat to scientific discourse, except that it relegates the scientist from “truth knower” or “person through whom you may have exclusive access to the truth” to “useful person whose theory works the best for now” and who may be in competition for that status with other people in the community, whether or not they’re scientists.

If science does work better than feng shui or healing crystals (and it seems to, right?) then this shouldn’t be a particularly troubling way of looking at the world for a scientist who is at ease with his views and his value to the community. So it makes the knee-jerk reactions against relativism all the more mystifying.

See also

• Relativism
• Truth
• Transgressing hermeneutical boundaries