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Reply by Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal

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Reply by Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal Reply to Turnbull Krips Dusek and Fuller For Metascience Jean Bricmont Institut de Physique Theorique Universite Catholique de Louvain chemin du Cyclotron B LouvainlaNeuve BELGIUM Internet BRICMONTFYMAUCLACBE Telephone Fax Alan Sokal Department of Physics New York University Washington Place New York NY USA Internet SOKALNYUEDU Telephone Fax February Biographical Note Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain Belgium Alan Sokal is professor of physics at New York University Introduction 1 In the preface to the second edition of Intel lectual Impostures we wrote that the criticisms of our b o ok can b e divided roughly into four types A very few reviewers discuss what we wrote and try to refute it Other commentators raise ob jections often p erfectly valid ones to ideas that are not in fact ours and that we may have expressly rejected in the b o ok while attributing them to us implicitly or explicitly Yet a third group of critics pretend to discuss our b o ok while actually doing something completely dierent for example attacking our p ersonalities our alleged motivations for writing the b o ok or the failings of scientists in general And nally some reviewers agree with us but think that we do not go far enough I I p xv The comments by Turnbull and Dusek fall squarely into the second and third cat egories apart from o ccasional brief excursions into category while Krips and Fuller oer a mixture of the rst and second categories It would b e a hop eless task to address al l the issues raised in these essays since in most cases it would simply amount to explaining over and over again that we do not hold and most certainly have never written the views attributed to us Instead we shall simply give for each reviewer a few examples of his misrepresentations or misunderstandings of our ideas and then do our b est to address the intellectually interesting issues that he raises Before pro ceeding further however let us remind the reader that our b o ok com prises two distinct but related works under one cover I I p x The largest part of the b o ok is devoted to demonstrating that famous intellectuals such as Lacan Kristeva Irigaray Baudrillard and Deleuze have rep eatedly abused scientic concepts and terminology either using sci entic ideas totally out of context without giving the slightest justication note that we are not against extrap olating concepts from one eld to another but only against extrap olations made without argument or throwing around scientic jargon in front of their nonscientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning We make no claim that this invalidates the rest of their work on which we susp end judgment I I pp ixx In two vastly more subtle chapters Chapters and we address widespread mis conceptions ab out p ostmo dern science and dissect a number of confusions that are rather frequent in p ostmo dernist and culturalstudies circles for example misappropriating ideas from the philos ophy of science such as the underdetermination of theory by evidence or the 1 Prole Bo oks London hereafter denoted I I All citations of page numbers refer to this edition which is identical to the rst British edition except for the addition of a new preface which do es not alter the subsequent pagination The American edition entitled Fashionable Nonsense Postmodern Intel lectuals Abuse of Science Picador USA New York is identical to the rst British edition except for sp elling and o ccasional small dierences of diction but has dierent pagination theoryladenness of observation in order to supp ort radical relativism I I p x These two parts of our b o ok must b e evaluated separately each reader has the p erfect right to agree with our arguments on one topic but not the other on b oth or on neither David Turnbull The most striking asp ect of Turnbulls essay is its profusion of derogatory charac terizations of our b o ok nasty sneering overstates the case fo olishly overin ated rhetoric and of our alleged p ersonalities totalitarian inquisitors lust for annihilation unsupp orted by even one concrete example We challenge Turnbull to supply evidence to back up his purp orted descriptions of our b o ok and we submit that he will b e unable to do so b ecause our b o ok is in fact a measured and carefully 2 reasoned critique of some texts that are to say the least rather extraordinary Furthermore Turnbull attributes to us views that are not ours and that are in many cases the exact opposite of what we have written unambiguously in the b o ok Why attribute failings of individuals sic arguments to all of some supp osedly homogeneous group b e they constructivists so ciologists of science p ostmo dernists or whatever In fact we write Let us emphasize that these authors dier enormously in their attitude toward science and the imp ortance they give it They should not b e lump ed together in a single category and we want to warn the reader against the temptation to do so I I p And again The intellectual abuses criticized in this b o ok are not homogeneous they can b e classied very roughly into two distinct categories corresp onding roughly to two distinct phases in French intellectual life The rst phase is that of extreme structuralism The second phase is that of p oststructuralism Our arguments must b e judged for each author indep endently of his or her link b e it conceptually justied or merely so ciological with the broader p ostmo dernist current I I pp Problematising progress is one of the currents of p ostmo dernism that Sokal and Bricmont nd so ob jectionable In fact we stress that 2 A more accurate description of our b o ok was given by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel in his review for The New Republic Nearly half the b o ok consists of extensive quotations of scientic gibb erish from name brand French intellectuals together with eerily patient explanations of why it is gib b erish This is amusing at rst but b ecomes gradually sickening We are oered reams of this stu from Jacques Lacan Julia Kristeva Bruno Latour JeanFrancois Lyotard Jean Baudrillard Gilles Deleuze Regis Debray and others together with comments so patient as to b e involuntarily comic Nagel p many p ostmo dern ideas expressed in a mo derate form provide a needed correction to naive mo dernism b elief in indenite and continuous progress scientism cultural Euro centrism etc What we are criticizing is the radical version of p ostmo dernism as well as a number of mental confusions that are found in the more mo derate versions of p ostmo dernism and that are in some sense inherited from the radical one I I p They Sokal and Bricmont are seeking to dismiss the p ossibility of the critical examination of science In fact we explicitly encourage such examination we ob ject only to sloppy ways of doing it of which we provide myriad examples We b egin by noting that it is crucial to distinguish at least four dierent senses of the word science an intellectual endeavour aimed at a rational understanding of the world a collection of accepted theoretical and exp erimental ideas a so cial community with particular mores institutions and links to the larger so ciety and nally applied science and technology with which science is often confused All to o frequently valid critiques of science understo o d in one of these senses are taken to b e arguments against science in a dierent sense I I p We then go on to state Thus it is undeniable that science as a so cial institution is linked to p olitical economic and military p ower and that the so cial role played by scientists is often p ernicious It is also true that technology has mixed results sometimes disastrous ones and that it rarely yields the miracle solutions that its most fervent advocates regularly promise Finally science considered as a b o dy of knowledge is always fallible and scientists errors are sometimes due to all sorts of so cial p olitical philosophical or religious prejudices We are in favour of reasonable criticisms of science understo o d in all these senses I I pp Sokals House Built on Sand essay cited in I I p fo otnote provides further details The following prop ositions are I hop e noncontroversial Science is a human endeavor and like any other human endeavor it merits b eing sub jected to rigorous so cial analysis Which research problems count as imp ortant how research funds are distributed who gets prestige and p ower what role scientic exp ertise plays in publicp oli cy debates in what form scientic knowledge b ecomes embo died in technology and for whose b enet all these issues are strongly aected by p olitical economic and to some extent ideological considerations as well as by the internal logic of scientic inquiry They are thus fruitful sub jects for empirical study by historians so ciologists p olitical scientists and economists At a more subtle level even the content of scientic debate what types of theories can b e conceived and entertained what criteria are to b e used for deciding b etween comp eting theories is constrained in part by the prevailing attitudes of mind which in turn arise in part from deepseated historical factors It is the task of historians and so ciologists of science to sort out in each sp ecic instance the roles played by external and internal factors in determining the course of scientic development There is nothing wrong with research informed by a p olitical commit ment as long as that commitment do es not blind the researcher to inconvenient
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