Name: Fashionable Nonsense
Rating: 4.1 (43 reviews)
Author: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

What’s in it for me? See how an -ism can ruin science.

Would you be surprised to hear that a scientific journal published a text without any empirical evidence or a scientifically sound hypothesis? Impossible, right? Yet this is exactly what Alan Sokal accomplished. He managed to get a nonsensical and completely unfactual paper published in a journal. What made it possible?

Postmodernism.

Postmodernism is an intellectual philosophy that sprang up in the late 1970s and has since been adopted widely – in the arts, social sciences and humanities (as well as other sciences). This philosophy throws overboard previous standards for scientific progress, claiming that there is no objective truth. Let's look at what postmodernism is and how it poses a real problem for science.

In these blinks, you'll discover

that postmodernism treats Native American creation myths as possible realities;
why one man's mumbo-jumbo seems like proper science to a postmodernist; and
how postmodernists use mathematical language to give their theories false credibility.

Postmodernism is a wide-ranging term that challenges the concept of objective truth.

To understand what makes postmodernism such a controversial subject, let’s first take a close look at the concept’s defining features.

Postmodernism denies that there is any objective “truth” to be found in the world.

Postmodernists believe that everything, including science, is a social construct. According to their view, all traditional forms of knowledge contain limited and biased ideas about the way things are. This facet of postmodernism is often called relativism, because it suggests that everything we know is relative and based on the individual.

For example, several Native American tribes have origin myths that claim their people have lived in the Americas ever since their ancestors “emerged onto the surface of the earth from a subterranean world of spirits.”

Some postmodernists argue that such beliefs are just as “valid” and “true” as the scientific evidence showing that the first humans entered the Americas by crossing the Bering Strait from Asia between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.

In this way, postmodernists suggest that there is no objective reality and that everything is an individual interpretation of the world. So, from a postmodern perspective, the Native American creation myth is as valid as the scientific evidence. From a scientific and factual perspective, however, only one can be considered “true.”

That said, postmodernism can balance out the negative effects of extreme modernism.

Modernism was an early twentieth-century movement designed to analyze every aspect of our existence in order to find out what was holding us back from “progress.” Sometimes this caused us to over-romanticize technology or Western values.

So, when postmodernism arrived in the late twentieth century, it showed us that such idealistic views often lead to our diminishing the value systems of other cultures.

And making room for a broader and more diverse range of voices is, of course, beneficial to our culture. So, in the following blinks, we will limit our look at postmodernism to cases involving scientific discourse – where it can do the most damage.

The Sokal hoax was a parody and critique of postmodernism.

You may have heard of the infamous Sokal hoax, in which physics professor Alan Sokal had an article published in the fashionable journal, Social Text.

While that may sound innocent enough, Sokal’s paper was actually intended as a parody, written in the style of postmodernist academics.

Postmodernists use science incorrectly, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Fooling the editors of a science journal was a point in itself – but Sokal was also trying to make a larger point about how postmodernism misunderstands and misuses science.

As a professor, Sokal had seen how postmodernist scholars in the humanities and social sciences employed scientific concepts in irrelevant and incorrect ways.

Postmodernism is detrimental to critical thought, progressivism and the social sciences.

The natural sciences have a pretty strict code of conduct, which has helped keep them safe from the abuses of postmodernism. The social sciences, on the other hand, are more tolerant and have inflicted great harm by accepting and advancing the trends of postmodernism.

Just think what would happen if we adopted into our daily life the aversion to science that postmodernism and extreme relativism have.

Key ideas in Fashionable Nonsense

What is Fashionable Nonsense about?

In Fashionable Nonsense (1998), we dive into some of the problematic aspects of postmodernism, a fashionable intellectual trend in universities worldwide. Learn how inaccessible, complex language does not always translate into profound ideas, and discover how the popularity of postmodern nonsense can actually harm society.