Современдік ойшылдардың ғылымға қатысты әурешілігі

1997 book by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (UK: Intellectual Impostures), first published in French in 1997 as , is a book by physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. According to some reports, the response within the humanities was "polarized"; The article itself is included in Fashionable Nonsense as an appendix.

The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general", but rather "to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism." Similarly, Lacan is criticized for drawing an analogy between topology and mental illness that, in Sokal and Bricmont's view, is unsupported by any argument and is "not just false: it is gibberish."

Philosopher Thomas Nagel has supported Sokal and Bricmont, describing their book as consisting largely of "extensive quotations of scientific gibberish from name brand French intellectuals, together with eerily patient explanations of why it is gibberish," and agreeing that "there does seem to be something about the Parisian scene that is particularly hospitable to reckless verbosity." Several scientists have expressed similar sentiments. Richard Dawkins, in a review of this book, said regarding the discussion of Lacan:

Limiting her considerations to physics, science historian Mara Beller maintained that it was not entirely fair to blame contemporary postmodern philosophers for drawing nonsensical conclusions from quantum physics, since many such conclusions were drawn by some of the leading quantum physicists themselves, such as Bohr or Heisenberg when they ventured into philosophy.

Bruce Fink offers a critique in his book Lacan to the Letter, in which he accuses Sokal and Bricmont of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings". Fink asserts that some concepts which the authors consider arbitrary or meaningless do have roots in the history of linguistics, and that Lacan is explicitly using mathematical concepts in a metaphoric way, not claiming that his concepts are mathematically founded. He takes Sokal and Bricmont to task for elevating a disagreement with Lacan's choice of writing styles to an attack on his thought, which, in Fink's assessment, they fail to understand. Fink says that "Lacan could easily assume that his faithful seminar public would go to the library or the bookstore and 'bone up' on at least some of his passing allusions." This point has been disputed by Arkady Plotnitsky (one of the authors mentioned by Sokal in his original hoax). Plotnitsky says that "some of their claims concerning mathematical objects in question and specifically complex numbers are incorrect", specifically attacking their statement that complex numbers and irrational numbers "have nothing to do with one another". Plotnitsky nevertheless agrees with Sokal and Bricmont that the "square root of −1" which Lacan discusses (and for which Plotnitsky introduces the symbol ) is not, in spite of its identical name, "identical, directly linked, or even metaphorized via the mathematical square root of −1", and that the latter "is not the erectile organ". However, they point out that Irigaray might still be correct in asserting that [[mass energy equivalence is a "masculinist" equation, since "the social genealogy of a proposition has no logical bearing on its truth value." Derrida reminds his readers that science and philosophy have long debated their likenesses and differences in the discipline of epistemology, but certainly not with such an emphasis on the nationality of the philosophers or scientists. He calls it ridiculous and weird that there are intensities of treatment by the scientists, in particular, that he was "much less badly treated", when in fact he was the main target of the US press. Derrida then proceeds to question the validity of their attacks against a few words he made in an off the cuff response during a conference that took place thirty years prior to their publication. He suggests there are plenty of scientists who have pointed out the difficulty of attacking his response. He also writes that there is no "relativism" or a critique of Reason and the Enlightenment in his works. He then writes of his hope that in the future this work is pursued more seriously and with dignity at the level of the issues involved.