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Raymond Tallis on Sokal & Bricmont.

April 10th, 2010
The multi-layered insulation that protects Theory.


What Did Sokal & Bricmont Really Say?

February 4th, 2004

Francis Wheen was on Start the Week Monday to talk about his new book How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. The book sounds like just our sort of thing in a way, being about various forms of delusion and what a lot of them there are about nowadays – but in another way it doesn’t, quite, because it apparently doesn’t limit itself the way we do. Mind you, there’s disagreement about how much we limit ourselves, and how much we ought to, which gets back to that ‘What was the question?’ N&C I did a week or two ago. But still. However expansive a view I take, I don’t attempt to cover every kind of delusion I can think … Read the rest



Science Wars: an interview with Alan Sokal

August 15th, 2002
Julian Baggini talks to the physicist who published a "transgressive" article in Social Text, only to unmask it as a parody.


Meet Rebecca Goldstein

March 8th, 2013
I actually did an email interview with Rebecca Goldstein once. Yes really! You didn’t know that, did you. I’m not just some shlub with a blog. [struts] I did an interview with Rebecca Goldstein once. Here. Rebecca Goldstein has a new book out: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. Readers at Science Daily …

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Thomas Nagel on the Sleep of Reason

April 10th, 2010
Eerily patient explanations of why gibberish is gibberish.


Five Questions About Clarity

April 23rd, 2007
Why does clarity matter?


A Bastion against Irrationalism

November 13th, 2006
Robert Wilcocks reviews Frederick Crews's Follies of the Wise and the French translation of the Freud-Fliess letters


Godless States in God Lands: Dilemmas of Secularism in America and India

December 1st, 2005
The postmodern deconstruction of science has been all too helpful to reactionary religiosity.


Fear and Loathing in Lacania

November 28th, 2005
Is it possible to understand Lacan without becoming his hostage?


I Employ Methods

October 28th, 2005

Steve Fuller. I’ve been browsing in some of my books, leafing through indexes, consulting bibliographies. Steve Fuller.

Here is a passage from Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense pp. 97-98:

Let us read it as a methodological principle for a sociologist of science who does not himself have the scientific competence to make an independent assessment of whether the experimental/observational data do in fact warrant the conclusions the scientific community has drawn from them. In such a situation, the sociologist will be understandably reluctant to say that ‘the scientific community under study came to conclusion X because X is the way the world really is’ – even if it is in fact the case that X is the way

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French Connection III?

September 28th, 2005
The Black Book of Psychoanalysis is a start but it omits a lot


Remarks on Theory

June 30th, 2005

People have been commenting here and there on Mark Bauerlein’s “Theory’s Empire”, no doubt because of the links on Arts and Letters Daily and (cringe) National Review Online’s The Corner. There’s this colleague of Mark’s for example:

If the original impulse of theory was to shatter orthodoxies and challenge hierarchies (it wasn’t all that, but that’s the mythology), the current incarnation is tediously hegemonic…I’m sure deconstruction was really exciting back in the day, but, well, I don’t live back in the day, and I don’t care…the theory evolved into elaboration for its own sake, turning a corner of literature departments into Philosophy-Lite (“Just as much deep meaning, but a third less logical rigor”). You can see how theory

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An Interview with Rebecca Goldstein

March 9th, 2005
'If ever there was a man committed to the objectivity of truth, and to objective standards of rationality, it was Gödel.'


The Sleep of Reason

September 20th, 2004
H.E. Baber on the roots of the Left's antipathy to reason and logic.


Elephants, Foxes and Pigs

September 19th, 2004

The discussion continues to continue. Norm has more, so does Harry, so does David T. Plus I had a long talk with Polly Toynbee on the phone earlier. No I didn’t, that’s just one of my jokes. (Or irony? No, just a joke. I don’t know from irony.) There’s quite a lot of agreement this time around. This from Harry’s –

For what it is worth I am not a supporter or defender of fox hunting nor am I opposed to a ban. I accept Ophelia Benson’s criticism of Polly Toynbee’s phrase “Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like”. There clearly need to be some qualifications added to such a statement

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Critical Realism Replacing Postmodernism?

October 7th, 2003

‘If postmodernism is indeed dead…Sokal and Bricmont have surely been instrumental in hastening the death-throes.’… Read the rest



A Glaring Omission

June 5th, 2003

I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain lately. It’s not available in the States yet, but my colleague sent it to me from the UK. It’s great stuff, of course – Dawkins is a brilliant polemicist, essayist, explainer, persuader. His review of Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures/Fashionable Nonsense is hilarious (though of course it could hardly help it, having such rich material to work with). And Dawkins mentions one fact in passing which I feel compelled to make a fuss about.

Sokal was inspired to do this [his famous hoax] by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: the Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain

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Anti-realism – what’s at stake? An interview with Jonathan Rée

April 24th, 2003
According to Jonathan Rée, there is less to worry about in post-modernist inspired criticisms of science than one might think.


Science Studies

November 2nd, 2002
Is science merely a social construct?