In 1996, two physicists wrote a paper for the postmodernist journal Social Text called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." It was a long paper, running to over 35 pages, with hundreds of references to works by philosophers, scientists, social theorists and literary critics. Social Text accepted and published it, and then the fireworks started.
In Alan Sokal's words, "my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever". He had, nonetheless, managed to persuade a leading postmodernist journal to take the spoof seriously and publish it. They couldn't tell the difference between the spoof and their own work.
The postmodernist philosophy movement had become enraptured by the writings of Baudrillard, Lacan, Irigaray, Derrida, and many others whose focus was on deconstructing texts, eliciting meaning from sub-texts buried in narratives. From literary criticism, where the source material was fiction, they transferred their attention to all forms of narrative. Alas, they included science as a narrative too.
Some scientists had observed these moves with mild amusement as they came across debates about whether electricity was male or female, and whether gravity was a macho concept. The debates considered science itself as a collection of discourses, which would reveal their true meanings and values by deconstruction, exposing the subtexts by a process of criticism. For scientists, this was a very curious approach, but as it didn't impact their work, they rarely took it at all seriously.
But it wasn't just an air of levity that inspired theoretical physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to write a spoof paper. Books were being written by postmodernists arguing against the methodology of science itself, and that required an answer. The spoof was the first blast.
There followed a book in 1998 called Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science. It was such a comprehensive demolition job that one would have thought that would be the end of it. But unfortunately these subjectivist attitudes to science are still being promoted in university departments, especially in literature courses, and so Alan Sokal has again entered the fray, this time with Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture.
The book starts with an annotated explanation of the original paper in which, with wonderful humour, he illustrates the absurdities it contained: he exposes his own subtext. But the main meat of the book comes in the subsequent seven chapters, in which he explains how the constraints of the physical world influence the development of theory.
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