Anti-science postmodernists - Jean Bricmont's session at Second World Skeptics Congress

One of the liveliest sessions at the Second World Skeptics Congress was "Anti-Science and Postmodernists," and Jean Bricmont was its central figure. Bricmont, professor of physics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, is co-author with Alan Sokal of Intellectual Impostures. Sokal is the American physicist whose hoax paper satirizing the rhetorical excesses and scientific pretensions of extreme postmodern criticisms of science was published in the journal Social Text in 1996 without its editors realizing the article was a parody (see "Physicist Alan Sokal's Hilarious Hoax," SI, November/December 1996).

Last year Sokal and Bricmont expanded on their argument in their book. Published in Paris, it raised a storm of controversy, because many (but not all) of the philosophers and social critics who are the subject of its criticisms are French. And the French take their intellectuals very seriously. ("Americans don't have famous intellectuals as the French have," he said; the crowd moaned in reluctant agreement.) The book was published in English for the first time this summer in London (see page 58), and an American edition is due out soon.

Bricmont says Sokal's 1996 article was like a Trojan horse brought within the walls of cultural studies and science studies. "His article was full of nonsense."

Bricmont said criticism of science is healthy but too many of these "science studies" critics write without truly understanding science. They use scientific words and concepts they don't understand. "The editors did not understand Sokal's article," he said. "If they did understand it, they would have known it was bullshit. So how could their readers have understood? What were their readers to learn?"

Bricmont showed the audience excerpts from some of the postmodernist writings on science, calling one example "a maximum amount of confusion in a minimum number of words."

He said these critics insist they are not antiscientific and argue, "We are scientists just like you." Yet they profess that scientific theories are little different from socially constructed viewpoints, opinions no better than any others.

Yet, said Bricmont, it doesn't work to try to understand theories and make judgments on whether belief in them is rational or irrational "without regard to whether they're true or false."

"That doesn't work," he said. "You can't explain why people come to believe in anything without discussing the evidence for it. To explain the cause of belief, you have to consider maybe it is because it is true or rational, that evidence supports it. Without looking at the evidence, there is no way to understand" why scientists support one theory over another. "If you look at it purely sociologically, you don't always see."

The panel on anti-science and postmodernism concluded with a lively question session discussing all these issues. One audience member cautioned that this debate is not just academic. She told of similar antiscientific rhetoric that her daughter was forced to study in her classroom. "I am concerned about the damage being done to the average student."

Astrophysicist Evry Schatzman, a former president of the French Physical Association, was a member of the panel. In the discussion, he pointed out that in astronomy new astronomical instruments regularly come into operation, and they "make new discoveries almost every day." He echoed many scientists' antipathy toward the postmodernists' rhetoric and criticisms. "These philosophical speculations are so much away from the way we [astronomers] work, that we are not interested in them."

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