Greg Detre
Friday, 08 December, 2000
Nagel starts off with the story of Alan Sokal�s parody of those who seek to use cutting edge science spuriously as a support for their social, philosophical or literary comments with his article, published in Social Text, containing 109 footnotes and 219 references. Sokal and Bricmont have together written a book (Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science), first published in France (with an extra chapter on Bergson�s misunderstanding of relativity), detailing and debunking such scientific-sounding nonsense over the last century.
The book ends with a comment about how Marxism, logical positivism, and now the new relativists have sought to justify their views over others� by reference to a superior vantage point or lack of objectivity to refer to.