Quadrant, March 1st, 1998
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont are physicists, at the Universities of New York and Louvain, respectively. For some years, as they say, they have been astonished and irritated by certain trends that can be subsumed under the name postmodernism, "an intellectual movement characterised by more or less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical elaborations independent of any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural relativism that treats the sciences as `narrations' or social constructions ..." In 1996 Sokal wrote a parody of a postmodernist essay: "...
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