The conspicuous presence of Derrida: 2

Sokal's wordplay: Passing off a sequential relation as a causal one: 3

Confused thinking about confused thinking: 4

Why was it wrong to publish the hoax? 7

Einstein yes, Weinberg maybe, Sokal no.

“Only a scientific ignoramus could have missed the joke.”

“I assumed he was making a joke I didn't get.”

Sokal and Bricmont see a joke that isn’t there and miss the one that is.

Are your purposes being served? 9

Allegations of gibberish: 9

Sokal and Bricmont misread Latour reading Einstein.

Latour reading Einstein: Frames are not enough.

A sensible chapter? Take one: 11

“Now, it happens that, for the unsolved problems, nobody knows the right answer.”

Dr. Sokal and Mr. Hyde.

Redefining truth

Taking it back?

A sensible chapter? Take two: 15

Is there a fact of the matter about which theory is ‘most reasonable’ to accept?

A theory-laden diet of sundaes.

11, 12, 14, 15.

Constructing the past.

Kiss.

Last call.

Appendix: 20

Can a true belief be unreliable?

Can a statement be influenced by social factors?

In “The sleep of reason” (The New Republic October 12 1998) the philosopher, Thomas Nagel, hails the publication of Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont as a much needed hatchet job. In “Reading and relativism”(note 10), I remarked that, in the first part of this review, Nagel accepts uncritically whatever the authors say, almost as if he were taking dictation. However, I gave only one example of this (38), Nagel mindlessly endorsing an ignorant wisecrack by the authors about Luce Irigaray’s use of the word, ‘privileged.’ Here I present more examples of this kind, as well as some that demonstrate in other ways Nagel’s failure to stop and think carefully before calling for the rope or praising the authors’ treatment of some topic and, finally, debunkings of some of Nagel’s own views about the philosophy of science.

When Sokal and Bricmont say (8),

Nagel turns it into,

However, although Nagel eschews the derisory words, “amusing“ and “abuse“, his “that was an isolated instance” parrots the unsubstantiated claim that the Derrida quote is nonsense.² Nagel does deviate from the text when he says that Derrida is “conspicuously absent” from the book “except for one quote in the original parody.”³ But this brings him only trouble. The quote, which appears only in Appendix A (in a reprinting of the parody), is indeed the only statement by Derrida in the book. It also is the only statement by Derrida that is discussed in the book. However, even though no more than half a dozen sentences are devoted to it, this does not justify Nagel’s use of the expression, “conspicuously absent.” One sufficiently hostile remark, like the one quoted above, refutes it. Recall that when Derrida was being portrayed as the Father of all Physics Fakers (roughly, 1991-1996), it was solely on the basis of this one quote. Moreover, very little was actually said about it, in some cases, virtually nothing. Yet it would be absurd to say that Derrida was then “conspicuously absent except for one quote.” On the contrary, he was conspicuously present—as he is in this book, when, for example, Sokal and Bricmont say that, although they haven’t the slightest idea what the Derrida quote means, they know that it is gibberish. Here are their exact words (263):

Apparently, it does not occur to Nagel to wonder why Sokal and Bricmont are confident that the quote is nonsense if they “haven’t the slightest idea what it means.” Or why, right after saying, “we shall not belabor the point,” they do just that, in the following gratuitously offensive, and also illogical, footnote.

This reasoning is at best irrelevant and at worst nonsense. Convincing evidence in support of an interpretation suffices to refute a charge of gibberish but it is not needed to refute an alleged justification of such a charge. Anyway, this should not concern Sokal and Bricmont because they do not claim to have a justification. For them, it is an article of faith. What then is this talk about the trouble being that Plotnitsky presents two possible readings with no convincing evidence for either? In the eyes of Sokal and Bricmont, the trouble that trumps all other troubles is that, whatever Plotnitsky tries, he is wasting his time because, for them, the quote just is gibberish. Finally, as evidence that this ‘just is’ view of their view is fair, note that Sokal and Bricmont are shameless about criticizing Plotnitsky, in the footnote, for failing to provide convincing evidence (which, for his purposes, he doesn’t need) while, in the text, flaunting their complete lack of evidence for their view of the Derrida quote.

Superficially, the following remark from the review does not read like dictation. However, I claim that when we take into account not only its literal meaning, but also the innuendo, it does.

In the second paragraph of his announcement of the hoax in Lingua Franca, Sokal insinuates that such expressions of admiration, as well as other attempts to please the editors, played a significant role in their decision to publish his article. This is essentially what I mean by the innuendo. And Nagel seems more than willing to take Sokal’s word for it. Here is the relevant passage.

This statement is more of a con than the hoax and Nagel appears to be one of its victims. Apparently no suspicions were aroused when he encountered the word ‘if’ being used to pass off a sequential relation as a causal one. Nor does he seem to have noticed how Sokal exploits the ambiguities in the expressions “sounded good” and “flattered” by conflating his attempts to flatter the editors and to ‘sound good’ to them with the assumption that he succeeded. Nor does his incautious admission that he performed no controls seem to have alerted Nagel, who prides himself on his commitment to rationality, to the need to think about what difference this may have made and maybe even consult an expert. Nor, for that matter, does he seem to have wondered how Sokal could have learned that his attempts to flatter the editors and make ideological statements that would “sound good” to them did indeed play a significant role in their acceptance of his article. Does Nagel think that the editors told Sokal this? If they did, would he not have mentioned it? In his announcement of the hoax, Sokal takes for granted that the fact that his article was accepted is proof that his attempts at flattery and “sounding good” were successful. If Nagel buys this reasoning, I have a bridge he might also like to buy.

Also, even though Sokal portrayed the editors of Social Text as ‘postmodernists’ to whom his postmodernist-looking pronouncements would sound good, the editors strongly disputed this. They said that, on the contrary, it did not “sound good” to them and that they pressed Sokal to remove most of it as well as most of the footnotes. So far as I know, he does not challenge this. But if this part of his account of the editor’s behavior is such a self-serving distortion, what reason is there to believe that his boast about the success of his attempt at flattery is any different? If it is not, then Nagel’s innocuous looking remark about Sokal feigning “deep admiration” for the view of the editors is at best irrelevant and, at worst, badly misleading.

The hoax and the allegations in its announcement were not the only hostile actions that Sokal took against the editors of Social Text. He also cooperated with the editor of Lingua Franca to prevent them from presenting their side of things in the same issue in which he presented his.⁵It was in this context that the editors of Social Text received a second submission from Sokal, an “afterword” to his hoax, about which Nagel remarks,

Did Nagel read Sokal’s article? During my own initial reading of it, in a version downloaded from the web, I came upon a gaping hole where an argument belongs. I looked around on my desk and then on the floor for the pages containing it. But there were none because there was no argument, only a gaping hole. I will explain. After quoting Stanislav Andreski about confused thinking,⁷ Sokal announces:

When I first read this statement, I expected it to be followed, after some preparation, by a description of some part of Harding’s chapter, including a quotation or at least a careful paraphrase of something that Harding says in it, and a proof that it is an example of confused thinking. Initially, I was not disappointed. Sokal writes,

So far, so good. Presumably this alleged conflation is the “confused thinking” that Sokal says he wants to consider. He next lists the five issues: ontology, epistemology, sociology of knowledge, individual ethics and social ethics, each accompanied by a question that seems to be an example of what Sokal has in mind by an issue of that type.

Sokal next points out that, although these issues are related, they are conceptually distinct. True enough, but how does Harding conflate them? This is what we are waiting to hear. One might suppose that he would now tell us. Does he? What follows is a page and a half long discussion in which Harding is mentioned in the first sentence, never to be heard from again. Still, the required argument might be buried in it. So let us see. It begins:

This too is informative. It suggests that if Sokal thinks that Harding conflates at least two of the issues, the observation about research “motivated...by potential military applications” must be an instance of one of them. Furthermore, in the discussion that follows, he says:

This makes it likely that Sokal classifies Harding’s remark under ‘sociology of knowledge.’ But he also says:

Thus, Sokal seems to be saying that Harding treats her sociology of knowledge observation about potential military applications motivating research in quantum electronics as if it says something about ontology and/or epistemology. But instead of trying to show that Harding actually does this, Sokal suddenly changes the subject, never to return, leaving us with a gaping hole where an argument belongs. Thus, despite all his preparation, Sokal does not come close to demonstrating that Harding makes the conflation that he says she does. To do this, he would have to show that she does treat her sociology of knowledge observation as if it were a point of ontology or epistemology. But he does not even attempt to do this. Bizarrely, he just walks away from it, leaving Harding tarred by an empty accusation passed off as fact to an audience of supporters eager to believe him.⁸ Did Nagel even read this?

Finally, I would be remiss in presenting Sokal’s list of issues without pointing out that the questions accompanying the second and third are almost comically muddled. See “Can a true belief be unreliable?” and “Can a statement be influenced by social factors” in the appendix.

Here I question the assumption, implicit in the remark that I quoted at the beginning of the previous section, that the publication of Sokal’s hoax article reveals Social Text’s low intellectual standards.

Einstein yes, Weinberg maybe, Sokal no: Early on in this affair, I asked a few scientists and mathematicians, all of whom thought it was wrong for Social Text to publish Sokal’s article, whether it would have made a difference if Einstein had been the author. Everyone said yes and for the same reason: that it would have been of great interest to know whatever was going on in Einstein’s head about these matters even if it seemed crazy. However, when I posed the same question about Steven Weinberg, people were undecided. So it was Sokal, no, Weinberg, maybe and Einstein, yes, with the same content in each case. But if so, is it unreasonable that readers of a leftist journal of cultural studies should be curious about what is going on in the head of a “politically committed” professor of physics at a distinguished university concerning allegedly promising consequences for “liberation politics” of recent scientific developments?

Indeed, is it any more unreasonable than that highly regarded intellectual journals are eager to publish whatever certain scientists and philosophers wish to say about certain subjects trusting them not to make blunders or perhaps not caring if they do. Can one imagine the editors of the NYRB asking a physicist to check the elementary physics in Steven Weinberg’s criticism of what Bruno Latour says about relativity theory? They wouldn’t dare and it wouldn’t help. Weinberg made a hash of this not because he doesn’t understand relativity theory but because he doesn’t understand Latour.

“Only a scientific ignoramus could have missed the joke.” So far as I know, everyone who condemned the editors of Social Text for publishing Sokal’s article pointed to what they took to be its execrable content. As Nagel puts it:

This is either bluff or delusion. So far as we know, Sokal failed to perform any controls. He could have but he didn’t and people like Nagel, who should have known better, didn’t call him on it. Sokal worked this to his great advantage by conning gullible readers into assuming that reading the article knowing that it is a hoax (and where to laugh and why) is uninterestingly different from reading it knowing only that he is a “politically committed” professor of physics at NYU. Also, because it is a hoax, Sokal’s intended meanings have no privileged status. E.g., when he tries to make a pun that is based on his own misunderstanding of a mathematical expression,⁹ it would be perverse to say that, unless I misunderstand the expression the way Sokal does, I have been tricked.

The existence of readings of nonsensical-looking passages, from the hoax article and elsewhere, on which they are not nonsensical¹⁰ is another reason why, in the absence of controls, Nagel has no business parroting, as he does above, Sokal's unwarranted assumption about what a reader would have made of the article before it was revealed to be a hoax. Here is yet another reason for resisting this assumption.

“I assumed he was making a joke I didn’t get.” Some time ago, while thumbing through a friend’s copy of John Searle’s, The Rediscovery of the Mind, I encountered a blunder the likes of which I had never seen before. It begins:

It was easy to see that if Searle had said “eight,” as the rest of humanity does, his argument would have proceeded without change. But he made it clear that he wanted his argument to be disrupted by this irrelevant deviant use of language. He did not just say “seven” instead of “eight” and go on as if nothing had happened. Instead, he tagged it with an endnote:

I burst out laughing at this display of pretentious ignorance about an informal mathematical locution that is trickier than Searle supposed, capped by his conceit that he had discovered a mistake in arithmetic—or at least in the use of an arithmetic expression—that the rest of us dummies had missed.¹¹ Yet, my friend, who is both a great mathematician and a great reader, read Searle’s book without noticing this. How could he have missed it? I will never forget his explanation. “I assumed he was making a joke that I didn’t get.” Unlike me, to whom the “Everybody’s out of step except Johnny” was all too recognizable as Searle, my friend knew of him mainly as the author of several books that he admired and therefore took for granted that he was too much of a grownup to mean what he transparently seemed to mean.

For me, the relevance of this incident is that the position of the editors of Social Text with respect to Professor Sokal’s submission seems to have been very much like that of my friend with respect to Professor Searle’s bizarre digression from his argument. When one is in a sufficiently respectful mood, thoughts like “This must be a joke I don’t get” can excuse a multitude of sins—which shows how easy it can be, when one trusts the good sense of an author, to fail to acknowledge as such what one would otherwise take to be transparent nonsense.

Sokal and Bricmont see a joke that isn’t there and miss the one that is. Finally, if, Nagel’s “scientific ignoramus” remark is based in part on the many alleged examples of nonsense that were presented by ‘experts’ like Sokal, Boghossian and Weinberg, he may well have mistaken their confidence for competence. ¹² Evidence of this comes in different sizes and shapes. Here is an example in which it is not a scientific ignoramus but Sokal and Bricmont who miss a joke about quantum mechanics in Sokal’s hoax article.

In mathematics, two operations commute if reversing the order in which they are performed does not effect the result. Near the beginning of the third section of his parody, Sokal writes: When even the gravitational field-geometry incarnate-becomes a non-commuting (and hence nonlinear) operator, how can the classical interpretation...be sustained? (Italics added.)

In Fashionable Nonsense (263), the authors say about this:

But this alleged explanation of a blooper is itself one. When Sokal and Bricmont say that “quantum mechanics uses noncommuting operators that are perfectly linear,” they mean that it uses linear operators that do not commute with each other, which is true but irrelevant because, in the sentence in the parody, there is only one operator. It is only a blurring of singular and plural that makes it seem otherwise. Nevertheless, the sentence in the parody does contain a blooper because here is no such thing as a noncommuting operator. This is the one the authors missed.

This is more stenography on Nagel's part. The first question that Sokal and Bricmont need to answer is not whether some vocabulary has a clear meaning but whether it is the one being used by those whom they say misuse it. It also is fair to ask whether the intended use serves the purposes of the user. But does Nagel believe that Sokal and Bricmont have the necessary expertise in these different areas to answer this? In their book, they simply assume that they do. Is this good enough for an analytic philosopher?

Evidently, Nagel trusts their “eerily patient explanations” of why these quotations are gibberish. Yet the only such explanation in the review is the hare-brained remark about Irigaray’s use of the term “privileged.” (“Reading and relativism”(38).) And it only gets worse.

Nagel presents himself here as an authority. But even if he sincerely believes that he is one, why should we buy it? Surely he would want us to make up our own minds on the basis of the evidence he presents. But he doesn’t provide any evidence! Also, it seems fair to ask whether Nagel’s condemnation of “fraudulent displays of theoretical sophistication” is meant to apply to the passage in his review in which, in the same authoritative tone, he spouts gibberish about relativity theory. (See “Reading and relativism” (36-38).) If it isn’t, why not?

Sokal and Bricmont misread Latour reading Einstein. In the rest of this section, I show that a fragment of the chapter in Fashionable Nonsense about Latour’s essay on relativity theory refutes Nagel’s extremely generous assumption of the authors’ competence. Here first is a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in response to a review of the French edition of the book. In it, I contend that the authors misunderstand, seemingly perversely, both what Latour means by a ‘privileged’ frame and by an ‘observer.’

In “I am not a reference frame” and “Places in space” (“Reading and Relativism” (39-40)), I debunk two claims about Latour on relativity made by Sokal in A House Built on Sand that are almost identical to ones made in the book. One is the bizarre charge that Latour does not understand the difference between a frame of reference and an “actor ” in semiotics. The other is that Latour does not understand that relativity is about two frames in relative motion. In “Places in space,” I note that is that it is impossible to read Latour’s essay without seeing that it is dominated by a consideration of two frames in relative motion. Nevertheless, like Sokal before them, Sokal and Bricmont ignore this, saying that Latour “appears to think that relativity is concerned with the relative location (rather than the relative motion) of different frames of reference, at least in the following excerpts.” They present four of them—two of which, removed from the context of Latour’s essay, might well invite the kind of misreadings that Sokal and Bricmont make of them. Their verdict is that “this error,” (of seeming to talk about relative location instead of relative motion), “can perhaps be attributed to a lack of precision in Latour’s style.” But if they think this may be what it is, why are they talking about “this error”? The authors seem confused. Also, they miss an important clue: in two of the excerpts, Latour talks about ‘place’ not ‘position’ or ‘location.’ The authors assume that they mean the same thing but that they do not is shown very clearly in the fourth excerpt, in which Latour remarks that electrons are prominent among the places that he is talking about! That Bricmont and Sokal ignore this even while talking about about a frame of reference ‘attached’ to a proton is, I think, telling.

Latour reading Einstein: Frames are not enough: In “A physics experiments with scholarly discourse,” I criticize Sokal for taking a statement of Latour to mean something like “two reference frames are not enough, a third frame is needed.” I also criticize a similar reading of it by Sokal and Bricmont. On my reading, Latour is saying that “reference frames are not enough” because we also need to know the Lorentz transformations and “a third frame is needed but it need not be different from one of the two in which the observations are made.”

Here, I point out some things in this “long and sensible” chapter that Nagel failed to mention, some of them absurd, others merely irresponsible. My guess, for what little it may be worth, is that he simply did not read this material carefully enough to notice them. As for what he would have done if he had, I have no idea.

“Now, it happens that, for the unsolved problems, nobody knows the right answer”

So, if a problem is unsolved, nobody knows the right answer but if it is solved, somebody does know it—unless she only thinks that she does! Doesn't this read like a hoax? Doesn’t the folksy, “Now, it happens that,” read as if the hoaxer is almost asking to be unmasked?

Dr. Sokal and Mr. Hyde:¹⁴ Sokal and Bricmont say (91) that how they would evaluate the causes of a man’s claim should depend heavily on whether or not the claim is true. They then qualify this, saying, “more precisely, since admittedly we have no direct, unmediated access to external reality,” it should depend on evidence for or against the claim.¹⁵ However, as an assertion about our relationship to external reality, this is crazy. The problem is not with the idea of looking at evidence. Of course we should. It is with the conceit that although we do not have direct, unmediated access to the truth-value of an assertion, we do have such access to the truth-value of a claim that something is evidence for an assertion. This is fantasy. A claim that a rabbit test is evidence of pregnancy is itself based on evidence, probably statistical. There is an infinite regress for evidence, just as for justification. In practice, we follow it just so far. I doubt that it is often a matter of conscious choice. Where we stop, for those like Sokal and Bricmont who believe that talk of “direct unmediated access to external reality” means something, this de facto privileged level seems to be the practical equivalent of a realm to which we do have “direct unmediated access.” Maybe this is the source of their blunder, which they proceed to compound in a most remarkable way.

Imagine the hoots if a social constructivist were to contend that, because we lack “direct unmediated access to external reality,” we must stop making factual assertions, no matter how convincing our evidence. Yet the authors say something (90) that plainly amounts to this and faithfully follow it by refusing to assert that Newtonian mechanics is true (to a high degree of approximation). Their discussion is based upon an earlier one by Sokal (A House Built on Sand (13)) that I debunk in “A physicist experiments with scholarly discourse.” There he writes:

But if the amended assertions are again statements of fact, they must be glossed the same way and so on, ad infinitum, in which case, we get nothing. And if the amended assertions are not statements of fact, Sokal’s bright idea amounts to a promise to stop making any!¹⁶ Yet he is serious about this and evidently Bricmont is too. In Fashionable Nonsense (90), they write:

So, Drs. Sokal and Bricmont find the astronomical evidence that Newtonian mechanics rules the solar system (to a high degree of approximation) extremely convincing but Mr. Hyde is not convinced. He doesn’t believe it! All he is willing to say is “if this belief is correct.” How did the authors get into this mess and how were they able to go on in this way without someone—an editor, Nagel, somebody—noticing? Evidently, the emperor’s new clothes come in many styles.

Redefining truth?¹⁷ Sokal and Bricmont present what they claim is a “radical redefinition of the concept of truth” by Barry Barnes and David Bloor. Here is their offending statement followed by their reading of it, followed by my debunking of their reading.

One doesn’t have to be very clever to make such talk about preferences seem absurd and with “I prefer to believe that I drank coffee this morning” Sokal and Bricmont do just that. But if, when Barnes and Bloor say, “He will naturally have preferences,” they mean merely that the acceptance of a belief is not arbitrary and, when they say that these preferences “will typically coincide with those of others in his locality,” they mean only that most cows agree about most things, especially those who read the Daily Moos, then it is not at all absurd. Nor is it a redefinition of the concept of truth. Sokal and Bricmont turn the observation that our pattern of accepting and rejecting beliefs typically coincides with that of others in our locality into the bizarre claim that we sort out our beliefs by following those of others in our locality—who presumably sort out their beliefs by following ours. ¹⁸

Taking it back?¹⁹ After Sokal and Bricmont convince themselves that Barnes and Bloor make, or pretend to make, a “radical redefinition of the concept of truth,” they attempt to show that they sometimes “fall back, without comment, on the traditional sense of the word.”

Firstly, Barnes and Bloor note that the problem arises if one says that all beliefs are equally true. But they do not say this.²⁰ Secondly, they are not talking about a contradiction between beliefs held in different places but rather about one between beliefs that are held in the same place. Contrary to what Sokal and Bricmont imply, Barnes and Bloor do not make the absurd assumption that all of one's beliefs are shared with one's community. Meera Nanda makes a similar blunder in the final chapter of A House Built on Sand.

Yes, what about us? Within the tribe of scientists, I am an iconoclast about mathematics, certainly a reformer and maybe even a rebel. Faced with a choice between conventional and constructivist mathematics, I always choose the latter. But, typically, when I am faced with a choice between conventional science and a competitor, I choose the former. Furthermore, I rarely give the matter any serious thought. Typically, I trust my tribe. On the picture of things that Barnes and Bloor present, everyone can be an iconoclast about some things.

In the last section, I considered some of the statements in the “long and sensible” chapter that Nagel fails to mention. In this one, I consider statements in the review that are presented as elaborations of ones in this chapter. But my criticism here is directed only at the statements in the review, not at the ones in the chapter.

Is there a fact of the matter about which theory is ‘most reasonable’ to accept?

Nagel says that it always is logically possible that something that is assumed to be true may be false. To see that this is a blunder, note that when what is assumed to be true is true, which, on Nagel’s view, is sometimes the case, he is saying that it is logically possible for something that is true to be false. He is right. It sometimes is, in the sense of possible world semantics. But in science, we are interested in what is true in this world, not in some other “possible” one. And in this world, a true statement is not false. Note that if Nagel had said “for all we know” instead of the pseudo-sophisticated “it always is logically possible that,” he would have avoided this problem. Note also that he neglects to consider the possibility that the assumption fails to refer to anything in the world and, hence, is neither true nor false. For those who associate scientific revolutions with incommensurability, conclusions of this kind play an important role. Nagel continues:

So it may seem.²¹ However, Nagel seems indifferent here to the difference between denying that scientific reasoning is objective and, for whatever reason, neither accepting nor denying that it is. He seems to be responding to an unidentified opponent who has claimed, “Some of it does imply that scientific reasoning is not objective.” But, in my experience, believers like Nagel commonly mistake a denial of belief for a denial of the belief. I think it is much more likely that someone whom Nagel might think is denying that science is objective (in the metaphysical sense in which he means it) would actually be agnostic about it, if only because she would not think that she had a clear enough idea of what it is supposed to mean and would suspect that neither does Nagel.²² He continues:

This, too, reads as if Nagel is replying to an unidentified opponent, one whom he takes to be saying in part, “It does mean that it cannot be true that a certain theory is the most reasonable to accept.” As before, I think that it is much more likely that someone whom he would take to be a denier would actually be agnostic.

A theory-laden diet of sundaes: Nagel next employs a thought experiment to argue that, in some cases, we are rationally required to accept (or to reject) some theory. My problem is not with his conclusion, about which I am neutral, but with the way that he argues for it.

Turning to the example, Nagel believes that he can show that the apparent weight gain, as evidenced by the bathroom scale, requires a rational dieter to abandon his theory. To this end, he supposes that the dieter tries instead to explain away the apparent failure of the theory by postulating that the diet caused a local change in the relevant laws of mechanics.²³ But instead of calling attention to the unending demand of special pleadings that would seem to be needed to maintain the causal claim, Nagel mistakenly supposes that it suffices for him to say that there is no such causal relation. He seems to forget that it is not enough to convince his readers, whom he has every reason to think are already firmly convinced. He owes them a rational argument. Worse, Nagel argues here against only one attempt to save the dietary theory in the face of appearances. But his claim is that no attempt can work.²⁴ So, even if his argument were valid, it would be of little help.

Also, unless I badly misunderstand, Nagel finds it preposterous that one could lose weight by a diet consisting only of hot fudge sundaes. But it is not. If, for example, each sundae is sufficiently small and there are sufficiently few of them, a weight loss is almost a sure thing. Perhaps Nagel did not have such a possibility in mind but he should have. Moreover, what counts here as sufficiently small and sufficiently few is relative to the size, metabolism and other particulars of the dieter. Thus, a dieter whose weight had been stable at around 400 pounds might well lose weight on the same hot fudge sundae diet that Nagel would expect to lead to a weight gain for his dieter, who is assumed to be Nagel himself. Thus, contrary to what he implies, it would be irrational for my dieter to immediately abandon his dietary theory on the evidence of his scale readings in favor of Nagel's apparent assumption that eating only hot fudge sundaes causes everyone to gain weight. Other, less implausible, possibilities would need to be explored. Maybe the scale is broken or the dieter has been reading it wrong. Or he sleepwalks and eats vast quantities of pasta when he does. Etc..

Finally, notice that, in the next to last sentence of Nagel’s statement, his criticism is directed not at the dieter’s inference from his apparent weight gain to the conclusion that eating only sundaes changes the laws of mechanics in his bathroom but, rather, at the idea of defending this inference by an appeal to the dictum that all statements face experience as a corporate body. But this has it exactly backwards. What makes it possible for the dieter to adopt his ad hoc explanation of the scale readings is precisely his disregard for this dictum. Instead of allowing all statements to face experience “as a corporate body,” the dieter considers only two of them, the dietary theory and the laws of mechanics in the bathroom, together facing a minute piece of experience. ²⁵

11, 12, 14, 15:

This is Nagel support Sokal and Bricmont against Paul Feyerabend. But does Feyerabend say that the first clause supports the second? Not on the face of it. He joins the two clauses by “and” not “hence.” But if he is not making such a claim, it is fair to ask how he does support the second clause. It also is fair to assume that Nagel sees nothing, either in the first clause or the rest of the text from which the remark is taken, that supports it. However, it is not clear that what Nagel means by Feyerabend’s second clause is what Feyerand meant by it-a consideration that does not seem to have captured Nagel’s interest. An obvious guess is that Feyerabend is noting, in a clever way, that, even in science, there are no constitutive rules—no law, theory, method or measurement that must be retained no matter what, on pain of it ceasing to be science. But is this what Nagel finds outrageous?

Here too Nagel mistakes what it is like to be Nagel for what it was like to be Feyerabend. Just because, if the outrage had been Nagel’s, it would have been accompanied by certain interior metaphysical baggage, it doesn’t follow that Feyerabend’s outrage was accompanied by such baggage. Although Nagel may believe that, if he were to experience such outrage, he would be able to justify it—not merely to his own satisfaction but objectively, in the sense of metaphysical realism, it seems unlikely that Feyerabend was subject to this conceit.

Constructing the past:

Contrary to what Nagel implies here, the view attributed to Latour is not a consequence of holding that the physical world is “a construction,” social or otherwise. Nor is it, as Sokal and Bricmont claim (96), a matter of “playing constantly on the confusion between facts and our knowledge of them.” It is a consequence of forgetting that the world has a temporal component, which includes the past, as well as a spatial one—a blunder that Sokal also makes (A House Built on Sand: 13).

Kiss.²⁶

Why make it this complicated? It does not matter what the ground is for the denial. The denial of objective truth is not an objective truth. Full stop. More important, Nagel is following Sokal and Bricmont up the wrong tree. No matter how those whom he attacks may seem to put it, non-acceptance, not denial, is very often all they mean. It also is all that is reasonable. In his sensitive and sensible discussion of Wittgenstein’s agnosticism in The Last Word, Nagel finds no ‘self-refutations’ where other analytic philosophers, who conflate this agnosticism with denial, do. Instead of making the same conflation himself elsewhere, Nagel would do better to seek cases that are framed in terms of denial and in which non-acceptance does not suffice for the ‘critic of objectivity’ to make her point. These would be the ones worth pointing out.

Last call: In this final section, I criticize a few more of Nagel’s contributions to philosophy of science, some of them inspired by the authors “long and sensible” chapter about it, others not. He writes:

This simplistic view of relativism is kept alive by Nagel’s repeated refusal to study it from inside. Were he to abandon this anti-intellectual stance, he would soon discover not only that relativism is, almost by definition, committed to studying different discourses from inside but, also, that his statement about “conformity to the practices of a linguistic community” is more than a little simplistic. A little later, he informs us that:

This sounds nice but so does “sincerely yours.” Nagel will not find evidence for “vice versa” until he gets serious about seeking it. He will then have to read the relevant case studies with much greater care than he so far seems to have done. It is dangerously easy to read them in a way that makes his claim seem obvious. This also is true for the following claim.

Nagel ignores the standard alternative view that scientific research aims at coherence not at correctness. Yet how, without comparing the alternatives, can he legitimately conclude that it is “more reasonable” to say, as he does, that these practices aim at a correct account of the world rather than at a coherent one?

Finally, further on, Nagel tells us that, in a criminal investigation, the evidence and relevant background assumptions of the investigators “do not entail an answer, but they often make one answer more reasonable than others.” Really? All I know is that they often make one answer seem more reasonable than others. Why does Nagel think that he doesn’t need the qualifier ‘seem’? I have no answer but, were I to seek one, I would first try to get a general sense of when and why Nagel does and does not eschew the use of qualifiers like ‘seem,’ ‘I think’ and ‘from my perspective’. For this, the introduction to The Last Word (3-6) seems like a good place to begin. I think.

How can a true belief be unreliable? In this section and the next, I defend a claim that I make at the end of “Confused thinking about confused thinking.” The second item on Sokal’s list of five issues that Harding allegedly conflates is:

In footnote 113 of Fashionable Nonsense (88), the authors write,

But if knowledge is something like justified true belief, then ‘the reliability of knowledge’ is an oxymoron. How can a true belief be unreliable? Elsewhere, referring to the same alleged radical redefinition of the word knowledge, Sokal says:

Here Sokal commits the very sin of which he accuses Barnes and Bloor. He in effect redefines the word knowledge without acknowledging that this is what he is doing, much less explaining why he is doing it. Unlike justified true belief, Sokal’s kind of knowledge can be more or less reliable! This is not a one-shot abuse. In his announcement of the hoax, Sokal says that human beings can and do obtain “reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative knowledge of [physical] laws”.²⁸

How can a statement be influenced by social factors?

But how and in what ways can such factors influence or even determine a statement?²⁹ Sokal gives an example that seems to bear on what he means. He writes:

This is still murky but at least it makes it plausible that Sokal has in mind whether and how social and other factors influence the processes of belief acceptance, which includes but of course is not identical with knowledge acquisition.