...science

Lecture given in Helsinki at the invitation of the Finnish Mathematical Society.

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...Wars"

This was intended to be a reply to critiques, by scientists, mostly by Gross and Levitt (1994), of postmodernism and cultural relativism in academia. See also Holton (1993), and Gross, Levitt and Lewis (1996).

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...l'Homme

The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, see Derrida (1970) in the bibliography.

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...intellectuals

For the French: Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Irigaray, Lacan, Latour, Lyotard, Serres and Virilio.

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...book

Whose provisional title is: Les impostures scientifiques des philosophes (post)-modernes (The scientific frauds of (post)-modern philosophers). An English translation will also appear.

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...``postmodern"

The word is not important to us, and we include some older texts, from Lacan and Kristeva, which might be classified as structuralist or post-structuralist.

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...strip]

A Möbius strip is obtained by turning a strip of paper by 180 degrees, and glueing the two opposite sides. The resulting object has only one face.

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...surface

A Klein bottle is somewhat like a Möbius strip, but without boundary; it can be embedded in a space of higher dimension (at least four).

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...jouissance

enjoyment; the word appears in French in the translations.

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...compactness.

Here and below, I add emphasis in boldface letters.

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...pl

poetic language

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...correct

She should have writen: ``|F(X)| exceeds 1/n".

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...text

Another amusing characteristic of this field is, as we shall illustrate again below the extreme sloppyness of the translations. But if the meaning of the sentences does not matter, who cares about the translation?

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...[Fr. fonctionnelle]

Note the pedantic use of French: the words are almost the same as in English, yet the original words are inserted, as if the concepts were so subtle that it mattered. Of course, as the quotes below show, the notion of functive makes little sense.

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...[p. 117]

Functions and propositions are quite different objects. A function has arguments and values, but I do not know what they mean by an ``element" of a function.

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...[pp. 117-118]

In their book, Deleuze and Guattari quote Prigogine and Stengers (1988). These authors discuss an analogy between the origin of the universe and a phase transition. Neither of these two issues is directly connected to the theory of chaos, as usually understood in the modern theory of dynamical systems.

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...(13#13).

This is either difficult to understand or difficult to believe: it seems to say that functions like a=2b, or y=2x are not functions. Indeed, after that, they explain that only functions where one of the variables is at a higher power can be differentiated! Of course, the reference to Hegel itself is amusing. Throughout his ``Greater Logic", one finds quite nonsensical remarks about limits, derivatives, and mathematics in general (see Section 6 below for further remarks on Hegel). But, it is one thing to exhibit one's ignorance, as Hegel did, at the beginning of the 14#14 century, when mathematical analysis had not yet been put on a firm foundation, and quite another to repeat the same confusions 170 years later, as Deleuze and Guattari do.

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...argument.)

This is one of my favorite jokes: as in many of the quotes, the translator does not seem to worry very much about accuracy. But since there is, in Sokal's view, no logic of the argument, the error here does not matter in the least.

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...systems

For further discussion, see Gross and Levitt (1994).

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...metaphysics

Heisenberg (1958), Bohr (1963).

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...credibility

Kuhn (1970), Feyerabend (1975), Latour (1987), Aronowitz (1988), Bloor (1991).

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...``objectivity''.

Merchant (1980), Keller (1985), Harding (1986,1991), Haraway (1989,1991), Best (1991).

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...Harding

She wrote an essay entitled ``Why `Physics' Is a Bad Model for Physics'' Harding (1991). According to Sokal, she has a `` prestige in certain (but by no means all) feminist circles, and her essay is (unlike much of this genre) very clearly written." (Sokal, 1996c)

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...argument

Hayles' paper is much more clearly written than the one of Irigaray, so I quote the former.

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...mathematics

Irigaray sometimes suggests that science is not good for women: she recommends

``not to subscribe nor to adhere to the existence of a neutral and universal science, to which women should painfully arrive, and through which they oppress themselves and other women, transforming science in a new superego." [Irigaray (1987)]

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...work

Note that, in the fields studied by the natural sciences, it is also sometimes necessary, for the sake of the general culture, to ``waste time" in order to expose charlatanism (astrology, quack medicines, etc....).

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...years

See e.g. Snow (1963).

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...theory

Emily Post wrote one of the best-known American books on etiquette.

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