If anyone is only familar with Sokal for his <i>Social Text</i> hoax, you owe it to yourself to check out his book <i>Fashionable Nonsense</i> (originally published in French as <i>Impostures Intellectuelles</i>).<p>While Sokal&#x27;s hoax exposed inadequacies in <i>Social Text</i> (and similar journals), his book is <i>far</i> more damning. In it he exposes numerous French philosophers&#x2F;&#x27;intellectuals&#x27; for the misuse and abuse of scientific and mathematic concepts and terms to obscure the meaning of their texts.  The examples he presents range from plausibly the consequence of well-meaning ignorance, to inexcusable outright quackery.  Some of his examples may seem like pedantic nitpicking of flowery poetic language, but much of it is truly damning.<p>Excerpt from the introduction:<p>&gt; Some readers will no doubt think that we are taking these texts too seriously.  That is true, in some sense.  But since these texts <i>are</i> taken seriously by many people, we think that they deserve to be analyzed with the greatest rigor.  In some cases we have quoted rather long passages, at the risk of boring the reader, in order to show that we have not misrepresented the meaning of the text by pulling sentences out of context.