I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.

Alan Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword’, in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, New York, 1998, p. 269