File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-06.190, message 37


Date: Mon, 4 Nov 1996 17:11:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: the Sokal-Ross debate


>From sokal-AT-acf4.NYU.EDU Mon Nov  4 17:10:56 1996
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 1996 15:39:23 -0500
From: Alan Sokal <sokal-AT-acf4.NYU.EDU>
To: lnp3-AT-columbia.edu
Subject: Re:  Lou Proyect on the Sokal-Social Text meeting

Dear Lou,
   Many thanks for your report on the meeting.  Was that a post to one
of the Internet discussion groups?  It'll be interesting to hear other
responses, especially from people who were there.
   By the way, I enclose a copy of my 10-minute talk.  Feel free to post it.

	Best, Alan



ALAN SOKAL TALK AT NYU FORUM, 10/30/96


This affair has brought up an incredible number of issues,
and I can't dream of addressing them all in 10 minutes,
so let me start by circumscribing my talk.
I don't want to belabor _Social Text_'s failings
either before or after the publication of my parody:
_Social Text_ is not my enemy,
nor is it my main intellectual target.
I won't go here into the ethical issues related to the propriety of hoaxing
(although in the question period I'd be glad to defend my ethics).
I won't address the obscurantist prose and the uncritical celebrity-worship
that have infected certain trendy sectors of the American academic humanities
(though these are important questions that I hope
 other panelists will address).
I won't enter into technical issues of the philosophy of science
(although again I'd be glad to do that in the question period).
I won't discuss the social role of science and technology
(though these are important issues).
Because I want to emphasize that this affair is in my view
_not_ primarily about science ---
though that was the excuse that I used in constructing my parody ---
nor is it a disciplinary conflict between scientists and humanists,
who are in fact represented on all sides of the debate.
What I believe this debate _is_ principally about ---
and what I want to focus on tonight ---
is the nature of truth, reason and objectivity:
issues that I believe are crucial to the future of left politics.


I didn't write the parody for the reasons you might at first think.
My aim wasn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes
of lit crit or sociology.
I know perfectly well that the main threats to science nowadays
come from budget-cutting politicians and corporate executives,
not from a handful of postmodernist academics.
Rather, my goal is to defend what one might call a scientific _worldview_
--- defined broadly as a respect for evidence and logic,
and for the incessant confrontation of theories with the real world;
in short, for reasoned argument over
wishful thinking, superstition and demagoguery.
And my motives for trying to defend these old-fashioned ideas
are basically _political_.
Because I'm worried about trends in the American Left ---
particularly here in academia --- that at a minimum _divert_ us
>from the task of formulating a progressive social critique,
by leading smart and committed people into
trendy but ultimately empty intellectual fashions,
and that can in fact _undermine_ the
prospects for such a critique,
by promoting subjectivist and relativist philosophies
that in my view are inconsistent with producing a realistic
analysis of society that we and our fellow citizens will find compelling.


David Whiteis, in an article recently submitted to _Z Magazine_,
said it well:
\begin{quote}
\small
   Too many academics, secure in their ivory towers and insulated from the
   real-world consequences of the ideas they espouse, seem blind to the fact
   that non-rationality has historically been among the most powerful weapons
   in the ideological arsenals of oppressors.  The hypersubjectivity that
   characterizes postmodernism is a perfect case in point:
   far from being a legacy of leftist iconoclasm, as some of its advocates
   so disingenuously claim, it in fact ... 
   plays perfectly into the anti-rationalist
   --- really, anti-_thinking_ --- bias that currently infects
   ``mainstream'' U.S. culture.
\end{quote}
Along similar lines, the philosopher of science Larry Laudan
observed caustically that
\begin{quote}
\small
   the displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter
   by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests
   and perspectives is --- second only to American political campaigns ---
   the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism
   in our time.
\end{quote}
(And these days, being nearly as anti-intellectual as
 American political campaigns is really quite a feat.)


Now of course, no one will admit to being against reason, evidence and logic
--- that's like being against Motherhood and Apple Pie.
Rather, our postmodernist and poststructuralist friends
will claim to be in favor of some new and _deeper_ kind of reason.
Such as the celebration of ``local knowledges''
and ``alternative ways of knowing''
as an antidote to the so-called ``Eurocentric scientific methodology''
(you know, things like systematic experiment, controls, replication,
 and so forth).
You find this magic phrase ``local knowledges'' in, for example,
the articles of Andrew Ross and Sandra Harding
in the ``Science Wars'' issue of _Social Text_.
But are ``local knowledges'' all that great?
And when local knowledges conflict,
_which_ local knowledges should we believe?
In many parts of the Midwest, the ``local knowledges''
say that you should spray more herbicides to get bigger crops.
It's old-fashioned objective science
that can tell us which herbicides
are poisonous to farm workers and to people downstream.
Here in New York City, lots of ``local knowledges'' hold that
there's a wave of teenage motherhood that's destroying our moral fiber.
It's those boring _data_ that show that the birth rate to teenage mothers
has been essentially constant since 1975, and is about half of what it was
in the good old 1950's.
Another word for ``local knowledges'' is _prejudice_.


I'm sorry to say it,
but under the influence of postmodernism
some very smart people can fall into some incredibly sloppy thinking,
and I want to give two examples.
The first comes from a front-page article
in last Tuesday's _New York Times_ (10/22/96)
about the conflict between archaeologists and
some Native American creationists.
I don't want to address here the ethical and legal aspects
of this controversy --- who should control the use of 10,000-year-old
human remains --- but only the epistemic issue.
There are at least two competing views
on where Native American populations come from.
The scientific consensus, based on extensive archaeological evidence,
is that humans first entered the Americas from Asia
about 10--15,000 years ago, crossing the Bering Strait.
Many Native American creation accounts hold, on the other hand,
that native peoples have always lived in the Americas,
ever since their ancestors emerged onto the surface of the earth
>from a subterranean world of spirits.
And the _Times_ article observed that many archaeologists,
``pulled between their scientific temperaments and their appreciation
for native culture, ... have been driven close to a postmodern
relativism in which science is just one more belief system.''
For example,
Roger Anyon, a British archaeologist who has worked for the Zuni people,
was quoted as saying that
``Science is just one of many ways of knowing the world. ...
[The Zunis' world view is] just as valid as the archeological viewpoint
of what prehistory is about.''

Now, perhaps Dr. Anyon was misquoted,
but we all _have_ repeatedly heard assertions of this kind,
and I'd like to ask what such assertions could possibly mean.
We have here two _mutually incompatible_ theories.
They can't both be right;
they can't both even be _approximately_ right.
They could, of course, both be _wrong_,
but I don't imagine that that's what Dr. Anyon means by ``just as valid''.
It seems to me that Anyon has quite simply allowed
his political and cultural sympathies to cloud his reasoning.
And there's no justification for that:
We can perfectly well remember the victims of a horrible genocide,
and support their descendants' valid political goals,
without endorsing uncritically (or hypocritically)
their societies' traditional creation myths.
Moreover, the relativists' stance is extremely condescending:
it treats a complex society as a monolith,
obscures the conflicts within it,
and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.



My second example of sloppy thinking
comes from _Social Text_ co-editor Bruce Robbins'
article in the latest _Tikkun_ magazine,
in which he tries to defend --- albeit half-heartedly ---
the postmodernist/poststructuralist
subversion of conventional notions of truth.
``Is it in the interests of women, African Americans, and other
super-exploited people,'' Robbins asks, ``to insist that truth and
identity are social constructions?  Yes and no,'' he asserts.
``No, you can't talk about exploitation without respect for
empirical evidence'' --- exactly my point.
``But yes,'' Robbins continues, ``truth can be another source of oppression.''
Huh???
How can _truth_ oppress anyone?
Well, Robbins' very next sentence explains what he means:
``It was not so long ago,'' he says, ``that scientists gave
their full authority to explanations of why women and
African Americans ... were inherently inferior.''
But is Robbins claiming that _that_ is truth?
I should hope not!
Sure, lots of people say things about women and African-Americans
that are not true;
and yes, those falsehoods have sometimes been asserted
in the name of ``science'', ``reason'' and all the rest.
But claiming something doesn't make it true,
and the fact that people --- including scientists ---
sometimes make false claims
doesn't mean that we should reject or revise the concept of truth.
Quite the contrary:
it means that we should examine with the utmost care the _evidence_
underlying people's truth claims, and we should reject assertions that
in our best rational judgment are false.


This error is, unfortunately, repeated throughout Robbins' essay:
he systematically confuses
truth with _claims_ of truth,
fact with _assertions_ of fact,
and knowledge with _pretensions_ to knowledge.
These elisions underlie much of the sloppy thinking about
``social construction'' that is prevalent nowadays in the academy,
and it's something that progressives ought to resist.
Sure, let's show which economic, political and ideological interests
are served by our opponents' accounts of ``reality'';
but first let's demonstrate, by marshalling evidence and logic,
why those accounts are objectively _false_
(or in some cases true but incomplete).


A bit later in his article,
Robbins admits candidly that
``those of us who do cultural politics sometimes act
as if ... truth were always and everywhere a weapon of the right.''
Now, that's an astoundingly self-defeating attitude for an avowed leftist.
If truth were on the side of the right, shouldn't we all ---
at least the honest ones among us --- become right-wingers?
For my own part, I'm a leftist and a feminist _because_
of evidence and logic (combined with elementary ethics), not in spite of it.


This plea of mine for reason, evidence and logic is hardly original;
dozens of progressive humanists, social scientists and natural scientists
have been saying the same thing for years.
But if my parody in _Social Text_ has helped just a little bit
to amplify their voices
and to provoke a much-needed debate on the American Left,
then it will have served its purpose.







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