Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 21:17:01 +0300 (EET DST)
From: J Laari <jlaari-AT-cc.jyu.fi>
Subject: Sokal controversy (fwd)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 14:27:16 -0500
From: Don Cunningham <cunningh-AT-copper.ucs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Sokal controversy
Resent-Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 12:25:52 -0700 (PDT)

Joe Ransdell  forwarded the message below to the Peirce list.  It
is part of an ongoing discussion of the Sokal article and contains his
defense of his deed.  While I think his action is basically unethical,
it does point to the uncommonly sloppy way that some people write and
talk in this genre of scholarship.  I have my own pet peeves about this -
for instance to label something as _semiotic_ seems have the
force of foreclosing discussion of what _it_ is.  Anyway, here is the post.

djc

>--------------------from Linqua Franca-------------------------
>
>A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies
>Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, pp. 62-64
>by Alan Sokal, NYU, Physics Department
>
>[intro paragraph from editor of Lingua Franca]
>
>                The interdisciplinary university is not always a
>        peaceful place. In recent years, scientists and humanists have
>        cooperated in new ways-and quarreled in new ways as well. On
>        many campuses, practitioners of "science studies" take a close
>        look at what scientists do in the laboratory and theorize boldly
>        about the social construction of scientific knowledge. Some
>        scientists welcome the attention. Others worry that this sort of
>        scholarship, when taken too far, threatens the legitimacy and
>        validity of what they do. Underlying much of this discussion are
>        some nettlesome questions: How much knowledge of science does a
>        critic of science need to have? And what happens to intellectual
>        standards when the notion of objectivity is put into doubt?
>        These questions are often discussed in highly abstract terms.
>        But not always. In the essay printed below, professor Alan Sokal
>        of NYU discusses his unusual attempt to play with-some might say
>        transgress-the conventions of academic discourse. Lingua Franca
>        invites readers to respond to Sokal's article.
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
>        "Tbe 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." Larry Laudan, Science and
>        Relativism (1990)
>
>
>[Sokal's defense]
>
>FOR SOME YEARS I'VE BEEN troubled by an apparent decline in the
>standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.
>But I'm a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or
>tails of jouissance and diffirance, perhaps that just reflects my
>own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I
>decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
>Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies-whose
>editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and
>Andrew Ross-publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a)
>it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological
>preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Interested
>readers can find my article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a
>Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in the
>Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text. It appears in a special
>number of the magazine devoted to the "Science Wars." What's going
>on here? Could the editors really not have realized that my article
>was written as a parody? In the first paragraph I deride "the dogma
>imposed by the long postEnlightenment hegemony over the Western
>intellectual outlook":that there exists an external world, whose
>properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed
>of humanity as a whole- that these properties are encoded in
>"eternal" physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable,
>albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to
>the "objective" procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed
>by the (so-called) scientific method is it now dogma in cultural
>studies that there exists no external world? Or that there exists an
>external world but science obtains no knowledge of it? In the second
>paragraph I declare, Without the slightest evidence or argument,
>that "physical 'reality' [note the scare quotes] ... is at bottom a
>social and linguistic construct." Not our theories of of physical
>reality, mind you, but the reality itself. Fair enough: Anyone who
>believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is
>invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of
>my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.) Throughout the
>article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that
>few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For
>example, I suggest that the "morphogenetic field bizarre New Age
>idea proposed by Rupert Sheldrake-constitutes a cutting-edge theory
>of quantum gravity. This connection is pure invention; even
>Sheldrake makes no such claim. I assert that Lacan's psychoanalytic
>speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field
>theory. Even nonscientist readers might well wonder what in heaven's
>name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis; certainly
>my article gives no reasoned argument to support such a link. Later
>in the article I propose that the axiom of equality in mathematical
>set theory is somehow analogous to the homonymous concept in
>feminist politics. In reality, all the axiom of equality states is
>that two sets are identical if and only if they have the same
>elements. Even readers without mathematical training might well be
>suspicious of the claim that the axiom of equality reflects set
>theory's "nineteenth-century liberal origins." In sum, I
>intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist or
>mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize
>that it is a spoof. Evidently, the editors of Social Text felt
>comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without
>bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject. The
>fundamental silliness of my article lies, however, not in its
>numerous solecisms but in the dubiousness of its central thesis and
>of the "reasoning" adduced to support it. Basically, I claim that
>quantum gravity-the still-speculative theory of space and time on
>scales of a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth
>of a centimeter has profound political implications (which, of
>course, are "progressive"). In support of this improbable
>proposition, I proceed as follows: First, I quote some controversial
>philosophical pronouncements of Heisenberg and Bohr, and assert
>(without argument) that quantum physics is profoundly consonant with
>"postmodernist epistemology." Next, I assemble a pastiche-Derrida
>and general relativity, Lacan and topology, Irigaray and quantum
>gravity-held together by vague references to "nonlinearity," "flux,"
>and "interconnectedncss." Finally, I jump (again without argument)
>to the assertion that "postmodern science" has abolished the concept
>of objective reality. Nowhere in all of this is there anything
>resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations
>of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald
>assertions. In its concluding passages, my article becomes
>especially egregious. Having abolished reality as a constraint on
>science, I go on to suggest (once again without argument) that
>science, in order to be "liberatory," must be subordinated to
>political strategies. I finish the article by observing that "a
>liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of
>the canon of mathematics." We can see hints of an "emancipatory
>mathematics," I suggest, "in the multidimensional and nonlinear
>logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily
>marked by its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist production
>relations." I add that "catastrophe theory, with its dialectical
>emphasis on smoothness/discontinuity and metamorphosis/unfolding,
>all indubitably play a major role in the future mathematics; but
>much theoretical work remains to be done before this approach can
>become a concrete tool of progressive political praxis." It's
>understandable that the editors of Social Text were unable to
>evaluate critically the technical aspects of my article (which is
>exactly why they should have consulted a scientist). What's more
>surprising is how readily they accepted my implication that the
>search for truth in science must be subordinated to a political
>agenda, and how oblivious they were to the article's overall
>illogic.
>
>WHY DID I DO IT?
>
>While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious.
>What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and
>sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and
>sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective
>realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays
>their practical relevance. At its best, a journal like Social Text
>raises important issues that no scientist should ignore - questions,
>for example, about how corporate and government funding influence
>scientific work. Unfortunately, epistemic relativism does little to
>further the discussion of these matters. In short, my concern about
>the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and
>political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that
>they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world;
>its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and
>evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And
>yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of
>attempts to blur these obvious truths. Social Text's acceptance of
>my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of
>Theory-postmodernist literary theory, that is-carried to its logical
>extreme. No wonder they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all
>is discourse and "text," then knowledge of the real world is
>superfluous; even physics becomes just another branch of cultural
>studies. if, moreover, all is rhetoric and language games, then
>internal logical consistency is superfluous too: a patina of
>theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility
>becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors, and puns substitute for
>evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely
>modest example of this well-established genre. Politically, I'm
>angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating
>from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound
>historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left
>has been identified with science and against obscurantism-, we have
>believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of
>objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for
>combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful not to mention
>being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of
>many "progressive" or "leftist" academic humanists and social
>scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism
>betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile
>prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about "the
>social construction of reality" won't help us find an effective
>treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global
>warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology,
>economics, and politics if we reject the notions of truth and
>falsity. The results of my little experiment demonstrate, at the
>very least, that some fashionable sectors of the American academic
>Left have been getting intellectually lazy. The editors of Social
>Text liked my article because they liked its conclusion: that "the
>content and methodology of postmodern science provide powerful
>intellectual support for the progressive political project." They
>apparently felt no need to analyze the quality of the evidence, the
>cogency of the arguments, or even the relevance of the arguments to
>the purported conclusion.
>
>        OF course, I'm not oblivious to the ethical issues involved
>in my rather unorthodox experiment. Professional communities operate
>largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust. But it is
>important to understand exactly what I did. My article is a
>theoretical essay based entirely on publicly available sources, all
>of which I have meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real,
>and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Now,
>it's true that the author doesn't believe his own argument. But why
>should that matter? The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the
>validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their provenance.
>(That is why many scholarly journals practice blind refereeing.) If
>the Social Text editors find my arguments convincing, then why
>should they be disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more
>deferent to the so-called "cultural authority of technoscience" than
>they would care to admit? In the end, I resorted to parody for a
>simple pragmatic reason. The targets of my critique have by now
>become a selfperpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores
>(or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside. In such a
>situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture's
>intellectual standards was required. But how can one show that the
>emperor has no clothes? Satire is by far the best weapon; and the
>blow that can't be brushed off is the one that's self-inflicted. I
>offered the Social Text editors an opportunity to demonstrate their
>intellectual rigor. Did they meet the test? I don't think so. I say
>this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I'm a leftist too (under
>the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National
>University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical political
>issues-including many concerning science and technology-I'm on the
>same side as the Social Text editors. But I'm a leftist (and a
>feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it. Why
>should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual
>high ground? And why should self-indulgent nonsense-whatever its
>professed political orientation-be lauded as the height of scholarly
>achievement?
>
>Alan Sokal is a professor of physics at New York University. He is
>coauthor with Roberto Fernandez and Jiirg Fr6hlich of Random Walks,
>Critical Phenomena, and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory
>(Springer, 1992).
>------------------------



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