Date: Sat, 15 Jun 1996 06:43:24 -0700 (PDT) From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: SOCIAL TEXT POSTSCRIPT I found some time in the wee hours last night for some bedtime reading, so I decided to peruse the rest of the infamous SOCIAL TEXT (#46-47) that carried Alan Sokal's hoax article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (pp. 217-252). The title alone makes me laugh. The rest of the issue, the contents of which were presumably written with a straight face, was uninspiring. What is the problem, exactly? Years ago I read tons of material in the social studies of science placing scientific activities in their social, cultural, and economic context, and there certainly is enough meaty material to study. But then, the solid stuff is not written by people in Cultural Studies, who after all, are nothing more than carriers of the fetishism of cultural commodities, no matter how hip they think they are (viz. Stinky Stanley snapping at Sokal calling him ill-read). The worst examples of science studies are not confined to Cultural Studies as a discipline by a long shot, but I'm using the latter as a shorthand term to cover a common set of philosophical assumptions whatever the discipline. The problem begins with the introduction by Andrew Ross that frames the issue. The aim is to defend the pomo-esque Cultural Studies take on science against the attack from the right, i.e. >from the National Association of Scholars, Gross and Levitt, etc. In other words, this group is defending its position in the culture wars, which renders most of this issue of little worth. If the right could actually succeed in wiping out the likes of Andrew Ross or Sandra Harding, they would have performed the one service to humanity they will ever render. Beyond the defensive posturing, the confused reasoning, and the feminist drivel, there is little beyond a recapitulation of some of the research in science studies. Not every word is nonsense, of course, but there is a consistent lack of clarity in what is being argued -- when one argues about the economic, class, and other factors that drive science and technology as a social enterprise, what does that have to say about scientific rationality or method itself? Cultural Studies people, who are incapable of writing a coherent paragraph, are not the most adept at getting their arguments and their targets straight. >From a philosophical perspective, I found only a few pages of interest. Steve Fuller, in his article "Does science put an end to history, or history to science?" (pp. 27-42), has a section on "How Japan taught the west the secret of its own success" (pp. 35-40). The historical information utilized comes from James Bartholomew, THE FORMATION OF SCIENCE IN JAPAN and Scott Montgomery, THE SCIENTIFIC VOICE. Fuller describes the context n which science was taught in the western universities in the 19th century. Most interesting is the case of Germany (I think it was), in which science was taught explicitly with the cultural tradition of western civ as a backdrop. The Japanese, seeing the various contradictions involved in this heritage -- the quarrel between science and religion, etc. -- were very skeptical of the cultural package, and learned to see western science not as a "western" achievement but as a merely conjunctural phenomenon. They learned to strip off the purely scientific methods from the cultural packaging and use the former without buying into the latter. Perceiving a possible threat to traditional values such as happened in the west, the Japanese ruling class who bankrolled science and technology transfer adopted a purely instrumentalist approach to science, in which methods and techniques that produced results were accepted, without challenge to traditional religious, metaphysical, or cultural beliefs. Too bad Fuller doesn't draw the logial conclusion from this example, that the petty bourgoeis obsession with "contextualization" is not an argument for anything in itself. --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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