A Response to Alan Sokal
delivered to the University of Minnesota Physics Department, April 1997
I'm pleased and honored to be given the opportunity to respond to Prof. Sokal's remarks, although I admit that I have been a little apprehensive about what I, as an assistant professor of philosophy from a small liberal-arts college, would say in response to an opponent who has superior scientific credentials and a devastating talent for satire. One person I spoke too had the following advice, "Let the Wookie win!"
But after further consideration, I remembered that this is not supposed to be a debate, and that I need not consider Prof. Sokal to be my opponent. As a result of a string of circumstances, I have a chance to engage with a Physicist about philosophical, cultural, and political issues -- and I hope this can be an occasion for an interesting and fruitful discussion rather than for recriminations, polemics, and other kinds of academic fireworks. So I will try to keep my remarks under my allotted time, to make room for some discussion. I will begin by laying out some points where I fully agree with Prof. Sokal, then proceed to some points of disagreement, and conclude with some suggestions for how a dialogue between scientists and non-scientists might succeed.
In reading the text that Prof. Sokal sent by e-mail last week, it occurred to me that I ought to begin with a declaration of faith: Tables and chairs and atoms exist. Unsupported objects will fall toward the ground even if no one standing near them believes that they will. Here we agree. I also agree with his "Three noncontroversial propositions" -- that science is a human endeavor that merits a social analysis, that the content of scientific debate can be influenced by prevailing attitudes of mind, and that legitimate research can be informed by a political commitment.
Note that I can agree with these proposition without agreeing with his characterization of them as noncontroversial. I appreciate Prof. Sokal's recognition that there is not one canonical doctrine in STS, and thus a multiplicity of cultural studies accounts of science. Prof. Sokal is correct when he states that SOME science studies researchers DO want to debunk science, diminish its prestige and authority, and reduce it to ONLY a process of negotiating social interests. Stanley Fish has stated that NONE of the people working in science studies have this kind of hostility toward science, but what Stanley Fish said was false Similarly, SOME science studies researchers DO claim that reality is ONLY a social construct. Stanley Fish has stated that NONE of them say this, but what Stanley Fish said was false. If you look for them among the sociologists of science, you will, unfortunately, find that Straw Men live and breathe and walk among us.
I greatly appreciate Prof. Sokal's admissions that some of his supporters have claimed too much from the episode, and that Social Text is a marginal publication rather than a mainstream refereed journal of STS. Now for some more substantive points of agreement: A significant amount of trendy postmodern theory is gratuitously obscure posturing that simply makes no sense. How much? I hope we can agree that it is more than a tiny minority but less than all of it. Furthermore, a significant amount of the work that seeks to draw weighty cultural and political conclusions from the results of contemporary science makes drastic errors in presenting these results and massively unwarranted inferences in interpreting them. For the past few years I have been examining the ways chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics have been used by literary theorists, social theorists, theologians, and management consultants -- and it is a source of deep despair for me. I have found that the worst of the management consultants are far worse than the worst of the literary theorists, but perhaps that isn't saying much. Finally, I agree with Prof. Sokal that intellectual discussion should not be modelled on combat. When scientists and non-scientists disagree, we all lose when it turns into a "war", with opposing camps and strategic maneuvers. I hope I can remain true to this spirit as I turn now to the points where I disagree with Sokal's presentation.
In a few places, I must differ from Prof. Sokal's interpretation of his own work. For one thing, he is being too modest when he claims that "the most hilarious parts of my article were not written by me." To say this seriously underestimates how perfectly he skewers Postmodern jargon with phrases like "the pi of Euclid and the G of Einstein...are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity." (222) Or how outrageously over-the-top is the claim that recent developments in topology have occurred "under the impetus of the feminist critique" (225).
And, as one often finds, the best parts are in the footnotes. I cannot resist recalling his helpful advice: "For a gentle introduction to set theory, see Bourbaki" (n 31) . . . which is like saying "for a gentle introduction to literary modernism, read Finnegan's Wake"! But the crowning touch comes in the second-to-last footnote, which really should have been a dead giveaway, where we read that "liberal mathematicians" are content with the axiom of equality and the axiom of choice . . . a suggestion only slightly more daft than saying that conservative mathematicians favor numbers like 4 and 9 because they are square.
But Sokal goes on to say that the funniest parts of his parody are "direct quotes from the Postmodern Masters," and I think this is hardly the case. Who, after all, is this Robert Markley who provides so much of the worst speculation in the last part of the piece? A full professor somewhere, but I'd never heard of him. And where are two of the true Giants of postmodern cultural studies of science, Donna Haraway and Michel Foucault?
Even more to the point, some of the strongest claims for the subjectivisation of reality come from Physicists Heisenberg and Bohr! Why are they being ridiculed? How, exactly, are their accounts "vulgarizations"? And what about the work of physicist Ernst Mach, who didn't believe in atoms? Or nobel-prizewinning physicist Leon Lederman, who has said in a televised documentary that "in the atom there can be no objective reality"? Or the speculations of John Wheeler and Kip Thorne? Some of this is very heady stuff. It seems that either the community of physicists needs to police itself more thoroughly for orthodox correctness, or else acknowledge that humanists shouldn't be condemned for professing some of the same radical philosophical positions that physicists themselves have stated.
When Prof. Sokal says that the passages he quotes are "even worse in context", I will agree -- but only in some cases. In other cases, such as the work of Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Michel Serres, I will admit that the work is very difficulty to read, and that their specific comments about scientific results are sometimes ill-informed, but I would argue to the bitter end that their philosophical work is valuable and worthwhile.
Look, sometimes I want my students to read a clear, well-organized argument, and sometimes I want them to struggle with important ideas that may be very hard to express clearly, or to engage their imagination and loosen up their habits of thought. There is a real danger in scoring points against people by displaying the obscurity of isolated quotes -- it can reinforce the anti- intellectualism sometimes at work among students and give them a convenient excuse for avoiding the hard work of reading difficult texts.
Here's an example: "Whereas we have not merely shown that things that are not, are, but we have brought to light the real character of 'not-being.' We have shown that the nature of the different has existence and is parceled out over the whole field of existent things with reference to one another, and of every part of it that is set in contrast to 'that which is' we have dared to say that precisely that is really 'that which is not." How's that for postmodern obscurity? It's from Plato! (Sophist, 258e) and the surrounding text doesn't exactly make it crystal clear, either. But Prof. Sokal's hoax runs the risk of encouraging students flip through the assigned books for a class, and, if they find passages that make no sense to them, decide that the class has nothing valuable to offer. This would be a bad thing for Philosophy enrollments, but also for education as a whole.
So I disagree with some of the interpretations Prof. Sokal has drawn from this episode. Do I have any right to such disagreements? Of course I do. Just because Sokal's 'experiment' has succeeded does NOT mean that he alone gets to decide what the hoax does and does not prove. Similarly, just because physicists' experiments have succeeded does not mean that physicists alone get to decide what their experiments do and do not prove. This is why I, as a philosopher, have a right to disagree with Sokal about not just his interpretation of the Social Text hoax, but about his metaphysical interpretations of the success of modern physics.
What do I mean in saying that Sokal has a metaphysical interpretation? I mean that instead of simply stating that nuclear weapons do explode and that the standard model does explain the readings on detectors at Fermilab, he takes the extra step of claiming that our theories of nuclear processes are, to a high degree of approximation, true of the way the world really is, independently of us . . . and that quarks Really, Really do exist, independently of us.
There is a large body of literature in the philosophy of science that questions the warrant for these latter claims. After all, using a theory that is not true, you can build a machine that works just fine. You can even build a machine that works without using any particularly sophisticated theory at all! Examples abound. I recommend the article "A Confutation of Convergent Realism" by Larry Laudan, a philosopher of science whom Sokal quotes approvingly. Laudan argues that the success of a theory does not establish that the theory is true, because many successful theories have employed crucial explanatory concepts that fail to refer: "the crystalline spheres of ancient and medieval astronomy, the effluvial theory of static electricity, the phlogiston theory of chemistry, the caloric theory of heat, the electromagnetic ether, the optical, ether, theories of spontaneous generation." (p.232-3).
But it's not just a problem of successful theories with nonreferring terms. Geological theories prior to the 1960's denied any lateral motion to the continents. They were successful theories, but the claim that the continents have no lateral motion is not "approximately" true. And "what about chemical theories of the 1920's which asumed that the atomic nucleus was structurally homogeneous? Or those chemical and physical theories of the late nineteenth century which explicitly assumed that matter was neither created nor destroyed? I am aware of no sense of approximate truth according to which such highly successful, but evidently false, theoretical assumptions could be regarded as 'truthlike'" (p. 234)
Having disagreed with the metaphysical realism that Sokal claims t easily from the success of modern science, I now move to a cautious and limited defense of the program of social constructivism in the sociology of science. Here I follow my mentor, Arthur Fine, in dismissing the glib declarations of the social construction of reality, while welcoming the insistence on paying attention to the actual, concrete techniques used to achieve scientific knowledge. (There follows a brief explication of the Kantian distinction between the world of appearance and the unknowable world of things-in-themselves, which I have omitted).
In pursuit of fruitful interaction between the disciplines, I would like to offer a tentative list of suggestions, and I would stress that these suggestions are not aimed AT Prof. Sokal but are occasioned BY the discussions surrounding his parody: Here is a list of things to avoid:
Try to resist making general statements about "scientists" or "Postmodernists" or "feminists" -- recognize the diversity of views and positions and levels of competence.
Try to resist the urge to issue interpretations of or pass judgment on the work of a scientist without making an honest effort to understand it. And the same goes for the work of a humanist.
Don't rule a critic out of the discussion because they don't have a Ph.D. in your field, or because they have misunderstood some element of your field, or because they have written a sentence that sounds absurd, false, or incomprehensible . . . or even if they have written a sentence that IS absurd, false, or incomprehensible.
Avoid being imperialistic about your chosen field of study: try not to issue grand declarations that "Everything, after all, is Really Just text, or social interests, or language, or power, . . . or genes, or chemicals, or quarks."
Avoid name-calling and abuse. I really must object to several places in Gross and Levitt's _Higher Superstition_ where their argument comes down to "Postmodernism is poop," but I note with optimism that a number of my friends and colleagues in the natural sciences have expressed distaste and even embarassment at this kind of discourse by the self- proclaimed defenders of rationality.
Avoid Polemics. Very little is learned from intellectual warfare. One of my favorite philosophers has written that the polemicist claims to possess "rights authorizing him wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not consist of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue." This is Michel Foucault.
And here are two other pieces of advice from philosophers: Seek out strong challenges to your views. If you value reason, find the smartest people you can who will argue that reason may not do everything we hoped, and that it might sometimes actually be harmful. This suggestion has been well-defended by J.S. Mill Give your opponent's position the strongest, most charitable reading you can. If they make errors in fact or in reasoning, correct them. This is one of the virtues of genuine conversation that Plato praised in the Theaetetus.
Finally, here are some practical goals to strive for: We need to improve science literacy in this country. Humanists could encourage their students to learn science and mathematics, if only in order to critique them more effectively. Scientists could take seriously the work of educationg non-majors. I'll never forget hearing a Chemistry professor in another state declare that there was no use trying to teach science to most students because, and I quote, "They're dumb." And we need to revive the education of critical thinking so that it includes the skill of careful reading, historical awareness, and attention to issues of culture and power, as well as good old clear argumentation. Now I've reached the threshold of platitudes, so I will end here.
