Sokal controversy

Don Cunningham (cunningh who-is-at copper.ucs.indiana.edu)
Thu, 23 May 1996 14:27:16 -0500

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).
>
>------------------------
>
>

__________________
Don Cunningham
School of Education
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405

PH: 812-856-8316
Fax: 812-856-8440

Email: cunningh who-is-at ucs.indiana.edu