Sheila writes:
>And we certainly need open and honest discussion; for consider what has come
>to pass as normal in the trendy attack on scientific reason. At a lecture at
>the New York Academy of Sciences (Feb. 7 1996), Social Text co-editor Andrew
>Ross said, "I won't deny that there is a law of gravity. I would nevertheless
>argue that there are no laws in nature, there are only laws in society. Laws
>are things that men and women make, and that they can change."
>What could Ross possibly mean? That the law of gravity is a social law that
>men and women can change? If so, Sokal was dead on target when he wrote, in
>revealing his own "hoax," that "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)." Or
>perhaps all Ross means is that our understanding of the laws of physics
>changes over time; but if that's what he meant, why didn't he say so, and
>what's the big deal?
>The key issues at stake are the defense of rationality, and the quest for the
>best attainable truth. As the postmodernists point out, we can never expect
>to possess the complete truth about the world around us (or society, or
>ourselves). But there is nevertheless a world external to our consciousness,
>about which we can gain knowledge. Some accounts come closer to the truth than
>others. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to pursue such accounts.
>The defense of truth and objectivity is in no way the sole property of
>conservatives. In fact, the fearless analysis of objective reality is
>especially crucial to those of us on the left: without it there is no solid
>ground for social critique.
While I do not agree with that the method employed by Sokal was necessary
or even helpful, I do agree that there should always be open and
constructive criticism on any view of the world. Unfortunately, I think
that the Sokal's 'proof' of the inadequacy of post-modern
thought/post-modernist community is not unique to post-modernism.
Unfortunately for Sokal's 'proof' there are examples from both the recent
and not so recent history of physics which illustrate essentially the same
sort of inadequacy on the part of the physics community of the time.
...the pot calling the kettle black?
If the post-modernist view, or any other for that matter, seems to someone
to be flawed or inadequate then why not deal with the actual flawed or
inadequate aspects of the view itself? What Sokal has demonstrated is not
an inadequacy of the post-modernist view itself, but an inadequacy of the
practice of many 'communities' in our society, including physics. I have
to say that Sokal 'proof' is even less impressive than others I have seen
to date which attribute claims or positions which are not actually
positions held by post-modernists (or radical constructivism or situated
cognition or whatever view they want to take to task) and then procede to
'burn them down.' At least these latter efforts are attempts to deal with
issues of a particular view.
There is a problem with above reproduced section of the note by Shiela
Peuse. Sokal's comments about 'the laws of physics' and his apartment
window are really the _old_ argument by Berkeley (??) about, if you do not
believe there is a reality, then kick this rock. This argument misses the
point for which it was developed and it missed the point here.
I cannot vouch for Andrew Ross, because I do not know him nor have I ever
heard of him before, so I do not have any idea what he thinks of as the
'law of gravity' except what the quote says. I doubt that _he_ doubts that
he would do anything but fall toward the pavement if he stepped off the
observation deck of the Empire State Building. It seems quite clear that
he is distinguishing between a human construct, in his words, 'law of
gravity,' and our experience with the natural world in which we live, when
he goes on to refer to 'laws of nature.'
As someone who has studied these 'physical laws' maybe more than most
people, who are not in physics, and as one who has taught about them, I
have to point out that there are at least two _fundamentally_ different
'laws of gravity' which are taught, though not at the same time. One is
that attributed to Newton (and originating at least three centuries ago)
which almost anyone who has had high school or introductory college physics
has seen. In this context there is believed to be a _force_
(gravitational) which causes motions which we attribute to gravity. The
other is from this century in the work of Einstein on what is called
general relativity. In this context motions which we attribute to
gravitational effects are _not_ due to forces, but curvatures of something
called space-time.
These two laws of gravity are quite clearly human constructs, both of which
pertain to the repeatable _experiences_ of dropping objects near the earth
or the orbital motion of planets, etc. They are fundamentally different
explanations of largely the same class of phenomena or experiences. I
would submit that it is entirely possible that this _is_ what Ross is
referring to and it _is_ a big deal when people _fail to discriminate_
between _explanations_ of experience (physical laws) and the experiences
themselves.
So, the author of the above quoted paragraphs asks, if this is the case
"that our understanding of the laws of physics changes over time", then
"what's the big deal?" The big deal is that, in teaching their subject and
defending their turf, _scientists_ seem not to make this distinction
_themselves_. They seem _not_ to be able to distinguish the experience
with gravity from a made-up explanation agreed upon by a group of
scientists. This has been a problem in science, physics in particular for
the current discussion, for most of recorded history. At one point
scientists came to think that there _really is_ a gravitational force and
the 'fact' that it is a force, which has a particular mathematical
description, becomes for them the 'law of gravity' _along with_ the fact
that things fall and planets orbit.
The problem appears to me to come from an association of these constructed,
plausible explanations which fit experience with truth (what _really is_)
or some asymptotic approach to the truth. It's not that there is no
objective reality, but that the explanations we have constructed about it
are useful, plausible explanations, which all of our history tells us that
we should _never_ become invested in as pictures, however fuzzy and out of
focus, of the truth (what _really is_.) That this association of
explanations with the truth is a view that exists is quite clear in the
third paragraph of the excerpt above.
The reason why changes in these beliefs take on the aspects of revolutions
(as in T. S. Kuhn's descriptions of the history of science) seems to be
because scientists come to take the plausible and effective description
that someone proposes and assume that this tells us what nature really
_is_. I will point out that Einstein came out with his General Theory of
Relativity in 1915 or so. He received the Nobel Prize in about 1920, but
it was NOT for the General Theory of Relativity, but for contributions made
mostly in his papers from 1905, _excluding_ (I believe) even his paper on
Special Relativity from that time, too.
Finally, let me say that this is _not merely_ a matter that "our
understanding of the laws of physics changes over time." It is a matter of
egos being invested in the notion that these explanations of physical
phenomena are telling us what _really is_ and furthermore these egos are
invested in specific versions of these explanations. In spite of what
physicists become able to to as a result of their training, the
professional training of a physicist is _also_ usually an un-self-critical
indoctrination into a particular world view and ideology from which an
extremely likely outcome is to invest the ego in an association with
particular explanatory schemes of the world of both physical phenomena and
beliefs about 'physics' in relation to all other walks of life.
Unfortunately, the flaw that Sokal points out with his "hoax" on
post-modernism and that I am pointing to in physics is precisely the one
Galileo attempted to convice the "Church" to avoid in his day concerning
Aristotelianism, now more than three centuries ago. (Drake, S. Galileo:
Past Masters Series, New York, Oxford Univ. Pr, 1980) We've come a long
way :^(.
Dewey
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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/SN318 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad who-is-at varney.idbsu.edu
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Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper
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