[ Top : Articles : "What is worth Pr. Sokal's lesson" : Other Articles ]
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From 100574.3414@CompuServe.COM Mon Apr 14 02:43:41 1997 Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 09:58:58 EDT From: Emmanuel Marin <100574.3414@CompuServe.COM><SCIFRAUD@CNSIBM.ALBANY.EDU> Reply-To: Discussion of Fraud in Science To: SCIFRAUD@CNSIBM.ALBANY.EDU Subject: My summaries of La Recherche's columns on "Sokal's hoax" The texts are very dense - as usual with this affair - , so my 'summaries' are far from perfect not only because of my lack of fluency in English, but anyway here it is : _La Recherche_, April 1997, p. 94 - 96 : "What is worth Pr. Sokal's lesson ?" All the 6 columnists are regular columnists in _La Recherche_. *** Jorge Wasenberg, professor in physics and head of the Museum of Science in Barcelona : Jorge Luis Borges once said that the best version of "Don Quichotte de la Manche" was some English translation. The laugh he had when faced with the outraged comments is a laugh similar to the one Sokal provoked, JW writes. He then describes Sokal's hoax : we all prefer to trust science when we cross the Atlantic ocean in a plane rather than to climb aboard a plane that would have been built by an artist or a mysticist - but does it mean science can not suffer from ideology ? Sokal proved that it can, since a leader journal in its field published his hoax only because it was "well written" and could be used to substantiate the editors' ideology. In science, there will be a time before Sokal and a time after. *** Antoine Danchin, researcher at the CNRS, professor at the Institut Pasteur : AD was amongst the ones who used to create an uproar at Lacan's seminars. Lacan even once choked with rage when a smell of incense rose from his desk as he was talking about "l'objet petit-a(utre)" ["usual" 'pomo', fabricated French new words I won't even bother to try to translate - EM]. AD adds that nowadays one can even find a random generator of postmodernist talk on the Net - that produces sentences that look a lot like some that can be found in texts taken seriously, alas ! AD comments that Lacan used a lot the mathematical vocabulary, only to make believe what he said were "laws". In the same time, postmodernists use science's words and attack science. Sokal's hoax points out this schizophrenia. *** Herve Le Bras, from the EHESS (..Social Sciences. Demographist, I think - EM): What does Sokal want to prove ? That postmodernism is like Blondlot's N-rays or Haeckel and Huxley's Bathybius ? That the peer-review systems doesn't work in social sciences ? Sokal's method would not have been tolerated even for the work of an undergraduate if the goal was to "falsify" postmodernism : where is the protocol ? Has the experiment been replicated elsewhere ? Therefore, no conclusion can be drawn from Sokal's hoax. It's not even worth more than an ad-hominem attack. If adversaries of so-called postmodernism have to use such tactics, is it because they're afraid of a real debate ? As far as peer-review is concerned, there are other fields of science than social sciences to do the test : HLB gives the example of Podkletnov's anti-gravity apparatus described in a paper accepted by Journal of Physics D. Latour's methods are rigorous - Sokal's is not, HLB concludes. *** Etienne Klein, "ingenieur" [this is not "engineer", this is a specific PhD-level French title - EM] at the CEA (Fundamental Physics) The main quality of Sokal's text is to be really funny. EK gives some examples, and then proceeds to do a very short summary of the problem : one may wonder what quarks really are, but can we say there are just "stories" ? EK applaudes Sokal, but hopes there won't be any perverse side effects. He gives two examples of such side effects : 1 - Social sciences may stop having a look at the "hard" sciences, while there is much interesting and necessary work to do. 2 - "Hard" scientists may think that "their" science would never have fallen for such an hoax. EK gives an example of a similar hoax in "hard" science published in a 1931 German serious science journal "Die Naturwissenschaften", written by Hans Bethe (who later won the Nobel Prize) to ridiculize physicist Arthur Eddington. The hoax was to explain the - 273 Celsius value of the absolute Zero Kelvin was linked to a constant value used in electromagnetism, while - 273 is obviously an arbitrary value. *** Boris Cyrulnik, (ethologist - EM), from the faculty of Medecine in Marseille, and from the faculty of Human Sciences in Toulon : BC gives an example of how rigorously established facts can be used to substantiate even stupid claims : given the number of sexual intercourses and the number of babies, it is unlikely that the latter has a link with the former. BC then gives an example of how Lacan used Wallon's findings about the behavior of animals in front of a mirror to build one of the main concepts of his theory. Bernadette Chauvin later showed that Wallon's findings were wrong - but Lacan's theory was not affected : "hard" science is used to give more credit to "soft" science, but they are two different worlds. When a biologists work on the link between genes and alcoholism, he unwillingly gives credit to some ideological theories. How can this misuse of science be fought ? BC says "hard" scientist should share their knowledge with others themselves, otherwise it will cause a comeback of superstition in the universities - and nowadays we already begin to observe such a comeback. *** Pierre Laszlo, professor in chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique and at the University of Liege : PL takes a look at a reference work in social studies "A Social History of Truth. Civility and Science in Seventeeth-Cenutry England" (1994, Stephen Shapin), and explains that Shapin rewrote history to make it fit his social theories. Shapin's description of how experimental science was created in the XVIIth century by the English "gentlemen" is far too summary. Shapin doesn't say that the atmosphere was far from quiet inside the Royal Society, that Robert Boyle was worried not to be from the university - while Shapin says not being from the university made him more reliable. Shapin also forget important figures like Bernard Palissy. So social sciences do not respect history, as well as they do not respect today's science by depicting it only as a matter of fight for the power. What can be done to fight against such social sciences ? Let's laugh ! ***** Emmanuel Marin Paris, France