When wry hits your pi from a real sneaky guy

Originally from http://www.netarrant.net:80/news/doc/1047/1:SCIENCE22/1:SCIENCE22052796.html

An "experiment," the physicist called it. A modest experiment. Would a leading academic journal publish a nonsensical article that served its political and intellectual preconceptions? Would its editors not even realize the extent of their own ignorance?

Yes and yes, Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, concluded when the postmodern journal called Social Text published his arcane, jargon laden riff titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," a paper rife with scientific error that dismissed the notion that there exists an "external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being."

When Sokal then boasted about his hoax in Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life, there was an outpouring of outrage, dismay, exuberance, and fiery communications on the Internet.

Paradoxically, the responses defending Social Text and its attacks on science's privileged position last week showed, if nothing else, a fair amount of science envy.

Originally, the editors of Social Text clearly relished the idea of having a scientist support their views. In fact, they decided to make the essay the climactic offering in a special issue of essays devoted to challenging science's claims of objective truth.

What's more, at least one important defender of Social Text peculiarly tried to portray "science studies," the most recent version of the sociology of science, as having the noble and rational character of a science.

This is not an easy task. For, as Sokal teasingly showed, the sciences and humanities are not identical enterprises. In both, knowledge is required, premises must be accepted along with rules of argument, and institutions of authority are established.

But despite Social Text's protests, in science there exist facts and truths that are invariant -- unaltered by culture, politics and prejudices (and this includes the value of pi, which Sokal, in his hoax paper, boldly proclaimed to be a variable). That may be one reason why science has such prestige and power.

That power may have had something to do with the initial appeal of Sokal's paper. Andrew Ross, the editor of this special issue of Social Text and the director of the American Studies program at New York University, asserted on the journal's World Wide Web page last week that Sokal's piece had always seemed to the editorial board "a little hokey" and "not really our cup of tea."

So why did the journal accept it? "Sokal's article would have been regarded as sophomoric and/or outdated," Ross wrote, "if it had come from a humanist or social scientist."

What made it distinctive for the editors was that it was by a (italics)physicist(end italics) who seemed to be buying into the postmodern dream -- something, the Mr. Ross added, that "might be worth encouraging," if only to bring scientists into the fold.

Yet another sort of condescension and envy was on display last week, when Stanley Fish, a professor of English and law at Duke University and executive director of Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, suggested that science was like baseball.ubbard, a biology professor at Harvard doubts "the Western assumption that there are only two sexes," arguing that "most of us" are "neither or both."

Sandra Harding, a philosophy professor at the University of Delaware, calls for an "anti-Eurocentric Northern science studies." And Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the City University of New York, suggests the truth of science is less important than its "regime of truth."

These scholars are interested in establishing their own regime of truth, but behind their polemics lie commonplaces. Obviously, science is affected by the pressures of ordinary life.

Obviously, economic interests help determine what areas of research flourish, and obviously, political pressures can affect innovation. Obviously, scientific questions are raised in one era and not another partly because of changes in culture.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Special Theory of Relativity were partly products of their times and could not have been conceived a century earlier.

Darwinism is partly a product of literary Romanticism. Kepler's laws of planetary motion were partly inspired by religious beliefs. There are indeed aspects of science and mathematics that are like games (as Wittgenstein showed).

But what makes science and mathematics powerful is what makes them different from games. Unlike baseball, science reveals something about the world outside of itself and outside the culture that produces it.

Kepler's laws may have been the product of their time, but still describe the movements of the planets with great accuracy; Einstein's Special Theory is as valid in South America as it was in Europe; and pi, though it was approximated in ancient Egypt and Greece, is a constant everywhere.

It appears in the Bible and it is used in constructing skyscrapers. A variable pi, or a non-existent pi, wouldn't just give us a different culture; it would give us a different physical universe.

Sokal invites anybody who feels that physical laws are mere social constructs to defy them by leaping from his 21st-story window.

These arguments though would be of little concern to the practitioners of "science studies," who, Ross admits, may be more interested in politics than in the nature of scientific truth.

But that doesn't stop them from gazing at science's privileged position with envy and condescension, yearning for its power while having to make do with their own game of postmodern baseball.