Lingua Franca (July/August 1996).
This past May, Lingua Franca published an author's confession. In " A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," professor Alan Sokal of NYU revealed that he had written a deliberately absurd article entitled " Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," submitted it to the journal Social Text, and witnessed the article's subsequent acceptance and publication. In Sokal's view, the publication of his piece indicated a "decline in the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities."
Almost immediately, Sokal's stunt set off an avalanche of discussion about academic jargon, postmodern theory, and the propriety of hoaxes. The Internet was inflamed; articles linking quantum physics and Jacques Lacan appeared (for the first time?) in The New York Times and Newsweek. In this issue, Lingua Franca presents a series of considered responses to the whole affair: The editors of Social Text respond to Sokal in a full-length essay, which is followed by a rejoinder from Sokal, and letters from readers.
What were some of the initial responses of the journal's editors when we first learned about Alan Sokal's prank on Social Text? One suspected that Sokal's parody was nothing of the sort, and that his admission represented a change of heart, or a folding of his intellectual resolve. Another editor was unconvinced that Sokal knew very much about what he was attempting to expose. A third was pleasantly astonished to learn that our journal is taken seriously enough to be considered a target of a hoax, especially a hoax by a physicist. Others were concerned that the hoax might spark off a new round of caricature and thereby perpetuate the climate in which science studies and cultural studies have been subject recently to so much derision from conservatives in science.
All of us were distressed at the deceptive means by which Sokal chose to make his point. This breach of ethics is a serious matter in any scholarly community, and has damaging consequences when it occurs in science publishing. What is the likely result of Sokal's behavior for nonscientific journals? Less well-known authors who submit unsolicited articles to journals like ours may now come under needless suspicion, and the openness of intellectual inquiry that Social Text has played its role in fostering will be curtailed. However varied our responses, we all believe that Sokal took too much for granted in his account of his prank. Indeed, his claimthat our publication of his article proves that something is rotten in the state of cultural studiesis as wobbly as the article itself.
Obviously, we now regret having published Sokal's article, and apologize to our readers and to those in the science studies or cultural studies communities who might feel their work has been disparaged as a result of this affair. To give readers a clear sense of the circumstances underlying the publication of the article, we have taken the time to recount the relevant history of the editorial process. We regret that Lingua Franca did not provide us with such an opportunity when it decided to publish his statement.
From the first, we considered Sokal's unsolicited article to be a little hokey. It is not every day we receive a dense philosophical tract from a professional physicist. Not knowing the author or his work, we engaged in some speculation about his intentions, and concluded that the article was the earnest attempt of a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field. Sokal's adventures in PostmodernLand were not really our cup of tea. Like other journals of our vintage that try to keep abreast of cultural studies, it has been many years since Social Text published direct contributions to the debate about postmodern theory, and his article would have been regarded as somewhat outdated if it had come from a humanist or a social scientist. As the work of a natural scientist it was unusual, and, we thought, plausibly symptomatic of how someone like Sokal might approach the field of postmodern epistemology, i.e., awkwardly but assertively trying to capture the "feel" of the professional language of this field, while relying upon an armada of footnotes to ease his sense of vulnerability. In other words, we read it more as an act of good faith of the sort that might be worth encouraging than as a set of arguments with which we agreed. On those grounds, the editors considered it of interest to readers as a "document" of that time-honored tradition in which modern physicists have discovered harmonic resonances with their own reasoning in the field of philosophy and metaphysics. Consequently, the article met one of the several criteria for publication which Social Text recognizes. As a non-refereed journal of political opinion and cultural analysis produced by an editorial collective (and entirely self-published until its adoption four years ago by Duke University Press), Social Text has always seen its lineage in the "little magaine" tradition of the independent left as much as in the academic domain, and so we often balance diverse editorial criteria when discussing the worth of submissions, whether they be works of fiction, interviews with sex workers, or essays about anticolonialism. In other words, this is an editorial milieu with criteria and aims quite remote from those of a professional scientific journal. Whether Sokal's article would have been declared substandard by a physicist peer reviewer is debatable (it is not, after all, a scholarly contribution to the discipline of physics) but not finally relevant to usat least not according to the criteria we employed.
Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally to revise the piece. We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed resistant to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost all of his footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the grounds that his peers, in science, expected extensive documentation of this sort. Judging from his response, it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all. At this point, Sokal was designated as a "difficult, uncooperative author," a category well known to journal editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish, not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest to readers if published in the company of related articles.
Some time after this impasse was reached, the editors did indeed decide to assemble a special issue on the topic of science studies. We wanted to gauge how science critics were responding to the attacks of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, and other conservatives in science. Contributions were solicited from across the field of knowledge; from humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists. (The final lineup included many of the more significant names in the field Sandra Harding, Steve Fuller, Emily Martin, Hilary Rose, Langdon Winner, Dorothy Nelkin, Richard Levins, George Levine, Sharon Traweek, Sarah Franklin, Ruth Hubbard, Joel Kovel, Stanley Aronowitz, and Les Levidow.) Most responded directly to the evolving controversy that some were calling the "Science Wars," while others wrote their own accounts of work in their respective fields. Here, we thought, was an appropriate and heterogeneous context in which Sokal's article might appear, providing a feasible solution to the editorial problem posed by his piece. He expressed some concern when asked if we could publish his work in this special issue (we assumed he wished to distance himself from the polemical company assembled for the issue), but reiterated his eagerness to see it in print. Our final decision to include him presumed that readers would see his article in the particular context of the Science Wars issue, as a contribution from someone unknown to the field whose views, however offbeat, might still be thought relevant to the debate. Since his article was not written for that special issue, and bears little resemblance, in tone or substance, to the commissioned articles, it was not slated to be included in the expanded book version of the issue (with additional articles by Katherine Hayles, Michael Lynch, Roger Hart, and Richard Lewontin) which will be published by Duke University Press in September.
In sum, Sokal's assumption that his parody caught the woozy editors of Social Text sleeping on the job is ill-conceived. Its status as parody does not alter substantially our interest in the piece itself as a symptomatic document. Indeed, Sokal's conduct has quickly become an object of study for those who analyze the behavior of scientists. Our own role has also come under scrutiny, since, at the very least, the affair says something about our conception of how physicists read philosophy. As for the decision to publish his article, readers can judge for themselves whether we were right or wrong. But to construe this decision as proof of the bankruptcy of cultural studies is absurd.
What Alan Sokal's confession most altered was our perception of his own good faith as a self-declared leftist. However we feel about his deception, we do hope that the ensuing discussion has been, and will continue to be, productive, and that interlocutors will resist the opportunity to exploit existing divisions and splits among committed people and seek instead to bridge and heal those differences. There is nothing we regret more than watching the left eat the left, surely one of the sorriest spectacle s of the twentieth century.
Having talked to the (real) Sokal subsequently, we believe that most of the issues he intended to air are, at this point, rather well-known to readers of Social Text and Lingua Franca. Indeed, they have been going the rounds in the academy since the first postmodern, social constructionist, or anti-foundational critiques of positivism, appeared over thirty-five years ago. That many natural scientists have only recently felt the need to respond to these critiques says something about the restricted trade routes through which knowledge is still circulated in the academy, policed, as it is, at every departmental checkpoint by disciplinary passport controls. Nor are these critiques unfamiliar to folks who have long been involved in debates about the direction of the left, where positivism has had a long and healthy life. At this point in time, we have a vestigial stake in these critiques and debates, but much less of an interest than Sokal supposes. Like Gross and Levitt, he appears to have absorbed these critiques only at the level of caricatures and has been reissuing these caricatures in the form of otherworldly fanatics who deny the existence of facts, objective realities, and gravitational forces. We are sure Sokal knows that no such persons exist, and we have wondered why on earth he would promote this fiction. He must be aware that early proponents of quantum reality encountered similar parodies of themselves in the opposition to their ideas. Physics is not the only field where this occurred. Comparable caricatures have figured in many different scholarly controversies, from early twentieth century debates about legal realism to more recent ones about genetic reductionism. It is time to put them to rest.
On the other hand, we recognize that professional scientists like Sokal do feel that their beliefs and their intellectual integrity are threatened by the diverse work done in the field of science studies. Doubtless, there have been distorted and reductive descriptions of scientists in many aspects of that work. Over the years, many scholars in the field have responded sympathetically to this grievance, and a good deal of common ground has been established. We share Sokal's own concerns about obscurantism, for example. It is highly ironic that Social Text should now be associated with a kind of sectarian postmodernism that we have been at pains to discourage for many years. We would be all too happy if this episode cleared the air. Sokal has said that he agrees with many of the arguments put forth by other authors in the Science Wars issue of Social Text. Unfortunately, he declined to enter into a publishable dialogue with us for this issue of Lingua Franca. We are heartened, however, by the prospect of any levelheaded discussion about the politics of science that does not rest exclusively on claims of expertise, and is shaped by the public interest.
Our main concern is that readers new to the debates engendered by science studies are not persuaded by the Sokal stunt that this is simply an academic turf war between scientists and humanists/social scientists, with each side trying to outsmart the other. Sadly, this outcome would simply reinforce the premise that only professional scientists have the credentialed right to speak their minds on scientific matters that affect all of us. What's important to us is not so much the gulf of comprehension between "the two cultures," but rather the gulf of power between experts and lay voices, and the currently shifting relationship between science and the corporate-military state. Nor are these concerns extrinsic to the practice of science itself. Prior to deciding whether science intrinsically tells the truth, we must ask, again and again, whether it is possible, or prudent, to isolate facts from values. This is a crucial question to ask, because it bears upon the kind of progressive society we want to promote.
Why does science matter so much to us? Because its power, as a civil religion, as a social and political authority, affects our daily lives and the parlous condition of the natural world more than does any other domain of knowledge. Does it follow that nonscientists should have some say in the decision-making processes that define and shape the work of the professional scientific community? Some scientists (including Sokal presumably) would say yes, and in some countries, non-expert citizens do indeed participate in these processes. All hell breaks loose, however, when the following question is asked: Should nonexperts have anything to say about scientific methodology and epistemology? After centuries of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific domination of nature, one might have thought this was a pertinent question to ask.
Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, Co-Editors, for Social Text
Alan Sokal replies:
I confess to amusement that one Social Text editor still doesn't believe my piece was a parody. Oh, well. As for Social Text's editorial process, readers can judge for themselves the plausibility of the editors' post facto explanations, which if true may be more damning than the incident itself. Some of their chronology is at variance with my own documentary record, but let me not beat a dead horse. More interesting than the scandal provoked by the article's acceptance is, I think, the scandal that ought to be provoked by its content. My essay, aside from being (if I may quote Katha Pollitt's flattery) "a hilarious compilation of pomo gibberish," is also an annotated bibliography of the charlatanism and nonsense purveyed by dozens of prominent French and American intellectuals. This goes well beyond the narrow category of "postmodernism," and includes some of the most fashionable thinkers in "science studies," literary criticism, and cultural studies. In short, there is a lot of sloppy thinking going around about "social construction," often abetted by a vocabulary that intentionally elides the distinction between facts and our knowledge of them. I'm no expert in epistemology, but some of this work is so illogical that it doesn't take an expert to deconstruct it. I've analyzed one representative example in an Afterword submitted for publication in Social Text ; I hope the editors will print it, perhaps along with replies. I'd suggest they also invite c ontributions from philosophers far sharper than myself, such as Susan Haack and Janet Radcliffe Richards. Robbins and Ross say that I "declined to enter into a publishable dialogue" with them. Quite the contrary: we're having that dialogue right now. What I declined was an oral dialogue, which in my opinion usually yields a low ratio of content to words. Robbins and Ross guess wrong when they say I feel "threatened" by science-studies scholars. My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. Like innumerable others from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, I call for the Left to reclaim its Enlightenment roots. We're worried above all for the social sciences and the humanities, not the natural sciences. In their last two paragraphs, Robbins and Ross bring up a plethora of real issues, but it would take quite a bit of space to disentangle the substance from the rhetoric. They conflate science as an intellectual system with the social and economic role of science and technology. They conflate epistemic and ethical issues. These confusions lead Robbins and Ross into a serious error: setting up an opposition between science and progressive politics. They describe science as a "civil religion" that supports existing social and political structures. It is of course true that scientific research is skewed by the influence of those with power and money. But a scientific worldview, based on a commitment to logic and standards of evidence and to the incessant confrontation of theories with reality, is an essential component of any progressive politics.
Despite these differences, there is a potentially vast common ground between Robbins, Ross and myself. When scientific research is increasingly funded by private corporations that have a financial interest in particular outcomes of that researchis the dr ug effective or not?scientific objectivity is undermined. (But to make this argument, one must first have a conception of objectivity: not as a state that human beings can ever attain, but as an ideal standard of comparison.) When universities are more interested in patent royalties than in the open sharing of scientific information, the public suffers. There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even counterproductive.
The central issue raised by Alan Sokal's hoax is not the legitimacy of a philosophical, sociological or political study of science; it is rather the competence with which such studies are conducted nowadays by scholars loosely united under the banner of "cultural studies."
For many years now, academics from a variety of disciplines have been grumbling, mostly in private, about the appallingly low standards of argument and evidence that appear to characterize work in this area, and especially in that branch of it that has come to be known as "science studies." As philosophers, for example, we have often been struck by the sloppy and naive quality of what passes for philosophical argument in cultural studies, and at the central role that such argument has been made to play. Practitioners of cultural studies have not been impressed with the disapproval of their colleagues. They have insisted that their critics are moved merely by a self-interested sense of academic propriety and protection of turf. On occasion, they have gone so far as to question the very idea of expertise in a given subject, arguing that appeals to it are merely veiled attempts to silence unpopular views.
Alan Sokal's brilliant idea was to try to settle this dispute with a simple stratagem: Write a piece full of such transparent nonsense that no one -- not even the most committed proponent of cultural studies -- could hope to defend it. "Transgressing the Boundaries" succeeds brilliantly. Take, for example, the following delicious passage:
Just as liberal feminists are frequently content with a minimal agenda of legal and social equality for women and "pro-choice," so liberal (and even some socialist) mathematicians are often content to work within the hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework (which, reflecting its nineteenth-century liberal origins, already incorporates the axiom of equality) supplemented only by the axiom of choice. But this framework is grossly insufficient for a liberatory mathematics, as was proven long ago by Cohen 1966.
To anyone with even a passing acquaintance with, for example, the axiom of choice, this is pure foolishness. What this axiom says is that, given any set of mutually exclusive sets, there exists a set containing exactly one member from each of those mutually exclusive sets. This proposition clearly has nothing to do with the issue of choice in the abortion debate. Similarly, Paul Cohen's article is concerned with the purely mathematical claim that the continuum hypothesisa hypothesis about the number of cardinal numbers between two particular transfinite cardinalsis logically independent of the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. It has nothing to do with a "liberatory mathematics," whatever that means.
Catching such "errors" requires no subtle understanding of higher mathematics, physics or philosophy; they are elementary blunders and Sokal's article positively overflows with them. Only the complete scientific, mathematical and philosophical incompetence of the editors of Social Text can explain how they were able to accept for publication such a tissue of transparent nonsense.
Stanley Fish has argued in The New York Times that the fact that Sokal's experiment depended upon deception undercuts its probative value. The processes of inquiry and publication depend, says Fish, on our being able to trust the sincerity of the participants, a condition that was manifestly not met in the present case.
This means that it is Alan Sokal, not his targets, who threatens to undermine the intellectual standards he vows to protect...No scientist...begins his task by inventing anew the facts he will assume....They are all given by the tradition of inquiry he has joined, and for the most part he must take them on faith. And he must take on faith, too, the reports of his colleagues....[Sokal] carefully packaged his deception so as not be detected except by someone who began with a deep and corrosive attitude of suspicion....
Now, there is a limited sense in which the practice of journal review does depend on trust; but it is irrelevant to the case at hand. In the context of a paper reporting on the findings of an experimental study, the factual report detailing the methods used and the results obtained would have to be taken on trust by a putative referee, since those reports are, in general, impossible to verify.
But this is not relevant to the sort of article that Sokal submitted. His essay did not claim to have run some experiments and to report on their results. Rather, it offered a philosophical interpretation of certain theoretical claims within physics, interpretations that are so absurd that anyone with the least familiarity with their content would see right through them. Of course, Sokal sought to conceal his own disbelief in the nonsense he had so ingeniously cooked up; the experiment would not have worked otherwise. But that fact cannot be translated into an excuse for the editors of Social Text. In the context of a purely philosophical/theoretical paper, it is not the business of an editorial board to judge the sincerity of its authors, but only the cogency of their arguments. In the case of Sokal's paper, that cogency was fully open to view.
Fish also takes Sokal to task for misunderstanding the central claim of postmodernism. According to Fish, no one has ever asserted the radical thesis that reality is socially constructed, but only the far more innocuous thesis that scientific theories of reality are socially constructed. Here Fish is just being disingenuous, for he is presumably aware of the many texts in which it is precisely the radical thesis that is advocated.
In dismissing the idea that anyone in cultural studies would assert anything as foolish as the radical thesis, Fish writes, "Sokal's question should alert us to the improbability of the scenario he conjures up: Scholars with impeccable credentials making statements no sane person could credit. The truth is that none of his targets would ever make such statements."
The fact of the matter, however, is that in accepting Sokal's parody, these scholars have made it clear that, impeccable credentials or no, they are unable to tell the difference between a statement that no sane person could credit and its opposite.
Paul Boghossian, Professor of Philosophy and
Chair, New York University
Thomas
Nagel, Professor of Philosophy and Law, New York
University
As one of the contributors to the Social Text volume, I must confess that I did not initially detect Sokal's ruse. Instead, I was struck by how misplaced was his vast erudition in cultural studies. I thought: If only this physicist knew something about the history of his own field, he would not have had to fall back on the jargon-ridden prose of postmodernism. Rather, he would have known that many of the points he raised about the crisis of representation, the illusory character of scientific truth, andyesan obdurate external reality, had been made by philosophically sophisticated scientists just prior to the revolutions in relativistic and quantum physics. Duhem, Poincaré, Hertz, Mach, and Ostwald all contributed to these discussions, even while they were continuing to do respectable science. As Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin observed in Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973), the relativism and mysticism evident in Wittgenstein's Tractatus derived in large part from meditating on the metaphysical crisis into which the Newtonian worldview had fallen in the 18901910 period. And lest one think that the scientists saw this as a purely academic matter, a liberatory politics was frequently intimated in the popular works of Mach and Ostwald.
I therefore diagnosed Sokal as the victim of an ahistorical physics education who became overimpressed with the radicalness of cultural studies because he was unaware of similar sentiments in his own discipline. The tone of Sokal's "revelations" suggest t hat this diagnosis may not be so far off the mark, after all.
Steven Fuller, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Durham (UK)
How did Alan Sokal fool the Social Text editorial collective? Simple: The members of that collective knew very little about physics (nothing wrong with that) and they didn't bother to ask an expert. They didn't do so, Ross and Robbins have told us, becaus e "professional" standards "are not finally relevant to us, at least not according to the criteria we employed." This is a rather opaque justification, and no wonder. Basically, it means that Social Text doesn't care whether Sokal's workor anybody else's is solid or not. Nice to know, in general. But still, why did Social Text publish this particular article?
Because, the editors say, "[we] concluded that this article was the earnest attempt by a professional scientist to seek some kind of affirmation from postmodern philosophy for developments in his field." In plainer words: We publish Sokal not because he is interesting, but because he says we are. This a wonderful explanation, with a great hidden premisethat people in the humanities have nothing to learn from a scientist. He may be exhibited as a curious convert to theory, but we don't have to take him seriously. The Social Text board read and reread the article, and didn't understand a thingyet they didn't care, because at bottom they believe that physics has nothing to teach them. In the Social Text cosmology, science is a socially aggressive but intellectually weak enterprise that seeks "affirmation" from postmodern philosophy. This is why they didn't check Sokal's claims out: whether the physics made sense or not made no difference, because its value had to be in the philosophy anyway. So why bother?
This disciplinary narcissism, so typical of recent literary cultural studies, is a mystery to me: after all, the natural sciences have been quite successful with their object of study, and we probably have a lot to learn from their methods. But no: for Stanley Aronowitz (quoted in the New York Times), Sokal is "ill-read and half-educated." Well, then, how does it feel being duped by the half-educated?
Towards the end of his reply, Ross states that "we must ask, again and again, wherever it is possible, or prudent, to isolate facts from values." I would respond that yes, it is possible (though difficult), and certainly very prudent, because it's the only way to learn anything. If facts cannot be isolated from values, then values can never be tested, never contradicted, never changed. Research, experiment, evidence, and discussion all become useless. Only values, everywhere. A nightmare: Cardinal Bellarmino and Stanley Aronowitz, forever together.
Why Ross likes this scenario, and what makes it "progressive," is another mystery. "Science trades in knowledge," wrote Brecht at the end of Galileo, "which is the product of doubt. And this new art of doubt has enchanted the public.... They snatched the telescopes out of our hands and had them trained on our their tormentors" prince, official, public moralist. Knowledge, doubt, enchantment, polemical unmasking: Here is the science we need; not prudence. But alas, much of the left has lost its passion for knowledge, and Social Text has proved it.
So far, Social Text has not offered arguments, but rather invoked all sorts of Victorian pieties ("deception," "breach of ethics," "irresponsible," "good faith," "confession") in the hope of exorcising the hoax. Come on. You are a polemical journal, with an issue entitled "Science Wars." Drop the pose, accept the facts, and another, more interesting discussion may begin.
Franco Moretti, Professor of Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Alan Sokal's prank was a brilliant strategy for making an extremely important point, but what exactly is this point, and for whom is it important?
First, the point. Is it that the academy houses scholars who have the audacity to question the meaning of objectivity, or to challenge the immunity of science from social forces? Or that some literary scholars have begun to write about scientific texts wi thout first seeking the approval of scientists? Not only does Sokal seriously weaken his case with such suggestions, but he helps fuel the media's enthusiasm for the outlandish idea that a left anti-science conspiracy is perpetrating the claim that the world is not real. I wish he had let his ruse speak for itself, for its point is quite simple: The editors of Social Text have been shown to be unable to distinguish a hilarious jargon-ridden spoof from real argument. Or perhaps the editors were so eager to count a physicist as one of their own that they chose to publish an article they themselves regarded as "hokey".
Now, to whom should this matter? For many scientists, this episode will only bolster their fear that postmodernism (and science studies more generally) threatens the integrity and well-being of their own disciplines. But it is not science that is threaten ed by the hapless publication of gibberish; it is science studies itself. And the embarrassing defense offered by Ross and Robbins (not to mention the many counter-attacks) just makes the problem worse. Scholars in science studies who have turned to postm odernism have done so out of a real need: Truth and objectivity turn out to be vastly more problematic concepts than we used to think, and neither can be measured simply by the weight of scientific authority, nor even by demonstrations of efficacy. Yet surely, the ability to distinguish argument from parody is a prerequisite to any attempt at understanding the complexities of truth claims, in science or elsewhere. How can we claim credibility for responsible scholarshipfor the carefully reasoned and empirically founded research that makes up the bulk of science studiesif we do not recognize a problem here?
It saddens me that my scientific colleagues so readily confuse the analysis of social influence on science with radical subjectivism, mistaking challenges to the autonomy of science with the "dogma" that there exists no external world. And it alarms me to see the politicization of legitimate intellectual argument as a "left anti-science" movement vs. a defense of traditional values mounted by the "right." But neither condones the failure of my colleagues in science studies to acknowledge so blatant a compromise to the integrity of their own discipline.
Evelyn Fox Keller, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT
I find Alan Sokal's "experiment" and the furor it has caused more than a little disturbing. I agree with much of what he said: There is no justification for intellectual sloth nor is opacity a virtue. Nonetheless, I am afraid that Sokal may not realize how potentially damaging his discursive booby trap may be.
Besides a real physical world, there is a real political one, a world in which conservative pundits and lawmakers are attacking not just the cultural studies departments but the entire academy. The battleground here is not a text but the bottom line. The right is fighting a broad-based campaign to demonize those sectors of the academic community that encourage critical thinking and offer an alternative perspective on the status quo. The Culture Wars have taken their casualties. Much of what we in the academy would consider mainstream scholarship is now under attack and continues to lose public support.
The onslaught against what academics do reinforces the efforts of the business-oriented Republicans and their allies to defund the public sector. So much the better if it turns out that much of the academy is not only economically irrelevant, but also wrong. The defenders of the good old flag and canon, despite their alleged reverence for the liberal arts, rarely if ever confront the damage that bottom-line thinking and forced vocationalism are doing to their cherished institutions.
Alan Sokal is certainly no enemy of the traditional academy and is, in his way, trying to strengthen it. His demand for intellectual rigor is both refreshing and long overdue. There is no reason why conservatives should claim a monopoly on high standards and scholarly merit; leftists can be tough graders, too. Even so, I worry that Sokal's merry prank may well backfire and provide further ammunition for the forces that have damaged the academic community far more than a few trendy theorists.
Ellen Schrecker, Professor of History, Yeshiva University
Hoaxes don't rank high on the scale of cultural achievement, but a hoax as brilliant as the one Sokal has pulled off does provide some of the visceral satisfaction of great art or music. It has a kind of perfection; one stands in envious awe.
As to the moral Sokal wants to draw from it, the payoff is less clear. Sokal rightly reminds us that people ignorant of science have no business drawing portentous conclusions from its technical findings. He's right; it's an old story. Einstein's theory, Heisenberg's principle, Gödel's proof, and Bell's theorem have been used to suggest that everything is relative, nothing is certain, language fails us, we don't know where we are. These conclusions don't follow; they are wild overinterpretations.
Yet relativism, uncertainty, linguistic inadequacy, and cultural vertigo are problematic. So it won't do to couch the issue, as Sokal does, in terms of "subjectivist thinking" against the "real world." All thinking is the thinking of some subject (Sokal himself is one). That truism has to be acknowledgedso "subjectivist" shouldn't be used as an epithetand then it has to be pointed out how the subject in question gets to distinguish what is subjectively felt from what is objectively known. But on the latter point it won't do either to lay down the law with italics, as Sokal does ("there is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions"). That there is a real world is the best available hypothesis, but it's a hypothesis all the same; and the properties of that world aren't "merely" social constructions, but a lot of social constructing goes into agreeing what they are.
Sokal may have flushed bigger game than he intended. One of the things he has in his sights, though, I agree with completely: Those of us who care about the left have cause to worry. But we don't have to worry about its being discredited by pretentious academics, we have to worry about its failure to articulate its own position in a convincing way, given the recent history of the market and of public sensibility. Perhaps that is what Sokal will work on next.
Peter Caws, University Professor of Philosophy, George Washington University
Somewhere in this whole affair a significant element has been lost: Sokal's article masqueraded not as straight cultural criticism, not as sociology of science, and not as science, but as an interdisciplinary study. In other words, we should separate what Sokal wanted to mock (cultural criticism) from what he imitated (interdisciplinary research). As someone who works on relativity, quantum mechanics, and literary culture, I spend a great deal of time wondering what such research should look like. Sokal's piece didn't even come close.
The point of interdisciplinary endeavor is that work done in one field may be used to elucidate material in another. This idea rests on two premises: first, that certain ideas and concepts can be useful across disciplinary boundaries; and second, that the ir development in different disciplines may not be perfectly symmetrical. Finding commonalties between science and the humanities, then, does not mean that they have the same thing to tell us, but that concepts from one can be used to help us see new things about the other. They function as cognitive metaphors: unexpected associations that reorganize a familiar conceptual field and allow us to behave differently within it.
Interdisciplinary work, then, is always translation from one specialized discourse into another. But a great deal of Sokal's article is incomprehensible, and he tells us now that its science is also wrong. Several respondents ask why Social Text didn't ch eck the article's correctness. I also want to know why its opacity didn't bother them. Even if the physics of the article had been right, the editors should have refused it because it made no effort to be understood. The value of interdisciplinary work is precisely that it allows us to see something newand this rests on the premise that it allows us to see, period.
So far this debate has taken the form of mutual accusation: "Those critics hate science, but they still use their toasters." Or, "Scientists think culture and politics aren't important, but I'd like to see them work without language." The truth is, withou t science, we'd have no toasters. But without culture, we'd never want toast. Neither the don't-touch-it-if-you-don't-have-a-Ph.D. copout of territorial scientists, nor the no-one-really-understands-differential-equations-anyway copout of some cultural theorists should be allowed to undermine the possibility of a real interdisciplinary effort. I resent Sokal's piece because he used his command of a powerful and fascinating discourse to fortify the boundaries between disciplines, and I resent the editors of Social Text because they let him. Science (even quantum mechanics) can be made perfectly comprehensible to non-scientists, but it takes careful translation and a lot of work.
Teri Reynolds, Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
I am happy to see someone demonstrate the literary theory emperor has no clothes. It is a hard and bitter lesson which I, a relatively new literary scholar, have only recently accepted. I started on the theory bandwagon and began my dissertation excited about showing how postmodern fiction reveals the cultural constructedness of scientific "discourse." But the more I read, the more I realized that thinkers who attack scientific discourse were not thinking at all, just playing with ideas. What caused my tu rnaround was a suspicion shared by Alan Sokalthat theorists use concepts of limited application as universals, that those who most vehemently oppose science know very little about it, that, like editors of tabloid newspapers, many theorists are unable to distinguish ideas from nonsense.
Sokal's political point also struck a personal chord. Like him, I believe in an active political Left which directly engages the all-too-real problems created by corporate capitalism: a growing split between rich and poor, festering race relations, exploding numbers of guns on the streets. To claim, as theorists like Linda Hutcheon do, that taking an ironical stance toward all discourse (including one's own) will somehow strike a blow against empire is to ignore that empire is winning without breaking a sweat. The critical Left has abandoned meaningful criticism to go out and "play" with languageand thus has left nothing to carry on the fight.
This relativism-as-radical-chic has, alas, too far infested the humanities for anything but amputation to cure the patient. But that amputation is not coming. Instead, like gangrene, the theory rot breeds more theory rot. Grad students eager to get hired in a crammed labor "market" follow the lead of lefty-talking people who, in Reaganite fashion, created the market in the first place. So the grads who get hired most often are those who mouth the theory platitudes, repeat the theory mantras, and turn a bl ind eye to real concerns about the place of academic studies in the world.
David Layton, Olympia, WA
If something useful is to come from the Social Text furor, scientists and humanists who study science need to talk with each other openly and frankly about what we disagree about as well as what views we share. I would thus like to urge a cease-fire in wh at has been called the "science wars." Here are some points on which I think common ground might be found.
1) Scholars in the humanities have a right, and a duty, to examine what scientists do, and vice versa. Certainly, anyone who has something new to contribute to the understanding of scientific methodology and epistemology must do so. But they should be war ned that issues like quantum mechanics or molecular biology must be approached with care and subtlety.
2) The key issue is democracy and how it may work in a pluralistic, global society, in which everyone's future depends on decisions about scientific and technological issues. Anyone who wants to play a real role in this context must learn to communicate c learly and to listen to what people are actually saying. If academics, with special training in reading and writing, cannot communicate with each other, they have little hope of having genuine influence outside the academy.
3) Perhaps it is time to give it up the notion that knowledge is "constructed" and replace it with the more generous conception that the products of culture are the results of a negotiation with a natural world of which we are a part.
These are just a few issues whose resolution will require a dialogue between humanists and scientists. Our task, then, is not to argue further over the meaning of obscure texts; it is to invent a way of thinking about important political, philosophical an d aesthetic issues that orient us toward the problems and promises of the future.
Lee Smolin, Professor of Physics, Pennsylvania State University
There are a lot of different ways to respond to Sokal's "hoax." Perhaps the best way would be lightly, trading joke for joke. But I guess the stakes are a little too high for me to laugh a lot; my ultimate response to this prank is sadness.
In my essay in the Social Text volume that includes Sokal's article, I argue that for science studies to matter at all, its practitioners need to know something substantial about the scientific issues they address. One can't, for example, take a principle d position on what to do to prevent the decay of forests without knowing what would in fact prevent that decay. And I argue too that it's necessary to engage scientists in discussion of the cultural issues that inescapably link the activities of science with the life of non-scientists. The keyand Andrew Ross and Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, authors of Higher Superstition, actually agree on this, if Gross and Levitt would face what they have writtenis that the public should have a responsible and intelligent relationship to science. Sokal's crusade for reality demonstrates not the slightest understanding of the complexity of anti-realist arguments (with their millennia-long genealogy); it shows no awareness that a constructionist argument does not and cannot mean that "reality" can be changed just like that. The whole enterprise is rather only another move in a self-defeating crusade to keep people who are affected by science but don't "do" science from having anything to say about it.
Why are Sokal, Gross, and Levitt so threatened by people who are just about the only intellectuals in town really interested in a responsible public relation to science? Sokal should be aware that the real threat to the supercollider or to science funding is not coming from Andrew Ross or from Stanley Aronowitz. The threat comes from a culture profoundly anti-intellectual, and now overwhelmingly preoccupied with taxes and money.
Sokal says he is on the same side as the editors of Social Text. But he and his colleagues are dazzlingly unaware that the very imperial mode of their intellectual stancewhich they want to keep as a central aspect of the institution of scienceis part of the reason people at large have so little real sense of what science does, so little understanding of its workings, so painfully meager a recognition that what happens in scientific enterprises has something to do with what happens outside them. What Sok al's hoax reveals is his anxiety as a scientist about this empire of knowledge, as well as a rather ignorant and chortlingly condescending relation to complicated philosophical, sociological, and theoretical positions. Its effect will be to further divide those who ought to be working together against the anti-intellectualism of the culture at large. It will reduce to sneering condescension what ought to be a serious debate about how, precisely, the work of science reflects upon, influences, and is influenced by social, cultural, and political forces.
George Levine, Director, Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University