Pomo Science
Sometimes parody is the quickest path to revealing truth.
-by Phillip E. Johnson
Originally http://www.christianity.net/bc/6B6/6B6005.html
New York University physicist named Alan Sokal played a cruel practical joke this year on the editors of the postmodernist journal Social Text. "Pomos," as the postmodernists are not-so-affectionately called by other academics, are noted for leftism in politics, relativism in epistemology, and murkiness in expression. Pomo writing is radically skeptical about the objectivity of knowledge, including scientific knowledge. This has led mainstream scientists to denounce the Pomos as enemies of science, far more dangerous than the despised creationists because they hold influential positions in universities.
Alan Sokal is himself a leftist, proud of his stint teaching under the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but he is a rationalist--mmmuch like the sociologist Todd Gitlin (whose book I reviewed in the previous issue of this journal). To demonstrate that the Pomos are pretentious phonies who give the Left a bad name among sensible people, Sokal stitched together an incoherent article that combined quotations from Pomo authors (including some of the editors of Social Text ) with nonsensical scientific analogies. Then he ponderously titled it "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," signed his name and title, and sent the monstrosity off. The editors, pleased to be taken seriously by a real scientist, published the article in a special issue titled "Science Wars," which had been meant to rebut their rationalist critics. Sokal then turned the Pomo counterattack into a debacle by gleefully revealing his hoax to the press in the May/June 1996 issue of the journal Lingua Franca.
The fun begins with Sokal's preposterous title and continues throughout his brilliant parody, but in the endnotes, he really lets rip. You can almost hear him cackling as he crafted these notes, with their superb mimicry of Pomo pieties, their interweaving of genuine references with fabricated sources, and their inside jokes (many of which no doubt will be accessible only to a handful of readers), all conducing to a delicious absurdity. (The very first item in the reference list is the infamous piece by Hunter Havelin Adams III from the African-American Baseline Essays, which Sokal cites with a straight face.) Here is a sample of Sokal's endnote style:
54. 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 (wsts provides a very different model
of how literary intellectuals might write about scientists. Horgan was an English major who abandoned literary criticism as pointless because it generates nothing but an endless variety of conflicting interpretations. He gravitated toward science as an activity that addresses questions that actually can be answered, and became a highly regarded writer for Scientific American. Far from challenging the objectivity of science, Horgan thinks its very success in discovering universal truth jeopardizes its future. The time is coming, he says, when the big questions that can be answered will have been answered. What will remain is details--fffilling in the pieces--aaand speculative theories invoking mathematical entities like superstrings whose physical existence may never be empirically testable.It is best not to take too literally this "end of science" thesis, which Horgan used as a conversation-opener to give his interviews a common focus. Horgan understands that science still has major puzzles to solve, including the origin of life, the nature of consciousness, and the composition of cold dark matter. His claim is primarily that those puzzles will be solved within the boundaries of present theories, without the need for revolutionary new discoveries. Referring to the standard scientific materialist account of evolution, Horgan explains in curiously religious language that
My guess is that this narrative that scientists have woven from their knowledge, this modern myth of creation, will be as viable 100 or even 1,000 years from now as it is today. Why? Because it is true. Moreover, given how far science has already come, and given the physical, social, and cognitive limits constraining further research, science is unlikely to make any significant additions to the knowledge it has already generated. There will be no great revelations in the future comparable to those bestowed upon us by Darwin or Einstein or Watson and Crick.Again, Christian theology provides a rough analogy. With the Incarnation, God has spoken definitively. The Holy Spirit still has a lot to do, but Christians expect no comparable future revelation, and we certainly do not expect revealed truth to be replaced by something substantially different. Thus both science and theology affirm that there is a fundamental reality behind the changing patterns of language and culture, and that true knowledge of that reality endures even though various interpretations are culture-bound. Horgan's prime example of a permanent truth is the Darwinian theory of evolution; I predict that Jesus Christ will be a living reality long after Darwinism has been relegated to the history curriculum.
There is a lot of middle ground between the "end of science" thesis and the "science is just another tribal belief system" thesis. Of course, science can transcend cultural differences to generate objective knowledge on some subjects. Rationalists like to point out that not even Pomos want to fly in an airplane designed by a committee picked for its multicultural diversity. Such examples can be misleading if applied too broadly, however. Science is determined to explain all aspects of reality, and that ambition sometimes tempts scientists to theorize extravagantly from part of the evidence, while ignoring or explaining away the facts that don't fit the theory. When scientists do that, they really are culture-bound producers of texts. Our children can look forward to finding out whether the major components of the modern myth of creation are as permanent as Horgan thinks, or whether the twenty-first century will experience not the end of science, but the transformation of science.
"Science Wars": A special issue of Social Text
Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2 (1996)The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age
By John Horgan
Helix Books/Addison-Wesley
308 pp.; $24
Copyright(c) 1996 by Christianity Today, Inc/BOOKS & CULTURE, journal
November/December 1996, Vol. 2, No. 6, Page 5Last Updated: October 24, 1996