Subject:      Alan Sokal (was Re: Academic Journals)
From:         tburke1@cc.swarthmore.edu (Timothy Burke)
Date:         1996/08/23
Message-Id:   <tburke1-2308960855010001@mac12.pearson.swarthmore.edu>
References:   <cm5Zlku00iWQA3uElA@andrew.cmu.edu> <321B0C11.3EC3@hdc.hha.dk>
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In article <321B0C11.3EC3@hdc.hha.dk>, thh@hdc.hha.dk wrote:

> I am ot quite sure what kicked off this discussion but I recently read
> something with regard to academic journals that I found quite
> interesting as not to say scary.
>
> It seems that the physicst Alan Sokal wrote an article with a lot of
> humanistic buzz words, used a lot of quotes and concluded something that
> he thought would be well received at the journal "Social Text", i.e.
> "the postmodernistic science's content and methodology is a strong
> interlectual claim for the progressive political project". The article
> itself is nonsense trying to unify quantum physic with psycho analysis.
> The title is breathtaking "Transgressing the boundaries: toward a
> transformative hermeneutics of quatum gravity" and should be found in
> the 1996 summer issue of Social Text.
>

Didja read it, by the way? This is another one of these things that more
people know about from various sources--some of them seizing upon the
controversy for their own reasons--but few have read. This is not to say
that the impression you give is wrong. The article is actually a weird mix
of incoherent pomo babble and fairly lucid if totally ridiculous claims
about the relativism of physical reality, mixed together with a few
egregious physics howlers that I assume were thrown in deliberately for
good measure.

The whole affair probably worth talking about here, given all of our
recent discussions about science and society. I will say that I normally
like -Social Text-, and that Sokal probably picked the wrong target, since
they often feature fairly clearly written articles which in fact scorn the
kind of post-ironic pomo gibberish that Sokal claimed to be aiming at.

However, I will also say that the editors of the journal completely blew
it in their response to the whole thing. When you're nailed, it's best to
do a little mea culpa dance and graciously concede the field for the day.
They simply should have said, "Well, you've made a very good point. We
were inexcusably careless and gave voice to a sentiment that we ourselves
scorn. It probably says that something is wrong as a whole with our
collective thinking about science and about jargon. Sorry, everyone. We'll
try and figure out how to prevent this in the future. (Couldn't you have
just sent us an email or something?)".

I do think Sokal is, like many scientists, reacting too aggressively and
monolithically to scholarship which insists that a) science is in the end,
like all human institutions, a social activity and b) it's worth exploring
what that means. (This is leaving aside the other issue Sokal raised, that
of the rise of jargon and its effect on progressive intellectual politics
in this country.) I really don't think most of these scholars are arguing
that there is no objective reality, at least, not as I read them. But they
are insisting that the social aspects of science are not merely "filters"
which inhibit or interfere with its objectivity, but fundamental aspects
of its collective enterprise.

There's an interesting article on the Sokal affair in the latest NY Review
of Books on this score. I'm afraid I'm forgetting the author, but he's a
scientist. I think he makes some terribly good points, including the one
which clearly most fundamental: if science is social, but there is also
objective reality, we have to be able to account for science's superior
ability to describe and manipulate that reality? Most of the
science-is-social camp are pretty well uninterested in thinking about
this, but it strikes me as an absolutely fundamental issue that should
drive inquiries into science as a form of knowledge. It's also clear that
some of the scholars who study science are themselves not terribly
scientifically literate; I think anytime you study a particular
'discourse' or form of social practice, you should do your damnedest to
get completely inside of it and see what makes it tick.

At the same time, I thought the NY Review of Books article overlooked the
key thing on the other side. There's a point in the article where the
author says, "Of course science is social, scientists all know that. We
know that it conditions what can be said and who says it." But he leaves
it like that, as if this was merely a bit of conventional wisdom or common
sense. Surely this is something profoundly worth investigating?

If, for example, you let something like Kuhn's idea of a paradigm loosely
inspire a historical look at science in a particular moment and place,
you'd have to see that in some profound sense, certain questions or
possibilities simply can't be asked even if they might be 'true'. This
isn't just a question of bias against which individuals must heroically
struggle; it's integral to the whole enterprise. And it's still possible,
in such a historical account, to show that 'objective reality' can
ultimately shatter the limitations of such a paradigm; contradictory data,
collected almost against the will of scientific investigators, can bring
it all crashing down. This, to my mind, is the sort of account which takes
the social aspects of science more seriously than dismissing them as a
minor and irksome form of 'bias' to be overcome. And that's what I think
many scholars studying science are trying to do, perhaps not always
successfully.