Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword
Sokal, Alan D.
Two years ago, Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted to the editors of Social Text a parody of "postmodernist" studies of natural science. The piece was accepted as a serious...
...Notes I Readers are cautioned not to infer my views on any subject except insofar as they are set forth in this Afterword...
...that the evidence is expressed (usually) in human language whose meaning may be ambiguous...
...Harding wishes to answer the question, "Are feminist criticisms of Western thought relevant to the natural sciences...
...A History of Computing Technology...
...If science were merely a negotiation of social conventions about what is agreed to be "true," why would I bother devoting a large fraction of my all-too-short life to it...
...I am aware that this wisecrack is unfair to the more sophisticated relativist philosophers of science, who will concede that empirical statements can be objectively true—for example, the fall from my window to the pavement will take approximately 2.5 seconds—but claim that the theoretical explanations of those empirical statements are more-or-less arbitrary social constructions...
...And postmodernism, as we know, has been loath to address the "real," except to announce its banishment...
...But why did I do it...
...Fair enough: scientists are in fact the first to advise skepticism in the face of other people's (and one's own) truth claims...
...That's true, unfortunately, and it's part of the reason that our society lacks a genuine, responsible, serious left-wing movement.° Perhaps that's unduly harsh, but there's unfortunately a significant kernel of truth in it...
...To what extent have the erroneous theories (if any) in computer science, quantum electronics, solidstate physics, and quantum mechanics been the result (in whole or in part) of social, economic, political, cultural and ideological factors, in particular the culture of militarism...
...Same question for the false statements erroneously believed to be true...
...17 Telepathy: Hastings and Hastings (1992, 518), American Institute of Public Opinion poll from June 1990...
...The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1993...
...Forman, Paul...
...To say that "physical reality is a social and linguistic construct" is just plain silly, but to say that "social reality is a social and linguistic construct" is virtually a tautology...
...19 Chomsky (1984, 200), lecture delivered in 1969...
...But such epistemological agnosticism simply won't suffice, at least not for people who aspire to make social change...
...That is because she conflates five quite distinct issues: • Ontology...
...Ross, Andrew...
...Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits...
...13 Ross (1991, 26...
...The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth . . . . Once you read Foucault as saying that truth is simply an effect of power, you've had it . . . . But American departments of literature, history and sociology contain large numbers of self-described leftists who have confused radical doubts about objectivity with political radicalism, and are in a mess.' Likewise, Eric Hobsbawm has decried the rise of "postmodernist" intellectual fashions in Western universities, particularly in departments of literature and anthropology, which imply that all "facts" claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions...
...Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince las, the editors of Social Text have discovered that my article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which appeared in Social Text #46/47, is a parody...
...Princeton diary...
...Holland, Walter W. et al., eds...
...15 Snow (1963, 20-21...
...New York: Routledge...
...Gross, Paul R. and Norman Levitt...
...2) human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process...
...Why do you think so...
...And the computer has had applications that are beneficial to society (such as allowing the postmodern cultural critic to produce her articles more efficiently) as well as applications that are harmful (such as allowing the U.S...
...1972...
...Individual ethics...
...1991...
...Snow's time: while humanist intellectuals' ignorance about (for example) mass and acceleration remains substantially unchanged, nowadays a significant minority of humanist intellectuals feels entitled to pontificate on these subjects in spite of their ignorance (perhaps trusting that their readers will be equally ignorant...
...But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely fundamental.' (Hobsbawm goes on to show how rigorous historical work can refute the fictions propounded by reactionary nationalists in India, Israel, the Balkans, and elsewhere...
...Williams, Michael R. 1985...
...In Cultural Studies, pp...
...How can human beings obtain knowledge of truths about the world...
...So maybe the worst science teaching is at the elementary and secondary levels...
...And finally, Stanislav Andreski: So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society...
...On quantum mechanics...
...that the meaning of conceptual categories (for exFAIL • 1996 • 97 Boundaries ample, childhood, masculinity, femininity, family, economics, etc...
...In the discussion following this paper, Ross (1992, 549) expressed further (and quite justified) misgivings: I'm quite skeptical of the "anything goes" spirit that is often the prevailing climate of relativism around postmodernism . . . . Much of the postmodernist debate has been devoted to grappling with the philosophical or cultural limits to the grand narratives of the Enlightenment...
...14 By the way, intelligent non-scientists seriously interested in the conceptual problems raised by quantum mechanics need no longer rely on the vulgarizations (in both senses) published by Heisenberg, Bohr, and sundry physicists and New Age authors...
...What types of research ought a scientist (or technologist) to undertake (or refuse to undertake...
...The militaristic orientation ofAmerican science has quite simply no bearing whatsoever on the ontological question, and only under a wildly implausible scenario could it have any bearing on the epistemological question...
...I live on the twenty-first floor...
...A more exhaustive treatment would take account of the local, qualifying differences between the realm of cultural taste and that of science [!], but it would run up, finally, against the stand-off between the empiricist's claim that non-context-dependent beliefs exist and that they can be true, and the culturalist's claim that beliefs are only socially accepted as true...
...The reader who does not find this uproariously funny (as well as depressing) is invited to sit in on the first two weeks of Physics I. 16 I wasn't joking about that [in my Social Text article...
...Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press...
...Snow, C.P...
...The new threat to history...
...531-555, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler...
...New York: Cambridge University Press...
...By far the largest difference was by education: only 24 percent of college graduates supported creationism, compared to 49 percent of high-school graduates and 52 percent of those with a grade-school education...
...military to kill human beings more efficiently...
...but I do not want to declare any of these questions a priori illegitimate...
...18 See Note 11 above...
...For example, Harding (citing Forman 1987) points out that American research in the 1940s and 1950s on quantum electronics was motivated in large part by potential military appli94 • DISSENT Boundaries cations...
...So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.'s A lot of the blame for this state of affairs rests, I think, with the scientists...
...For "astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives," it is 25-22-53...
...Andreski, Stanislay...
...And likewise for individual scientists and technologists...
...Here's Alan Ryan in 1992, concluding his wry analysis of American intellectual fashions with a lament that: the number of people who combine intellectual toughness with even a modest political radicalism is pitifully small...
...1994, 451...
...Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1994...
...Holland et al...
...Consider, for example, the following excerpt from a recent book on Rethinking Technologies, edited by the Miami Theory Collective and published by the University of Minnesota Press: "it now seems appropriate to reconsider the notions of acceleration and deceleration (what physicists call positive and negative speeds)" (Virilio 1993, 5...
...U.S...
...It has also served to increase the mean life expectancy in the United States from forty-seven years to seventy-six years in less than a century...
...This raises a host of social and individual ethical questions: Ought society to forbid (or discourage) certain applications of computers...
...Report to the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Nicaragua, Managua, unpublished...
...1993...
...but they don't prove anything like what she claims they do...
...189-206, edited by Carlos P. Otero...
...In Radical Priorities, 2nd ed., pp...
...So by no means do I claim that my comments about physics should apply directly to history and the social sciences...
...On solid-state physics...
...At the same time, Sokal sent Social Text an "Afterword," providing his own account of the political significance of the debate and inviting a response from the editors...
...Index to International Public Opinion, 1990-1991...
...The politicization of the university...
...Which, in a country that has George Bush as President and Danforth Quayle lined up for 1996, is not very funny...
...I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class...
...Bureau of the Census (1975, 47, 55...
...In 1995 it is 76.3 years (77.0 years for whites, 70.3 years for blacks...
...How can they assess the reliability of that knowledge...
...Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970...
...EDS...
...1993...
...Ask an average undergraduate: Is matter composed of atoms...
...1993...
...Social Text declined to publish the piece, and Sokal sent it to us...
...The reader can fill in the response...
...In particular, the fact that I have parodied an extreme or ambiguously stated version of an idea does not exclude that I may agree with a more nuanced or precisely stated version of the same idea...
...1987...
...A quarter-century ago, at the height of the U.S...
...If you think about ecological questions in this light, however, then you are talking about "real" physical, or material, limits to our resources for encouraging social growth...
...The response was cold: it was also negative...
...At this point Ross may object that I am rigging the power game in my own favor: how is he, a professor of American studies, to compete with me, a physicist, in a discussion of quantum mechanics...
...Virilio, Paul...
...London Review of Books (26 March): 21...
...For example, if the worldwide community of solid-state physicists, following what it believes to be the conventional standards of scientific evidence, were to hastily accept an erroneous theory of semiconductor behavior because of its enthusiasm for the breakthrough in military technology that this theory would make possible...
...But a sophomoric skepticism, a bland (or blind) agnosticism, won't get you anywhere...
...Oxford Textbook of Public Health, 3 vols...
...Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's...
...Likewise, sociological questions arise, for example: To what extent is our (true) knowledge of computer science, quantum electronics, solid-state physics, and quantum mechanics—and our lack of knowledge about other scientific subjects, for example, the global climate—a result of publicpolicy choices favoring militarism...
...Ithaca: Cornell University Press...
...Bureau of the Census 1975, 224-225...
...The issues at stake are too important to be left to the capitalists or to the scientists—or to the postmodernists...
...But they have no effect whatsoever on the underlying scientific questions: whether atoms (and silicon crystals, transistors, and computers) really do behave according to the laws of quantum mechanics (and solid-state physics, quantum electronics, and computer science...
...London: André Deutsch...
...Creationism: Gallup (1993, 157-159), Gallup poll from June 1993...
...New York: Greenwood Press...
...Differences by sex, race, region, income, and (surprisingly) religion were rather small...
...In view of the important intellectual and political issues raised by this episode, I have written this (nonparodic) Afterword, in which I explain my motives and my true views.' One of my goals is to make a small contribution toward a dialogue on the left between humanists and natural scientists—" two cultures" that contrary to some optimistic pronouncements (mostly by the former group) are probably farther apart in mentality than at any time in the past fifty years...
...I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific 96 • DISSENT Boundaries equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language...
...Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.' s an example of "confused thinking," I would like to consider a chapter from Sandra Harding's Whose Science...
...Gallup, George H. 1982...
...Chomsky, Noam...
...The same evidentiary standards of course apply to past erroneous theories...
...U.S...
...Works Cited Albert, David Z. 1992...
...New Age technocultures...
...it is, above all, history and the social sciences—and leftist politics—that suffer when verbal game-playing displaces the rigorous analysis of social realities...
...entitled "Why 'Physics' Is a Bad Model for Physics...
...The natural sciences: Trouble ahead...
...1991).] But—without discounting the role of social struggles in these improvements, particularly as concerns the narrowing of the racial gap—the underlying and overwhelming cause of these improvements is quite obviously the vast increase in the material standard of living over the past century, by more than a factor of five (U.S...
...We print it here because we think that the political issues are both engrossing and important...
...What objects exist in the world...
...I am aware that this assertion is likely to be misinterpreted, so let me engage in some pre-emptive clarification...
...And this increase is quite obviously the direct result of science, as embodied in technology...
...2° Four years later, with Bill Clinton installed as our supposedly "progressive" president and Newt Gingrich already preparing for the new millennium, it still isn't funny...
...Washington: Government Printing Office...
...also in Ross (1992, 536...
...Ryan, Alan...
...Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall...
...Ross, Andrew...
...5 Ryan (1992...
...changes over time...
...Les grandes personnes sont décidement Bien bizarres, se dit le petit prince...
...In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction...
...While the basic epistemology of inquiry ought to be roughly the same for the natural and social sciences, I am of course perfectly aware that many special (and very difficult) methodological issues arise in the social sciences from the fact that the objects of inquiry are human beings (including their subjective states of mind...
...A large fraction (possibly the dominant part) of the increase—especially in the first three decades of the twentieth century—is due to the general improvement in the standards of housing, nutrition, and public sanitation (the latter two informed by improved scientific understanding of the etiology of infectious and dietarydeficiency diseases...
...1987...
...The 486 PC sitting today on the literary theorist's desk is roughly a thousand times more powerful than the room-sized vacuum-tube computer IBM 704 from 1954 (see e.g...
...No wonder most Americans can't distinguish between science and pseudoscience: their science teachers have never given them any rational grounds for doing so...
...Rather, my concern is explicitly political: to combat a currently fashionable postmodernist/poststructuralist/ social-constructivist discourse—and more generally a penchant for subjectivism—which is, I believe, inimical to the values and future of the left.' Alan Ryan said it well: It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida...
...1963...
...Social Text editor Andrew Ross has drawn an analogy between the hierarchical taste cultures (high, middlebrow, and popular) familiar to cultural critics, and the demarcation between science and pseudoscience.'° At a sociological level this is an incisive observation, but at an ontological and epistemological level it is simply absurd...
...9 Ross notes, Cultural critics have, for some time now, been faced with the task of exposing similar vested inFALL • 1996 • 95 Boundaries stitutional interests in the debates about class, gender, race, and sexual preference that touch upon the demarcations between taste cultures, and I see no ultimate reason for us to abandon our hardearned skepticism when we confront science...
...As Ross has noted,' 8 many of the central political issues of the coming decades—from health care to global warming to third world development—depend in part on subtle (and hotly debated) questions of scientific fact...
...9 These are all serious questions, which deserve careful investigation adhering to the highest standards of scientific and historical evidence...
...that these objects of inquiry have intentions (including in some cases the concealment of evidence or the placement of deliberately self-serving evidence...
...Quantum Mechanics and Experience...
...Sokal, Alan...
...1975...
...But it is equally true that I would be unlikely to win a debate with a professional historian on the causes of World War I. Nevertheless, as an intelligent lay person with a modest knowledge of history, I am capable of evaluating the evidence and logic offered by competing historians and of coming to some sort of reasoned (albeit tentative) judgment...
...11 Ross (1991, 26...
...Informe sobre el plan de estudios de las carreras de Matemática, Estadistica y Computación...
...For "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil," it is 49-16-35...
...Gallup, George Jr...
...FAIL • 1996 • 99...
...I select this example both because of Harding's prestige in certain (but by no means all) feminist circles, and because her essay is (unlike much of this genre) very clearly written...
...8 Computers existed prior to solid-state technology, but they were unwieldy and slow...
...London: Verso...
...Deny that non-contextdependent assertions can be true, and you don't just throw out quantum mechanics and molecular biology: you also throw out the Nazi gas chambers, the American enslavement of Africans, and the fact that today in New York it's raining...
...but in this case the scientists may have already performed the second task, relieving the cultural critic of the need to do so from scratch...
...Cambridge: Harvard University Press...
...1991...
...A poll from July 1982 (Gallup 1982, 208-214) found almost identical figures, but gave breakdowns by sex, race, education, region, age, income, religion, and community size...
...also in Ross (1992, 535...
...For another sharp critique of the poor teaching of mathematics and science, see (irony of ironies) Gross and Levitt (1994, 23-28...
...The editors of Social Text, and anyone else with an interest in the politics of postmodernism and of modern science, are invited to respond...
...Social Sciences as Sorcery...
...6 Hobsbawm (1993, 63...
...Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics...
...1991...
...Some of her rebuttals are perfectly well-taken...
...1992...
...The trouble is that few non-scientists in our society feel this self-confidence when dealing with scientific matters...
...none are invented...
...Montreal: Black Rose Books...
...4 The natural sciences have little to fear, at least in the short run, from postmodernist silliness...
...The exact question was: "Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings: (1) human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process...
...2 For example: "linear," "nonlinear," "local," "global," "multidimensional," "relative," "frame of reference," "field," "anomaly," "chaos," "catastrophe," "logic," "irrational," "imaginary," "complex," "real," "equality," "choice...
...I think that this view is also largely wrong, but that is a much longer discussion...
...The results were 35 percent developed with God, 98 • DISSENT Boundaries 11 percent developed without God, 47 percent God created in present form, 7 percent no opinion...
...Williams 1985...
...The third interval: A critical transition...
...Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order...
...1994, 87...
...The Two Cultures: And A Second Look...
...In 1900 the mean life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years (47.6 years for whites, and a shocking 33.0 years for "Negro and other...
...Forbid (or discourage) research on quantum electronics...
...10 Ross (1991, 25-26...
...Thinking from Women's Lives...
...Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18: 149-229...
...I am not claiming that all of the increase in life expectancy is due to advances in scientific medicine...
...Epistemology...
...Still, Ross is correct that, at a sociological level, maintaining the demarcation line between science and pseudoscience serves—among other things—to maintain the social power of those who, whether or not they have formal scientific credentials, stand on science's side of the line...
...1992...
...But they don't depend only on scientific fact: they depend also on ethical values and—in this journal it hardly needs to be added—on naked economic interests...
...Sociology of knowledge...
...3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so...
...Whose Science...
...Without that ability, how could any thoughtful person justify being politically active...
...Harding, Sandra...
...20 Ryan (1992...
...Nowadays the erotic text tends to be written in (broken) French rather than Chinese, but the real-life consequences remain the same...
...1994...
...Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources...
...Nevertheless, because of the limitations of my own expertise, my analysis here will be restricted to the natural sciences (and indeed primarily to the physical sciences...
...Sokal then "exposed" the hoax in an article in Lingua Franca (May/June 1996), provoking a new debate, to which many scientists, social scientists, and philosophers have contributed...
...The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1982...
...Social ethics...
...12 U.S...
...For reviews of the evidence, see e.g...
...I also employed some other strategies that are well established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre: appeals to authority in lieu of logic, speculative theories passed off as established science, strained and even absurd analogies, rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous, and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words.' (N.B...
...The piece was accepted as a serious contribution to the debate about reason, objectivity, realism, and perspectivism, and published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, devoted to the "Science Wars...
...As C.P...
...One significant change has taken place since C.P...
...Bureau of the Census...
...1994...
...Or even of nuclear power— a subject on which I have no expertise whatsoever...
...New York Review of Books (16 December): 62-64...
...3-12, edited by Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Miami Theory Collective...
...1984...
...Now, quantum mechanics made possible solid-state physics, which in turn made possible quantum electronics (for example, the transistor), which made possible nearly all of modern technology (for example, the computer...
...The little book of Albert (1992) provides an impressively serious and intellectually honest account of quantum mechanics and the philosophical issues it raises—yet it requires no more mathematical background than a modicum of high-school algebra, and does not require any prior knowledge of physics...
...She does so by raising, and then rebutting, six "false beliefs" about the nature of science...
...Clearly, an affirmative answer to these questions becomes harder to justify as one goes down the list...
...Behind quantum electronics: National security as basis for physical research in the United States, 1940-1960...
...The teaching of mathematics and science is often authoritariae and this is antithetical not only to the principles of radical/democratic pedagogy but to the principles of science itself...
...Hastings, Elizabeth Hann and Philip K. Hastings, eds...
...Hobsbawm is right: facts do matter, and some facts (like the first two cited here) matter a great deal...
...True enough...
...P.S...
...1992...
...In Rethinking Technologies, pp...
...Oxford: Oxford University Press...
...For anyone who is interested in my views, I would be glad to provide a copy of Sokal (1987...
...These questions are obviously related—for example, if there are no objective truths about the world, then there isn't much point in asking how one can know those (nonexistent) truths— but they are conceptually distinct...
...The main requirement is a willingness to think slowly and clearly...
...Forbid (or discourage) research on computers per se...
...also in Ross (1992, 535-536...
...What types of research ought society to encourage, subsidize, or publicly fund (or alternatively to discourage, tax, or forbid...
...Academic Questions 7(2): 1329...
...Bureau of the Census...
...Snow observed in his famous "Two Cultures" lecture thirty-five years ago: A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists...
...3 By the way, anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment...
...Ross seems to recognize this, because he immediately says: I do not want to insist on a literal interpretation of this analogy...
...Mercifully, only 11 percent believe in channeling (22 percent are not sure), and 7 percent in the healing power of pyramids (26 percent not sure...
...7 Andreski (1972, 90...
...Whose Knowledge...
...Washington: Government Printing Office...
...Whose Knowledge...
...Hobsbawm, Eric...
...Is it then any surprise that 36 percent of Americans believe in telepathy, and that 47 percent believe in the creation account of Genesis...
...Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources...
...Concerning "telepathy, or communication between minds without using the traditional five senses," 36 percent "believe in," 25 percent are "not sure," and 39 percent "do not believe in...
...that the goal of historical inquiry is not just facts but interpretation, etc...
...What statements about these objects are true...
...Like the genre it is meant to satirize— myriad exemplars of which can be found in my reference list—my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever...
...And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naïvely, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover FALL • 1996 • 93 Boundaries some of them...
...invasion of Vietnam, Noam Chomsky observed that George Orwell once remarked that political thought, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters...
...I don't aspire to be the Emily Post of quantum field theory.') But my main concern isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you...
...But critics wishing to make such a case would have to provide not only historical evidence ofthe claimed cultural influence, but also scientific evidence that the theory in question is in fact erroneous...
...All works cited in my article are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate...
...Cultural critics, like historians or scientists, need an informed skepticism, one that can evaluate evidence and logic and come to reasoned (albeit tentative) judgments based on that evidence and logic...
...Sadly, there are only a handful of the latter: I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack...
...No left can be effective unless it takes seriously questions of scientific fact and of ethical values and of economic interests...
...To what extent are the truths known (or knowable) by humans in any given society influenced (or determined) by social, economic, political, cultural, and ideological factors...
...9 I certainly don't exclude the possibility that present theories in any of these subjects might be erroneous...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
