What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove


Alan D. Sokal
Department of Physics
New York University
4 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003 USA
Internet:
Telephone: (212) 998-7729
Fax: (212) 995-4016

April 8, 1997

To appear in
A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science,
edited by Noretta Koertge (Oxford University Press, 1998)

I did not write this work merely with the aim of setting the exegetical record straight. My larger target is those contemporaries who -- in repeated acts of wish-fulfillment -- have appropriated conclusions from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety of social cum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted. Feminists, religious apologists (including ``creation scientists''), counterculturalists, neoconservatives, and a host of other curious fellow-travelers have claimed to find crucial grist for their mills in, for instance, the avowed incommensurability and underdetermination of scientific theories. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

-- Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism[1]

I confess to some embarrassment at being asked to contribute an introductory essay to this collection of critical studies in the history, sociology and philosophy of science. After all, I'm neither a historian nor a sociologist nor a philosopher; I'm merely a theoretical physicist with an amateur interest in the philosophy of science and perhaps some modest skill at thinking clearly. Social Text co-founder Stanley Aronowitz was, alas, absolutely right when he called me ``ill-read and half-educated.''[2]

My own contribution to this field began, as the reader undoubtedly knows, with an unorthodox (and admittedly uncontrolled) experiment. I wrote a parody of postmodern science criticism, entitled ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'', and submitted it to the cultural-studies journal Social Text (of course without telling the editors that it was a parody). They published it as a serious scholarly article in their spring 1996 special issue devoted to what they call the ``Science Wars''.[3] Three weeks later I revealed the hoax in an article in Lingua Franca[4], and all hell broke loose.[5]

In this essay I'd like to discuss briefly what I think the ``Social Text affair'' does and does not prove. But first, to fend off the accusation that I'm an arrogant physicist who rejects all sociological intrusion on our ``turf'', I'd like to lay out some positive things that I think social studies of science can accomplish. The following propositions are, I hope, noncontroversial:

1) Science is a human endeavor, and like any other human endeavor it merits being subjected to rigorous social analysis. Which research problems count as important; how research funds are distributed; who gets prestige and power; what role scientific expertise plays in public-policy debates; in what form scientific knowledge becomes embodied in technology, and for whose benefit -- all these issues are strongly affected by political, economic and to some extent ideological considerations, as well as by the internal logic of scientific inquiry. They are thus fruitful subjects for empirical study by historians, sociologists, political scientists and economists.

2) At a more subtle level, even the content of scientific debate -- what types of theories can be conceived and entertained, what criteria are to be used for deciding between competing theories -- is constrained in part by the prevailing attitudes of mind, which in turn arise in part from deep-seated historical factors. It is the task of historians and sociologists of science to sort out, in each specific instance, the roles played by ``external'' and ``internal'' factors in determining the course of scientific development. Not surprisingly, scientists tend to stress the ``internal'' factors while sociologists tend to stress the ``external'', if only because each group tends to have a poor grasp on the other group's concepts. But these problems are perfectly amenable to rational debate.

3) There is nothing wrong with research informed by a political commitment, as long as that commitment does not blind the researcher to inconvenient facts. Thus, there is a long and honorable tradition of socio-political critique of science[6], including antiracist critiques of anthropological pseudo-science and eugenics[7] and feminist critiques of psychology and parts of medicine and biology.[8] These critiques typically follow a standard pattern: First one shows, using conventional scientific arguments, why the research in question is flawed according to the ordinary canons of good science; then, and only then, one attempts to explain how the researchers' social prejudices (which may well have been unconscious) led them to violate these canons. Of course, each such critique has to stand or fall on its own merits; having good political intentions doesn't guarantee that one's analysis will constitute good science, good sociology or good history. But this general two-step approach is, I think, sound; and empirical studies of this kind, if conducted with due intellectual rigor, could shed useful light on the social conditions under which good science (defined normatively as the search for truths or at least approximate truths about the world) is fostered or hindered.[9]

Now, I don't want to claim that these three points exhaust the field of fruitful inquiry for historians and sociologists of science, but they certainly do lay out a big and important area. And yet, some sociologists and literary intellectuals over the past two decades have gotten greedier: roughly speaking, they want to attack the normative conception of scientific inquiry as a search for truths or approximate truths about the world; they want to see science as just another social practice, which produces ``narrations'' and ``myths'' that are no more valid than those produced by other social practices; and some of them want to argue further that these social practices encode a bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist world-view. Of course, like all brief summaries this one is an oversimplification; and in any case there is no canonical doctrine in the ``new'' sociology of science, just a bewildering variety of individuals and schools. More importantly, the task of summarization is here made more difficult by the fact that this literature is often ambiguous in crucial ways about its most fundamental claims (as I'll illustrate later using the cases of Latour and Barnes-Bloor). Still, I think most scientists and philosophers of science would be astonished to learn that ``the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge'', as prominent sociologist of science Harry Collins claims[10]; or that ``reality is the consequence rather than the cause'' of the so-called ``social construction of facts'', as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar assert.[11]

With this preamble out of the way, I'd now like to consider what (if anything) the ``Social Text affair'' proves -- and also what it does not prove, because some of my over-enthusiastic supporters have claimed too much. In this analysis, it's crucial to distinguish between what can be deduced from the fact of publication and what can be deduced from the content of the article.

From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced. It doesn't prove that the whole field of cultural studies, or cultural studies of science -- much less sociology of science -- is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case, but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only that the editors of one rather marginal journal were derelict in their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because it came from a ``conveniently credentialed ally'' (as Social Text co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted[12]), flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions, and attacked their ``enemies''.[13]

To which, one might justifiably respond: So what?[14]

The answer comes from examining the content of the parody. In this regard, one important point has gotten lost in much of the discussion of my article: Yes, the article is screamingly funny -- I'm not modest, I'm proud of my work -- but the most hilarious parts of my article were not written by me. Rather, they're direct quotes from the postmodern Masters, whom I shower with mock praise. In fact, the article is structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics (and the philosophy of mathematics and physics) from some of the most prominent French and American intellectuals; my only contribution was to invent a nonsensical argument linking these quotations together and praising them. This involved, of course, advocating an incoherent mishmash of trendy ideas -- deconstructive literary theory, New Age ecology, so-called ``feminist epistemology''[15], extreme social-constructivist philosophy of science, even Lacanian psychoanalysis -- but that just made the parody all the more fun. Indeed, in some cases I took the liberty of parodying extreme or ambiguously stated versions of views that I myself hold in a more moderate and precisely stated form.

Now, what precisely do I mean by ``silliness''? Here's a very rough categorization: First of all, one has meaningless or absurd statements, name-dropping, and the display of false erudition. Secondly, one has sloppy thinking and poor philosophy, which come together notably (though not always) in the form of glib relativism.

The first of these categories wouldn't be so important, perhaps, if we were dealing with a few assistant professors of literature making fools of themselves holding forth on quantum mechanics or Gödel's theorem. It becomes more relevant because we're dealing with important intellectuals, at least as measured by shelf space in the cultural-studies section of university bookstores. Here, for instance, are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari holding forth on chaos theory:

To slow down is to set a limit in chaos to which all speeds are subject, so that they form a variable determined as abscissa, at the same time as the limit forms a universal constant that cannot be gone beyond (for example, a maximum degree of contraction). The first functives are therefore the limit and the variable, and reference is a relationship between values of the variable or, more profoundly, the relationship of the variable, as abscissa of speeds, with the limit.[16]

And there's much more -- Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray on differential topology, Jean-François Lyotard on cosmology, Michel Serres on nonlinear time -- but let me not spoil the fun.[17] (By the way, if you worry that I'm quoting out of context, just follow my footnotes, look up the originals, and decide for yourself. You'll find that these passages are even worse in context than out of context.)

Nor is all the nonsense of French origin. Connoisseurs of fashionable American work in the Cultural Studies of Science will, I think, find ample food for thought.

Fine, the Science Studies contingent might now object: maybe some of our friends in the English Department take Lacan or Deleuze seriously, but no one in our community does. True enough; but then take a look at Bruno Latour's semiotic analysis of the theory of relativity, published in Social Studies of Science, in which ``Einstein's text is read as a contribution to the sociology of delegation''.[18] Why's that? Because Latour finds Einstein's popular book on relativity full of situations in which the author delegates one observer to stand on the platform and make certain measurements, and another observer to stand on the train and make certain measurements; and of course the results won't obey the Lorentz transformations unless the two observers do what they're told! You think I exaggerate? Latour emphasizes Einstein's

obsession with transporting information through transformations without deformation; his passion for the precise superimposition of readings; his panic at the idea that observers sent away might betray, might retain privileges, and send reports that could not be used to expand our knowledge; his desire to discipline the delegated observers and to turn them into dependent pieces of apparatus that do nothing but watch the coincidence of hands and notches ...[19]

Furthermore, because Latour doesn't understand what the term ``frame of reference'' means in physics -- he confuses it with ``actor'' in semiotics -- he claims that relativity cannot deal with the transformation laws between two frames of reference, but needs at least three:

If there are only one, or even two, frames of reference, no solution can be found ... Einstein's solution is to consider three actors: one in the train, one on the embankment and a third one, the author [enunciator] or one of its representants, who tries to superimpose the coded observations sent back by the two others.[20]

Finally, Latour somehow got the idea that relativity concerns the problems raised by the relative location (rather than the relative motion) of different observers. (Of course, even the word ``observer'' here is potentially misleading; it belongs to the pedagogy of relativity, not to the theory itself.) Here is Latour's summary of the meaning of relativity:

provided the two relativities [special and general] are accepted, more frames of reference with less privilege can be accessed, reduced, accumulated and combined, observers can be delegated to a few more places in the infinitely large (the cosmos) and the infinitely small (electrons), and the readings they send will be understandable. His [Einstein's] book could well be titled: ``New Instructions for Bringing Back Long-Distance Scientific Travellers''.[21]

I needn't pursue the point: Professor Huth's essay in this volume provides a sober and detailed exegesis of Latour's confusions about relativity. The upshot is that Latour has produced 40 pages of comical misunderstandings of a theory that is nowadays routinely taught to intelligent college freshmen, and Social Studies of Science found it a worthy scholarly contribution.

OK, enough for examples of nonsense (although a lot more are available). More interesting intellectually, I think, are the sloppy thinking and glib relativism that have become prevalent in many parts of Science Studies (albeit not, by and large, among serious philosophers of science). When one analyzes these writings, one often finds radical-sounding assertions whose meaning is ambiguous, and which can be given two alternate readings: one as interesting, radical, and grossly false; the other as boring and trivially true.