Mooney and Sokal

It's a bit overstated to claim that Sokal "expos[ed] the ignorant anti-science posturing of some post-modern humanities scholarship"--first, I can't think of any postmodernists who are "anti-science" (that's the hallmark of our friends on the far right); second, the reasons for Sokal's inclusion in the infamous issue of Social Text are a bit more nuanced (essentially, the editors included his piece in an issue on lit theory and science because they were interested in an actual scientist doing theoretical work-they were aware of the many weaknesses of his article, which, BTW, he refused to revise for publication, as the proposed edits would defeat the purpose ofhis gambit.)

Also, the Sokal Hoax has becaome an oft-wielded club for anti-academic conseravites to pummel the academy, and humanities departments specifically; it's a good idea to think about this incident more clearly so we don't give them more ammo.

Thefix: There are plenty of postmodernists who are anti-science. Spend a few days in a graduate humanities department and you'll see what I'm talking about. Just try to introduce scientific methods into social science research and you're guaranteed to hear from them. Ask them what they think about evolutionary psychology. You'll get an earful.

The left's most prominent weakness vis-a-vis science would probably be in the area of genetically modified food. If putting a bit of a frog in your tomato makes it cheaper to produce, many scientists say why not? But many in the public and the left of the political spectrum are much more hesitant.

More broadly, I guess I don't get so hot under the collar about 'wars on science' in the abstract. Politics is a war on science. Trade politics is a war on the theory of comparative advantage. AIPAC and co are a war on the academia's consensus view of the colonisation of Palestine. etc etc etc.

I gotta say, it speaks to what a doorknob Sokal is that he treats pomo trends in literature and sociology from a decade ago as threats even remotely as serious as the stuff that Mooney's on about. Like a few poetry profs are really going to bring science to its knees.

I wish thefix were right. It's true that the most influential forces against science are on the right, but I saw Sokal on a platform with S. Aronowitz, the editor of social text, at the height of the Sokal hoax controversy. There was a lot of anti-science ignorance on display by self-styled men and women of the left that day--really really foolish stuff. Sokal didn't give right wingers a club with which to pummel progressives in academia, the people whose embarassingly silly views he exposed did that.

Spend a few days in a graduate humanities department and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Overgeneralize much? I spend my whole working life in a graduate humanities department (philosophy) and you'll get no basis for your statements there. Admittedly, most of the philosophers of biology I know aren't big on some strands of evolutionary psychology, but that's because they don't think it's good science, not because of some hostility to science itself.

"Ask them what they think about evolutionary psychology. You'll get an earful."

Advantage, crazy lefty pomo lit crits!

Of course there's a certain resentment toward science to be found in many contemporary humanities departments - though I suspect it's a byproduct of reasonable criticisms of the historical contingency of scientific belief in practice, and not necessarily part of a grand 'anti-science' agenda. Fact is, many scholars who take it upon themselves to write critiques of science/engineering practice don't actually have any expertise in the areas under discussion, and the ham-fisted 'master narrative' critiques ring false as a result. (Not to mention the dull-edged talk of 'faith' in science, which really does smack of the desire to bring the status of scientific knowledge down to that literary judgment - embarrassing.) At the same time, much superb work has been done on the thorny history of scientific knowledge, with its paths-not-taken and generative competition, which probably benefits to an extent from the outsider status of historians talking about science. But a tendency to constantly hit the refrain of 'unknowability' and focus on the 'mythical' character of scientific findings is a bad stain on the field of science studies. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing as always.

Sokal's book with Bricmont, Academic Impostures, is interesting - a sustained attack on a handful of well-known Theorists whose invocation of science has historically been shoddy and (at times) merely in every way wrong. There's two sections to the book as I recall, one a broader set of questions about epistemology. Something in there for a very small Everyone. The Social Text paper made the journal and its associated constellation of academic fields look bad - and my sense, reading the essays around the affair, is that the reviewers at the journal did not have an idea what they were publishing. They responded to his silly metaphors and weren't in a position to criticize the science; Sokal had a right to crow about it. But it was in the end a small thing, proving little but calling attention to much - and that's where we find the difference between the resentful Righties who use the Sokal hoax to bludgeon the academy in general, as part of a broader reactionary program for education, and the implicated Lefties who were merely uninformed and (in some senses) bad scholars.

Seems like a good op-ed, by the way.

Matt Weiner: so "most" of the philosophers of biology you know aren't big on "some" strands of evolutionary psychology? That's so vague I think you could say that about any topic of research. I'm not big on "some strands" of evolutionary psychology either. For example, I'm not big on white supremacists who claim support from genetics. But surely you are familiar with the left wing hysteria against sociobiology, i.e. against ALL strands of evolutionary biology?

Let me give you another example of what I'm talking about. In any poliical science department in the land you will find some people who oppose all use of statistical methods because it smacks of "positivism". For some, as soon as you can apply the label "positivist" to something, that means its case closed. That's what I'm talking about.

One of the people "caught up" in the Sokal imbroglio was Michael Bérubé, yet Professor Bérubé has a reasonably good grasp of, e.g., special relativity, and is in no way intrinsically anti-science. This was a large part of the problem with that incident: the broadness of the brush used. Which is why it's good to see Professor Sokal focus on the real enemies of reason and progress.

And yes, some of us have encountered the fringe school of thought that the electron is purely a social construct of the white Western patriarchy. But that's on the fringe. Few undergrads are getting this sort of thing in their humanities requirements. And its proponents sure aren't US senators, or appointees to run federal agencies.

And besides,

Ask them what they think about evolutionary psychology. You'll get an earful.

As david notes, advantage, postmodernists!

Admittedly, most of the philosophers of biology I know aren't big on some strands of evolutionary psychology, but that's because they don't think it's good science, not because of some hostility to science itself.

Hell, I and many of my fellow life scientists aren't big on a great many strands of evolutionary psychology, but that's because we don't think it's good science. Weird how the modern right wing venerates evolutionary psychologists while empowering creationists and spewing illiterate screeds at climate scientists. Wait, no, it's not weird at all.

Sigh.

mds: so you and many of your fellow life scientists aren't big on "a great many" strands of evolutionary psychology. So, like Mr. Weiner, presumably that means that there are some that you are ok with.

However, In many humanities departments you will find many people who are opposed to ALL evolutionary psychology

Advantage: The Fool.

QED

You can fill in the blanks in the following statement with anything:

Many _________ researchers aren't big on many strands of _______.

Talk about vacuous.

For the record, like Sokal, I oppose the right wing and I oppose creationism. I also oppose misguided lefties who throw the epistemological baby out with the bath water, leaving intellectual argumentation as nothing more than a rhetorical tournament of the silver-tongued.

Weiner: didn't you learn anything at ANU?

I haven't the Sokal/Bricmont book, though I did read a lot of the material on the Social Text thing a few years ago (I was considering using it as the topic for a paper in a philosophy of science course). While I found Sokal's hoax moderately amusing, and enjoy seeing Stanley Fish made to look silly, and I think there's a very real and valid point about the misuse and misunderstanding of scientific research and concepts by careless or dishonest philosophers...

A lot of the time I get the sense that actual scientists who are bristling against what seem to me to be relatively mild claims made by philosophers of science don't particularly grasp the nature of the claims.

The Fool: You seem a bit confused about what supports and what refutes your claim.

You said that spending a few days in a graduate humanities department would illustrate postmodernist anti-scientism. You adduced hostility to evolutionary psychology as an example.

I pointed out that there were plenty of graduate humanities departments for this was not true: the philosophy departments I'd been in. I conceded that there are people in those departments who are hostile to some strains of evolutionary psychology, but said that this was not a bad thing.

You are now admitting that hostility to some strands of EP are OK. So it seems that the graduate humanities departments I mentioned aren't anti-science. This means that your original statement was an overgeneralization, as I said.

You seem pretty confused on a lot of other issues, though. You give as "another example of what I'm talking about" an alleged fact about political science departments. But political science departments are social science departments, not humanities departments. So even if true this wouldn't support your hypothesis.

You also speak of "the left wing hysteria against sociobiology, i.e. against ALL strands of evolutionary biology?" I'm going to assume the last word should be "psychology," because otherwise this makes no sense; but it's still wrong. Sociobology is not the totality of evolutionary psychology. As this paper (google cache of a pdf) discusses, sociobiology is one phase in the development of evolutionary psychology in the broad sense, meaning treatments of psychology in terms of evolution. Evolutionary Psychology in the narrow sense, the "strands" I was referring to that aren't popular among my former colleagues, is a successor to sociobiology. My colleagues criticize this narrower EP because they feel that some of its tenets, e.g. the massive modularity of mind thesis, aren't well supported. And I believe the wider revulsion against evolutionary psychology is in large part a reaction to dubious popularizations of the already contentious approaches of sociobiology and narrow EP; it can hardly be taken as a sign of a more general hostility to science. (Otherwise life scientists like mds would hardly agree with it.)

Good day.

[On preview I see that The Fool, who I suspect to be the Troll of Sorrow, shows enough interest in me to follow around where I've spent time. On one level, I'm flattered; on another, get stuffed. Anyway, I hope the above bit about sociobiology and EP can be useful to some people; anyone really interested should read the Griffiths paper I linked, as this isn't my field.]

The biggest anti-science beliefs on the left (and these are by no means held by all of the left) usually have to do with alternative medicine or conspiracy-based paranoid hysteria ("Big Pharma's suppressing cancer cure DCA!","Mercury causes autism!","Frankenfoods!"). I agree that none of these are as big a problem as righties disagreeing with fundamental biology or climate change denialism, but the left's problems still tend to piss me off more than the right's.

Weiner:

I'm sorry I didn't make the same fine terminoloigcal distinctions you did in my blog commenting (guffaw!). I thought we were kind of loosely talking about the humanities versus the sciences, in which case I would lump departments of government/political science in along with the humanities. Your particular field, philosophy, is the one "humanities" department which which is not a notable offender on this score, so maybe I'm just referring to phenomena outside of your personal experience.

Sorry I don't have time to read the paper you link to and how it classifies research in evolutionary posychology. Again, I apologize for not making the same fine distinctions in my blog post as you would have (snicker). Most evolutionary psychologists would grant that their field began with what was formerly known as "sociobiology" but is now known as "evolutionary psychology" since the term "sociobiology" has been so unfairly but quite effectively slimed back in the 70's and 80's.

Also, for the record, I am not the Troll of Sorrow or any other kind of troll. I have posted lefty comments on lefty blogs under the same name for as long as there have been lefty blogs.

"Just try to introduce scientific methods into social science research and you're guaranteed to hear from them."

I stopped that stupidity when I saw Agreste as a required text for sociology graduate students.

"Ask them what they think about evolutionary psychology. You'll get an earful."

That's already been sufficiently covered, so I'll pass.

I am not the Troll of Sorrow

I apologize for the misidentification. I still find your addressing me as "Weiner" rude (other people do that, but they're not insulting me as they do it), and your gratuitous mention of my time at ANU off-putting.

As for the main contention, you seem to have conceded that you were overgeneralizing about humanities departments (since your critique doesn't apply to philosophy), and it seems likely to me that you are overgeneralizing in other respects too.

Weiner: sorry for the ANU crack. I just assumed that someone who studied philosophy at ANU would be familiar with the writings of someone like Michael Devitt and thus would understand that there is a creditable argument to be made that many postmodernists are anti-science.

sorry for the ANU crack.

OK. I was only there for three weeks, doing work on probability mostly. And I don't deny that many postmodernists have an anti-science bent, I'm just not sure how monolithic their influence is. And EP isn't a good test case, partly because of the slipperiness of the terms, which makes it hard to tell just what people are hostile to.

The influence of moonbat humanities profs may pale to nothing in the face of the influence of, well, the entire republican party. But they're not completely without influence. Their influence *within humanities departments* isn't negligible. And presumably those matter at least a little, right?

Not to mention, a great deal of their rhetoric has provided fuel for anti-science arguments made by the republicans. The left's philosophical critique provided fuel for the republican's attempts at painting science as just another set of opinions based on fundamentally religious claims.

Now hold on there gentlemen (where are the women in this debate?),

I get easily frustrated with the tendency of the left to hitch its wagon to rationalist scientists who blithely carry on as if Kant had never been born. Science is not a magic pill to answer all questions or turn every "mystery" into a "problem." The very nature of observation and experience is restrictive. Don't agree? Fine, but please refer to recent science (and not-so-recent philosophy) in your argument. To merely dismiss any response that doesn't conform with 19th century ideas of common sense does no service to our understanding.

It's a bit of a laugh to call bible-thumpers anti-science while rigidly refusing to yield one inch to scientific heterodoxy. What it displays is the exact same molding of data to fit political preferences that the right employs on creationism and global warming.

Mara Beller writes in her essay on the Sokal Affair:

When physicists failed to find meaning in Bohr's writings, no matter how hard they tried, they blamed themselves, not Bohr... Carl von Weizsäcker's testimony is a striking example of the overpowering, almost disabling, impact of Bohr's authority. After meeting with Bohr, von Weizsäcker asked himself: "What had Bohr meant? What must I understand to be able to tell what he meant and why he was right? I tortured myself on endless solitary walks." [7] Note that von Weizsäcker did not ask, "Was Bohr right?" or "To what extent, or on what issue, was Bohr right?" or "on what issues was Bohr right?", but, quite incredibly, he wondered what must one assume and in what way must one argue in order to render Bohr right?

Science needs humanities at least as much as humanities needs science. They illumine each other. Hard heads like Sokal are actually mushy romantics, yearning for a time past when certainties were inviolable as steel bars. If anything, this seems to me an extrememly conservative perspective.

Weiner:

This whole argument got started when I disputed thefix's statement, "I can't think of any postmodernists who are 'anti-science"

Since you no longer deny that "that many postmodernists have an anti-science bent," I think my work is done here.

Good day gentlemen.

As for the influence of humanities professors, they're largely either perceived as harmless drudges (like Dr. Johnson) or the butt of jokes. The Mr. Chips of the world wield little influence.

It seems likely that both "No postmodernists are anti-science" and "All humanities departments are full of anti-science postmodernists" are overgeneralizations.

"Mara Beller writes in her essay on the Sokal Affair:"

Beller's argument is that physicists saying silly things about sociology/psychology is the cause of postmodernists saying silly things about physics.

I don't see the connection myself.

"It's a bit overstated to claim that Sokal "expos[ed] the ignorant anti-science posturing of some post-modern humanities scholarship"--first, I can't think of any postmodernists who are "anti-science"

At least in the early 1990s, there were of students, some frankly brillant in other aspects, who didn't hestitate to call science a superstition. They didn't pick that up from the air. IIRC, the journal "Science as Culture" also took up a weaker version anti-science agenda (or, well, anti-scientist), lambasting scientists as anti-democratic experts (a natural progression, it being run of ex-Maoists, I guess). "Science as Culture" also published a book alleging that HIV didn't come from Africa, putting forward a crackpot conspiracy theory instead. (However, S-a-Culture did have an excellent analysis of the 1950s sci-fi film "The Day the Earth Stood Still", but that still doesn't compensate.)

Weiner:

It also seems absolutely certain that "All humanities departments are full of anti-science postmodernists" is a misquote. Very lame.

"At least in the early 1990s, there were of students, some frankly brillant in other aspects, who didn't hestitate to call science a superstition. "

Sorry, that should have been: "At least in the early 1990s, there were students taking the Cambridge SPS Tripos, some frankly brillant in other aspects, who didn't hestitate to call science a superstition.

Interesting..."reality-based government".

Look, there are two different things going on here. One is the sociological approach to science, going back to Kuhn, the Strong Program, etc. When humanists and social scientists look at science as it has been practiced in history and today, they find -- surpsise! -- that it is not quite as neat as scientists would like to think. Apparently some scientists got wind of the idea that science was being investigated as a cultural institution and said "Oh noes! We are teh Promethean God Men, no case studies plz!"

The second thing is that an elite French education includes both a great deal of philosophy and a great deal of math and science, so those who end up aggregating in philosophy know a superfluous amount of math, and vice-versa. So French theorists throw out metaphors from topology and analysis the way your or I might throw out metaphors with algebra, like "Bush + Iraq = Disaster." Now, someone coming from a culture where algebra is sacred knowledge used only for keeping accounts and calculating the ecliptic might respond "Oh really? So Iraq=Disaster-Bush? Or are you claiming that (Bush+Iraq)/Disaster=1? No? I didn't think so, bitch." Such an objection would be wholly rational and yet at the same time completely miss the point.

Sokal, full of wisdom, managed to conflate these two separate issues in a variety of self-aggrandizing dicta about his hoax.

No Longer (and Matthew),

Don't you think it's a wee bit defensive to equate a critique of science with "anti-science?" I'm the first to admit that postmodernism in the late 80s and early 90s got a little bit decadent, but that hardly suggests we should flush all critiques of science, and more than Skinner's excesses last century argue for discarding the study of psychology.

Also, Mr. Fool, most postmodern philosophers (and/or thier translators) were anything but silver-tongued.

I'd launch in here but there's no point. Every anti-postmodernism commenter on here is guilty of the exact same failing as Sokal: an utter refusal to actually confront the arguments of actual poststructuralist thinkers. Every criticism against postmodernism, everyone you will ever hear, is a straw man. But why bother to actually seek to understand Derrida or Lacan or Rorty, when it's so much easier to sneer and attack empty stereotypes?

If you'd really like a cogent analysis of anti-foundationalism, I'd suggest you read the relevent section in Michael Berube's book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?.

It wasn't intended as a quote, but as a paraphrase, and stop calling me "Weiner."

"At least in the early 1990s, there were students taking the Cambridge SPS Tripos, some frankly brillant in other aspects, who didn't hestitate to call science a superstition."

Science, for most scientists and most non-scientists IS, in fact, a superstition. Science isn't a superstition necessarily, but in actual current reality (again, for most people, scientists and non-scientists alike) people's beliefs in science are no more rational than belief in the evil nature of black cats. Most people believe in current science because our current political / cultural / economic authorities like to trumpet propaganda about the miracles of science rather than trumpeting propaganda about the miracles of the Virgin Mary or Zeus.

That is, most people (including most scientists) do not actually subject their belief in science to rational analysis.
Science is extremely defendable by rational analysis, but most people never actually do such an analysis (and it usually does not occur to them that such an analysis is even necessary). Which means that science for most people is an unexamined belief, just like an unexamined belief in the existance of witches.

"lambasting scientists as anti-democratic experts "

The Enlightenment refoundation of science explicitly depicts scientists as anti-democratic (though usually covertly so). See Bacon's Novum Organum for the most prominent example. This depiction is by scientists themselves who were hoping to found political regimes based on a "political science".

"Don't you think it's a wee bit defensive to equate a critique of science with "anti-science?" I'm the first to admit that postmodernism in the late 80s and early 90s got a little bit decadent, but that hardly suggests we should flush all critiques of science, and more than Skinner's excesses last century argue for discarding the study of psychology."

I've read Rorty, Kuhn, and Feyerbend, and my position on science is close to Kuhn's, in that science is a social process, but it's a *rational* social process based on which models provide the best explanation of empiral or observed data, and act as a basis for further work.

And where did I say to flush all critiques of science? The contention was [from thefix] 'first, I can't think of any postmodernists who are "anti-science" (that's the hallmark of our friends on the far right)'. I've provided such, or look at Barbara Ehrenreich at http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Ehrenreich.html, exerpt follows:

'When social psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth took the podium at a recent interdisciplinary seminar on emotions, she was already feeling rattled. Colleagues who'd presented earlier had warned her that the crowd was tough and had little patience for the reduction of human experience to numbers or bold generalizations about emotions across cultures. Ellsworth had a plan: She would pre-empt criticism by playing the critic, offering a social history of psychological approaches to the topic. But no sooner had the word "experiment" passed her lips than the hands shot up. Audience members pointed out that the experimental method is the brainchild of white Victorian males. Ellsworth agreed that white Victorian males had done their share of damage in the world but noted that, nonetheless, their efforts had led to the discovery of DNA. This short-lived dialogue between paradigms ground to a halt with the retort: "You believe in DNA?" '

Can we at least agree that those who do not believe in DNA are anti-science?

And as for proof of Sokal's contention that erosion of the concept of an objective truth would be a boon for reactionaries, try www.cei.org, www.climateaudit.org, or other such belief-tanks.

"Science is extremely defendable by rational analysis, but most people never actually do such an analysis (and it usually does not occur to them that such an analysis is even necessary). Which means that science for most people is an unexamined belief, just like an unexamined belief in the existance of witches."

I've never been to Japan. However, I have trust (by authority) that it exists. Does the fact I've never been to Japan make my belief that there is such a thing as Japan a superstition?

"Most people believe in current science because our current political / cultural / economic authorities like to trumpet propaganda about the miracles of science rather than trumpeting propaganda about the miracles of the Virgin Mary or Zeus."

Or maybe they look at the artifacts of technology that (clue: what are you doing right now that you couldn't do 20 years ago? And how did the work of Dirac, etc. make that possible?) and base their faith on that.

"Science is extremely defendable by rational analysis, but most people never actually do such an analysis (and it usually does not occur to them that such an analysis is even necessary). Which means that science for most people is an unexamined belief, just like an unexamined belief in the existance of witches."

What does this even mean? Seriously.

My general sense is that there are number of places in academica that have been overrun by crazy postmodern thinking--which is unfortunate, but hardly anything to get really worked up over. They are irrelevant and might as well just not exist as far as the practical world is concerned.

'My general sense is that there are number of places in academica that have been overrun by crazy postmodern thinking--which is unfortunate, but hardly anything to get really worked up over. They are irrelevant and might as well just not exist as far as the practical world is concerned.'

As Sokal and Mooney point out, the relevancy is that a degraded bastardized form of postmodernism is alive and well and appearing on a climate change denialist website near you. You'll even find it being used on the thread on the IPCC 4AR on this weblog:
http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/02/ipcc_versus_aei/#comment

And this *will* have a big global effect, if only by providing the thin intellectual cover for the U.S. [and, by extension, China and India] to postpone meaningful action by 5-10 years. And people will suffer and die because of that delay.

It's not that fault of the academic postmodernists [anymore than an inventor of a computer language can be blamed for a piece of malware created using it: you can't predict all the applications a tool you create can be used for], but it shows that any Marxian postmodernist who hoped that postmodernism as a discipline would undermine the power structure was seriously naive.

"What does this even mean? Seriously."

What it means is that beliefs that are held without first being exposed to rigorous and deliberate analysis by the person holding the belief are dangerous and counterproductive.

As far as things that are without meaning, the term "postmodern" is the sine qua non. There is absolutely no declarative value to the term. It means nothing, it explains nothing, it contains no logical or rhetorical value. Postmodern is analogous to politically correct; it has never meant to elicit anything other than derision and contempt. Like political correctness, postmodernism has never held anything close to the cultural force of its detractors. This is the ultimate case of speaking truth to no power-- a bunch of people on a weblog attacking a particular strain of radical French intellectual thought from the 1970's, the principal architects of which are all dead. Having done so, those people posture as though what they are attacking is a powerful institution, as though they are saying something iconoclastic or provocative. It isn't and you aren't.

What makes Yglesias's offhand condemnation so infuriating is that it is precisely the kind of argument-free argument that infects this dialogue. No need to offer rational criticism or anything of actual rhetorical value; just throw the term "postmodern" out, condescend to those crazy lefty professors, and be on your way.

Sokal was shooting fish in a barrel. Really, Social Text is one thing, but the government of the United States is another thing entirely. It's taken him quite a while to heave himself into this fight.

"What it means is that beliefs that are held without first being exposed to rigorous and deliberate analysis by the person holding the belief are dangerous and counterproductive."

And the irony that the editors of Social Text printed Sokal's paper with little to no understanding of its content or lack thereof, is completely lost on you.

"And the irony that the editors of Social Text printed Sokal's paper with little to no understanding of its content or lack thereof, is completely lost on you."

Says who? I haven't weighed in on Sokal or Social Text at all.

"This is the ultimate case of speaking truth to no power-- a bunch of people on a weblog attacking a particular strain of radical French intellectual thought from the 1970's, the principal architects of which are all dead. Having done so, those people posture as though what they are attacking is a powerful institution, as though they are saying something iconoclastic or provocative. It isn't and you aren't."

Sorry!

To be honest, it's true that most people haven't studied "poststructuralist thinkers," and it's true that it's both easy and fashionable to attack "postmodernism." I'm not familiar with those arguments myself, so I wouldn't engage in them.

However, that's does mean postmodernism as a practical profession should be immune to criticism from the unwashed masses. My general understanding is that a lot of people in the academic humanities are too concerned with obscure and abstract ideas, and not enough with the lives of real people. I think that's a line of attack that holds up, even if I haven't read Derrida or whatever.

"As Sokal and Mooney point out, the relevancy is that a degraded bastardized form of postmodernism is alive and well and appearing on a climate change denialist website near you."

I just don't really see how any of this sort of intellectual thinking has affected the life of the average person in any significant way, especially now that's it's on the decline. Are people really dying because of postmodernism? That seems like a gross exxageration to me.

"Says who? I haven't weighed in on Sokal or Social Text at all."

So then what do you find infuriating about Yglesias posting:

"It's also likely that you've heard of Alan Sokal, perpetrator of the infamous Social Text scam, exposing the ignorant anti-science posturing of some post-modern humanities scholarship."

Some PoMo were anti-science, yes (c.f. Ehrenreich's quote above)? And some of it was ignorant, otherwise they wouldn't have published his hoax, yes? Hardly "rigorous and delibrative analysis", no? Should we not laugh at those who have a beam in their eye complaining about the motes in others?

"Some PoMo were anti-science, yes (c.f. Ehrenreich's quote above)? And some of it was ignorant, otherwise they wouldn't have published his hoax, yes? Hardly "rigorous and delibrative analysis", no? Should we not laugh at those who have a beam in their eye complaining about the motes in others?"

But that's it exactly. You're conflating the opinions of any number of writers and critics (who happen to fall under the nebulous and vague term of postmodernist) with the failures of a very few editors who worked at a single journal. Was that a bone-headed thing to do? Sure, although all the anti-science rhetoric seems particularly ill-considered to me since the publication of Sokal's article was itself an attempt to reach out to a scientist. But that failure shouldn't be made to seem to call into question the opinions of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with Social Text. And I think it would do for the people who are accusing others of not being rational to admit that there is no logical progression from the Sokal afair to a wide-ranging debunking of the "postmoderns".

And, as I pointed out above, the notion that the followers of a niche French intellectual tradition that peaked in inluence 30 years ago are running around using their vast influence to--what?-- deny global warming?-- or whatever other evil ends you project on them is just foolish and absurd.

"I've never been to Japan. However, I have trust (by authority) that it exists. Does the fact I've never been to Japan make my belief that there is such a thing as Japan a superstition?"

If by "authority" you mean you accepted the claim that "Japan exists" without critically examining the claims by authorities (comparing the various accounts of Japan, seeing if it is geographically feasible for a potential Japan to be where it is claimed to be, weighing whether you have enough evidence to find the existance of Japan compelling considering you haven't been there, etc), then yes, your belief in Japan is effectively superstition. It may be a correct belief, but YOUR individual belief wouldn't actually be rational, but superstitious.

"What it means is that beliefs that are held without first being exposed to rigorous and deliberate analysis by the person holding the belief are dangerous and counterproductive."

Precisely. Thanks, Freddie!

"My general understanding is that a lot of people in the academic humanities are too concerned with obscure and abstract ideas, and not enough with the lives of real people."

Which actually was exactly the opinion fairly consistently voiced by those you label "post-modernist" (wow, how about actually READING about what you're talking about? They do sell Derrida in your local Borders, you know). Most were far more involved in French politics than the vast majority of American academics would ever dream of. In fact, any campus activism tends to so badly frighten American academics (including, of course, science academics) that they usually flee far to the right-wing to avoid any further reoccurances of same.

The key difference between science and other beliefs is that you can test scientific assertions. That is what makes them valid and scientific. You can go to Japan to see if it is there for yourself.

Some of the proofs in science are not experimental they are mathematical and only understood by experts in a very specialized field. So yes there is at this point a certain amount of belief in authority and expertise among people who put trust in the conclusions of scientists. Those conclusions do change because scientists are human and are subject tot he same flaws. I have little faith in scientists but more faith in the method overall. Science is a tool for describing processes. Nothing more or less.

The question isn't whether we "believe in science" the question is whether we as a culture value real world consequences and information when making decisions or whether we value our prejudices, feelings and faith instead.

"But that's it exactly. You're conflating the opinions of any number of writers and critics (who happen to fall under the nebulous and vague term of postmodernist) with the failures of a very few editors who worked at a single journal. Was that a bone-headed thing to do?"

No, because it wasn't just a single journal, c.f. the Ehrenreich quote above, or my encounters with some of those associated with Science-as-Culture.

"And, as I pointed out above, the notion that the followers of a niche French intellectual tradition that peaked in inluence 30 years ago are running around using their vast influence to--what?-- deny global warming?-- or whatever other evil ends you project on them is just foolish and absurd."

What didn't you understand from me saying:

'It's not that fault of the academic postmodernists [anymore than an inventor of a computer language can be blamed for a piece of malware created using it: you can't predict all the applications a tool you create can be used for], but it shows that any Marxian postmodernist who hoped that postmodernism as a discipline would undermine the power structure was seriously naive.'

It's rich you lecturing others on the need for rigorous analysis when you can't be arsed reading what I've written.

Can we at least agree that those who do not believe in DNA are anti-science?

Not necessarily. It's a very suspect quote, don't you think? Everybody "believes" in DNA. Even Michael Behe. Perhaps the questioner meant something different, like, "you believe in the genetic foundation of behavioral traits?" But without context we can't say, and the audience member is only quoted in paraphrase.

It doesn't seem very sporting of Barbara E. to call critics of sociobiology "antibiologists" and further to go on and analogize them as "secular creationists." Sociobiology is not settled science, and even if it were, the field of contention comprises a much more narrow band than all of "biology."

I think you're wrong that conceding subjectivity gives ground to conservatives. If discourse is scrupulously conducted, conclusions can still be effectively argued from pretexts. Plus, there's such a thing as "real enough." Newtonian motion was good enough for the industrial revolution. We can be fuzzy about "ultimate truth" and get on just fine. Maybe even better than we are now.

And what's so damn postmodern about global warming denial? I don't see it.

Also: what Freddy said.

"If by "authority" you mean you accepted the claim that "Japan exists" without critically examining the claims by authorities "

OK. I believe that the "Inferno" was written by a person named Dante. I have not performed textual analysis on the original to see if it matches La Vita Nuova. Is my belief that Dante wrote the Inferno supersition? Or is every fact I believe that I haven't done a PhD thesis on going to be labeled a superstition?

Ellenbrenna made some excellent points:

"The key difference between science and other beliefs is that you can test scientific assertions. That is what makes them valid and scientific. You can go to Japan to see if it is there for yourself."

Testability isn't the whole of the story, though.

"Some of the proofs in science are not experimental they are mathematical and only understood by experts in a very specialized field."

That's the problem with e.g. particle physics theories where we're not yet at the accelerator energies where we can get empirical data, and with model-based predictions such as those for climate change.

Nolonger,

Nobody is saying you aren't justified in believing in Japan, or the authorship of the Inferno. I personally think superstition is too strong a term for these beliefs, but the point is we all cleave to innumerable "unscientific" cognitions. We invest faith in our authorities, or certain select groups of them; society could not function if we had to verify every datum. That's not postmodernism, that's just logic.

One of the things postmodernism draws our attention to is the way we externally define untoward cultural traits, like superstition, in order to better believe our own myth of ourselves as rational. Baudrillard's examples were Watergate, which is set apart as an abberation as though our political systems didn't incubate that kind of abuse of power, and Disneyland, which is set apart as though our whole late capitalist culture wasn't built around disposable, two-dimensional, oversimplified, storybook reality.

And so the scientific mind likes to flatter itself for having overcome all that faith and begorrah. That's not to say it's not useful, just that it's not absolute.

"The key difference between science and other beliefs is that you can test scientific assertions. That is what makes them valid and scientific. You can go to Japan to see if it is there for yourself."

You're simply recycling Max Weber's fact / value distinction from the early part of the twentieth century. Weber's fact / value distinction would not have been accepted by eighteenth century scientists (indeed, it would have been extraordinarily unacceptable).

Again, scientists often prove to be totally unable to grapple with the arguments behind what they're doing. They cut n' paste ideas together without any inkling where those concepts came from, or what they might imply. Like slapping together Max Weber together with an Enlightenment depiction of science (hint: it can't work).

Now, Weber might be right, but we also notice that we're primarily talking philosophy and sociology, not science alone now.

"OK. I believe that the "Inferno" was written by a person named Dante. I have not performed textual analysis on the original to see if it matches La Vita Nuova. Is my belief that Dante wrote the Inferno supersition?"

Yes (or effectively so). But all humans take various things on authority and so on. The question is: "what is important to reason about?" Perhaps it is more important to reason about nature or politics or belly button lint than the identity of the Inferno's author (or, more appropriately, it is probably far more important to learn from Shakespeare's plays than to definitively learn who the author of those plays was).

In the 18th Century there was less scientific knowledge to undergird any particular scientist's philosophy.

There is no denying that science as it is practiced is a subculture, one that draws people with particular skills and interests, that has its own philosophical underpinnings. It would probably be interesting to examine them but I do not think the culture invalidates results. It influences the directions taken and the questions asked but the method itself, when practiced with rigor and honesty, is capable of producing the closest thing people can manage to an accurate description of causes and effects.

Science may be rational but university departments in the Sciences certainly are not. I have had "colleagues" reject a premise in a paper from my lab only to publish an almost identical theory six months later.

"It influences the directions taken and the questions asked but the method itself, when practiced with rigor and honesty, is capable of producing the closest thing people can manage to an accurate description of causes and effects."

Stop peddling the propaganda - none of this verbiage is generated from within science itself. It may be true or false but most scientists wouldn't have a clue about how to investigate your claims' truth or falsity. I.E. very few scientists bother to understand the grounding of what they're doing (and many in fact don't have minds capable of doing so). In this respect, they're no different from medieval peasants burning witches.

Propaganda? Interesting.

I know one person who studies soils and hydrology and another who studies evolutionary biology. They believe they are using a process to accurately describe reality. As accurately as people can, considering how imperfect human beings are. But then again one of them started out in Anthropology and the other plays music, reads literature regularly and keeps a journal but please explain again how scientists think about their discipline and what the limits of their worldviews are.

Richard Feynman certainly had pointed things to say about what he thought the purpose of science was as did Stephen Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould. The idea that there is no interdiscipline discussion strikes me as strange.

No one is asserting that scientists are perfect or should be trusted with all policy decisions but only that information produced through scientific methods is eventually found to be more reliable and rational than "if she floats burn her at the stake".

Scott E. wrote:

"I gotta say, it speaks to what a doorknob Sokal is that he treats pomo trends in literature and sociology from a decade ago as threats even remotely as serious as the stuff that Mooney's on about. Like a few poetry profs are really going to bring science to its knees."

Here is what Jean Bricmont and I wrote in Chapter 1 of our book _Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science_ (entitled _Intellectual Impostures_ in the UK), replying in advance to a number of possible objections to our ideas:

10. _Why do you write a book on this and not on more serious issues?
Is postmodernism such a great danger to civilization?_

First of all, this is an odd question. Suppose someone discovers documents relevant to the history of Napoleon and writes a book about it. Would anyone ask him whether he thinks this is a more important topic than World War II? His answer, and ours, would be that an author writes on a subject under two conditions: that he is competent and that he is able to contribute something original. His subject will not, unless he is particularly lucky, coincide with the most important problem in the world.

Of course we do not think that postmodernism is a great danger to civilization. Viewed on a global scale, it is a rather marginal phenomenon, and there are far more dangerous forms of irrationalism --
religious fundamentalism, for instance. But we do think that the critique of postmodernism is worthwhile for intellectual, pedagogical, cultural and political reasons; we shall return to these themes in the Epilogue.

atkaoua wrote:

"Look, there are two different things going on here. One is the sociological approach to science, going back to Kuhn, the Strong Program, etc. ...

"The second thing is that an elite French education includes both a great deal of philosophy and a great deal of math and science, so those who end up aggregating in philosophy know a superfluous amount of math, and vice-versa. So French theorists throw out metaphors from topology and analysis the way your or I might throw out metaphors with algebra, like "Bush + Iraq = Disaster". ...

"Sokal, full of wisdom, managed to conflate these two separate issues in a variety of self-aggrandizing dicta about his hoax."

Here, in fact, is what Bricmont and I write in the preface to our book _Fashionable Nonsense_, describing what we intend to show in the book:

But what exactly do we claim? Neither too much nor too little. We show that famous intellectuals such as Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Deleuze have repeatedly abused scientific concepts and terminology: either using scientific ideas totally out of context, without giving the slightest justification -- note that we are not against extrapolating concepts from one field to another, but only against extrapolations made without argument -- or throwing around scientific jargon in front of their non-scientist readers without any regard for its relevance or even its meaning. We make no claim that this invalidates the rest of their work, on which we suspend judgment.

...

A second target of our book is epistemic relativism, namely the idea -- which, at least when expressed explicitly, is much more widespread in the English-speaking world than in France -- that modern science is nothing more than a "myth", a "narration" or a "social construction" among many others. ...

This book is therefore made up of two distinct -- but related -- works under one cover. First, there is the collection of extreme abuses discovered, rather haphazardly, by Sokal; this is the "fashionable nonsense" of our title. Second, there is our critique of epistemic relativism and of misconceptions about "postmodern science"; these analyses are considerably more subtle. The connection between these two critiques is primarily sociological ... [AND WE GO ON TO EXPLAIN]

Enough said? Far from "conflating" these two critiques, we take pains to keep them separate.

As for the abuses of scientific language by Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze et al, our criticism does not concern elementary metaphors like "Bush + Iraq = Disaster", but rather passages invoking highly technical terminology such as:

[I]n the syntactic operations following the mirror stage, the subject is already sure of his uniqueness: his flight towards the "point \infty" in the signifying is stopped. One thinks for example of a set C_0 on a usual space R^3 where for every continuous function F on R^3 and each integer n > 0, the set of points X where F(X) exceeds n is _bounded_, the functions of C_0 tending to 0 when the variable X recedes towards the "other scene". In this topos, the subject placed in C_0 does not reach this "center exterior to language" about which Lacan speaks and where he loses himself as subject, a situation that would translate the relational group that topology calls a _ring_. [Kristeva 1977]

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility,
ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms. [Guattari 1995]

This displacement of the direct transparence of a material is due primarily ... to the effective use of _undulatory optics_ alongside classic _geometric optics_. In the same way that alongside Euclidean geometry we find a non-Euclidean, topological geometry, the passive optics of the geometry of camera lenses and telescopes is accompanied by the active optics of the _teletopology_ of optoelectric waves. ... Traditional chronology -- future, present, past -- has been succeeded by _chronoscopy_ -- underexposed, exposed, overexposed. The interval of the _time_ genre (the positive sign) and the interval of the _space_ genre (the negative sign, with the same name as the inscription surface of film) are inscribed only by _light_, that interval of the third genre in which the _zero_ sign means absolute speed. [Virilio 1989]

Finally, as Bricmont and I stress in Chapter 1, "our criticism does _not_ deal primarily with [scientific] errors, but with the manifest _irrelevance_ of the scientific terminology to the subject supposedly under investigation."

Weiner:

You said, and I quote,"It wasn't intended as a quote, but as a paraphrase, and stop calling me "Weiner."

Some advice, Weiner: if your paraphrase is not supposed to to be taken as a quote, then for goddsakes don't use quotation marks, idiot.

Also, if you don't like being addressed as "Weiner" then for goddsakes change your name.

"Posted by: Alan Sokal on February 6, 2007 06:12 AM"

:Eyes Boggle:

We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

"I personally think superstition is too strong a term for these beliefs, but the point is we all cleave to innumerable "unscientific" cognitions. We invest faith in our authorities, or certain select groups of them; society could not function if we had to verify every datum. That's not postmodernism, that's just logic."

No argument, and thank you for conceding that superstition is not the term to use for science or for trust in other forms of knowledge. (Perhaps you can have a word with burritoboy. He seems to think scientists are akin to witch-burning peasants, unless they have been ritually purified by reading Derrida. He might at least have recognized that we're professionals and called us witchfinder-generals, for God's sake.)

However, there is a difference between what we know from science and other methods of knowing. Frex, Lysenko was an authority in the Soviet Union on biology up until the mid-1960s. He stopped being an authority. Why? The political infrastructure and underlying did not change, the ideological reasons for the powers in control did not change. Why did Lysenko fall out of favor?

"And what's so damn postmodern about global warming denial? I don't see it."

Read some of the stuff written by global warming deniers (like the stuff I linked to: look for commenter beowulf888) and you'll see what I mean. They borrow heavily from social constructivists as well, but there's also the view that climate science is just a discourse that goes back and forth, hence the claims of "what about global cooling in the 1970s", never mind that the primary scientist who raised concerns about cooling in the 1970s (Stephen Schneider, based on aerosol pollution) retracted his conclusions 18 months later and is now a proponent of global warming. In fairness, this might be inadvertent borrowing (it probably owes more to tactics first honed by the tobacco lobby than the academy).

"However, there is a difference between what we know from science and other methods of knowing. Frex, Lysenko was an authority in the Soviet Union on biology up until the mid-1960s. He stopped being an authority. Why? The political infrastructure and underlying did not change, the ideological reasons for the powers in control did not change. Why did Lysenko fall out of favor?"

Sorry, that should have been:

However, there is a difference between what we know from science and other methods of knowing. Frex, Lysenko was an authority in the Soviet Union on biology up until the mid-1960s. He stopped being an authority. Why? The political infrastructure and underlying ideology did not change, the ideological reasons for the powers in control to prefer Lysenko to genetics did not change. Why did Lysenko fall out of favor?

I have only skimmed the comments here, so I may be wrong, but no one seems to have mentioned that there is no basis in the editorial for the sub-headline's " something of which both parties are historically guilty."

Where does the LAT get off pulling this crap? What's the point of running the editorial if most people, who will only glance at the headlines, come away with the opposite conclusion from the editorial itself?

However, there is a difference between what we know from science and other methods of knowing. Frex, Lysenko was an authority in the Soviet Union on biology up until the mid-1960s. He stopped being an authority. Why? The political infrastructure and underlying did not change, the ideological reasons for the powers in control did not change. Why did Lysenko fall out of favor?

If your point is that Lysenko's science was ideologically motivated, and therefore not "real" science, I agree. But I would reply that ideological bias is not "either/or." Rather, it exists by degree, and the best we can do is be conscious of the fact that we are not able to eradicate it altogether, any more than we're able to look without eyes or hear without ears.

Julian Jaynes talks about consciousness being like a flashlight searching for a spot of darkness, and I think that's a great model for knowledge in general; we can't know what we can't know--by definition. The "postmodernist" critique of science does not argue that we should replace science with some other superior way of knowing. Nor do the mythographers (Armstrong, Campbell, Eliade) argue this. There is a difference among ways of knowing. But none of them are objective in the traditional sense.

Read some of the stuff written by global warming deniers (like the stuff I linked to: look for commenter beowulf888) and you'll see what I mean. They borrow heavily from social constructivists as well, but there's also the view that climate science is just a discourse that goes back and forth, hence the claims of "what about global cooling in the 1970s", never mind that the primary scientist who raised concerns about cooling in the 1970s (Stephen Schneider, based on aerosol pollution) retracted his conclusions 18 months later and is now a proponent of global warming. In fairness, this might be inadvertent borrowing (it probably owes more to tactics first honed by the tobacco lobby than the academy).

I read Beowulf's comments and don't see what you're pointing to. The arguments he makes are: (1) we're at the end of the fossil fuel era, so it's too late to do anything anyway (which is false), and (2) models don't prove anything (defensible; the fact that modern planes demonstrate the principles of aerodymanics as modeled doesn't mean all models are predictive.) I believe in human-made global warming, and I believe we can (and must) still act to mitigate it. But I still fail to see how the deniers are given any ammo by postmodernists.

I know of no philosophers of science who maintain that scientific method doesn't matter, that induction and deduction cannot be used productively, or that all ideas have equal merit or relevance. This is the caricature built up by people who would prefer no doubts were cast on objectivity.

"The idea that there is no interdiscipline discussion strikes me as strange."

Again, you don't have good grasps on your terms - why is this necessarily an interdisciplinary discussion? Why are scientists generally unable to critically examine the grounding of their science? Why is such discussion of the theory of science necessarily outside the boundaries of science itself?

"only that information produced through scientific methods is eventually found to be more reliable and rational than "if she floats burn her at the stake". "

You're begging the question. Why is the scientific method (which is only one depiction of science and an idea that itself needs to be critically analyzed)more reliable and rational? What is reliable? What is rational? Why is it important that information be reliable?

I'm not saying that there aren't great answers to these questions (most of which answers I myself accept). The problem is that every scientist needs to be asking those questions as the foundation of their science and needs to be able to critically examine various opinions or claims about these question.

"Perhaps you can have a word with burritoboy. He seems to think scientists are akin to witch-burning peasants, unless they have been ritually purified by reading Derrida. He might at least have recognized that we're professionals and called us witchfinder-generals, for God's sake"

Geeze, you just keep getting yourself into more and more trouble. The concept of "professional" is one of the most loaded (politically) of modern times. See David F. Noble (or Bourdieu) to understand what that concept really has entailed.

I wouldn't actually reccomend scientists reading Derrida as their first step. Not a great author for novices.

...every scientist needs to be asking those questions as the foundation of their science and needs to be able to critically examine various opinions or claims about these question.

Why?

"The political infrastructure and underlying ideology did not change, the ideological reasons for the powers in control to prefer Lysenko to genetics did not change."

Your knowledge of Soviet history and politics is quite lacking. The death of Stalin totally changed the form of USSR governance (from a one man tyranny depending on the NKVD to a general council form where the Party, the Red Army and the KGB had to all agree on major decisions). It did take a while longer for Lysenko-ism to be abolished after Stalin's death, but it's abolition was largely a function of the political/ideological changes of the USSR in the period.

I'm disappointed in Dr. Sokal's response, because it echoes so much of the discussion regarding the Social Text affair. The Sokal incident is held up, again and again, as in some sense disproving or illegitimizing postmodernism as a whole. But when confronted with the fact that, logically, the incident does no such thing, there is a retreat into a far less sweeping statement, condemning only the misuse of scientific language. When nailed down on specifics, that's generally the best they can do. But when someone wants to throw out an offhand insult that isn't going to be held up to analysis-- like what Yglesias did in this post-- the Sokal incident serves as a handy little trope.

Dr. Sokal says that he withholds judgement on the postmodern project, and it's architects, beyond the specific argument against their use of scientific terminology. But he knows very well that the incident in question has been used to dispute postmodernism as a whole; that he has made many statements that infer the same; and that he is held-up as an anti-postmodern warrior in a general sense. To suggest that he doesn't understand those things, or to say that he has no control over them, is incredibly disingenuous.

If Dr. Sokal had done what he claims to have-- condemn specific misuses of scientific jargon by specific authors-- he'd have much more of a leg to stand on. It's true, there are many examples of misuse of scientific language by the authors he has mentioned. I would suggest that, given their field, he would perhaps be better served by seeking to understand that usage in terms of metaphor. But okay, fine. That point is well taken. But of course Dr. Sokal has never been as demure as he makes himself out to be here. He enjoys the personal aggrandizement that comes out of this discussion, which is why he is still thumping on it many years after the incident itself. His pretensions otherwise are dishonest.

Mr. Sokal,

I appreciate your attempt to clarify the scope of your editorial, and your recent work.

In reply I'd like to remark that I had hoped that a decade or so of hindsight might have made clearer how unnecessary was all the crowing over social theory's malign influence on our ability to make value judgements and truth statements. Human beings will probably always have "true" and "false" and "good" and "bad."

To say that science is a narrative is not to say it's interchangeable with any other story. It is merely to say that (a) data has no meaning until we put it in context, that is, tell its story, and (b) all of our observations, and our dialogue about our observations, are conditioned by the facts of our biology and our culture. There is nowhere to stand, perceive, and make statements, except from within a human body socially located in a culture. That's really not so controversial, is it?

"Your knowledge of Soviet history and politics is quite lacking."

Err, no actually. (I actually lived in the Soviet Union for a time, and worked in a research institute there. And yes, I read the history as well.)

"The death of Stalin totally changed the form of USSR governance (from a one man tyranny depending on the NKVD to a general council form where the Party, the Red Army and the KGB had to all agree on major decisions). It did take a while longer for Lysenko-ism to be abolished after Stalin's death, but it's abolition was largely a function of the political/ideological changes of the USSR in the period."

No, Khurschev was a supporter of Lysenko, and put Lysenko in charge of the Institute of Genetics. The death of Stalin did not remove Lysenko from influence over Soviet biology - that lasted as much as 12 years after Stalin's death.

Now let's try again. Why is Lysenko not longer an authority in Russian biology? Or, to spell it out: what did Lysenko say he could do that he could not do?

"I read Beowulf's comments and don't see what you're pointing to. The arguments he makes are: (1) we're at the end of the fossil fuel era, so it's too late to do anything anyway (which is false), and (2) models don't prove anything (defensible; the fact that modern planes demonstrate the principles of aerodymanics as modeled doesn't mean all models are predictive.)"

You didn't read down far enough. He makes a social-constructivist argument re. status and grant chasing, and then irrelevant stuff on Milankovich cycles.

"There is nowhere to stand, perceive, and make statements, except from within a human body socially located in a culture. That's really not so controversial, is it?"

Well, to refer to Johnson's refutation of Berkeley, our foot is still kicking against a rock. The rock is independent of our body and our social situation. (Our perception of the rock is not, however.) And that rock has a way of forcing us to ditch what you term narratives in a way that other forms of knowing are not subject to. So yes, because of that constraint that science faces, I am claiming a privilege for it.

I read the Mara Beller essay that Deets links to above, and it reminds me of why the Sokal hoax generated so much controversy. Beller wrote:

When feminists like Donna Willshire, or intellectuals of the left like Stanley Aronowitz, connect quantum physics with politics and wider social issues, they're treading a well-worn path legitimized by the scientific authority of the great quantum physicists, in whose writings we find the roots of the postmodernist excesses of today.

WMR wrote:

"...every scientist needs to be asking those questions as the foundation of their science and needs to be able to critically examine various opinions or claims about these question.

Why?"

In fairness to burritoboy, there is a place for what he asks. I don't think its role is not such much within the basic sciences, though, as within the applied sciences which rely more on heuristics and rules of thumb than do the basic sciences.

Say toxicology or pharmacology, where the limits of statistical sample size and interspecies variation just constrain how much you actually know about how dimethylchickenwire will affect the human body. There's a role for more modesty there.

Well, that was a bit of a McLuhan/Annie Hall moment. Sorta.

I did plenty of work drawing on George Canguilhem, who is pretty damn legit as a historian of the life sciences, and I was a bit disappointed that Intellectual Impostures didn't address the areas of HistSci that they might consider legitimate domains of continental study. Was it a generational shift (Canguilhem, along with Bachelard, was a doctoral supervisor for Foucault) or something else? Or did the authors really care?

But my general point stands: about bloody time, Dr Sokal. What kept you?

"The Sokal incident is held up, again and again, as in some sense disproving or illegitimizing postmodernism as a whole."

Fields are pretty much defined, at least in the strictly academic sense, by the trail of journal articles they create and leave behind. If the premiere journal of 'postmodern stuff' (that's my understanding of Social Text's status) publishes a piece of transparently vacuous, purposefully nonsensical garbage, that DOES say serious things about much more than just the editorial practices of that particular journal.

The only person I've seen write convincingly about why the Sokal affair isn't as big of a deal as it might seem has been Michael Berube. But then, he later bent over backwards to defend Steve Fuller from the Dover ID trial (another use of this exact sort of thing by the right) and that retroactively weakened his arguments to my mind.

You didn't read down far enough. He makes a social-constructivist argument re. status and grant chasing, and then irrelevant stuff on Milankovich cycles.

Nein. I read to the bottom. I don't believe that global warming science is the result of grant chasing. If anything, the conflicts of interest run the other way, with so much at stake for the capitalist superstructure. But conflicts of interest are real. Beowulf is a dissembler, but he's right about Vioxx. The way pharma studies conducted in this country are a scandal. But again, using the extreme example detracts from the more mundane but important reality that even decent, scrupulous scientists can't really become bias-free. They can become objective enough to do good science, which matters. But being a human being is a bias, not to mention being a specific human being with a biological and social history. I'm pretty surprised you find this contentious. It's a lot less radical than most physics.

Well, to refer to Johnson's refutation of Berkeley, our foot is still kicking against a rock. The rock is independent of our body and our social situation. (Our perception of the rock is not, however.) And that rock has a way of forcing us to ditch what you term narratives in a way that other forms of knowing are not subject to. So yes, because of that constraint that science faces, I am claiming a privilege for it.

I'm a fan of Sammy J, but that was not his best moment. Refutation, did you say? Berkeley never claimed that we could make reality whatever we wished, merely that it was outside our ability to observe directly. That doesn't mean our observations aren't (subjectively) "real."

So I'd like you illustrate, if you will, how encountering the world of reality forces us to discard our narrative of it.

"If the premiere journal of 'postmodern stuff' (that's my understanding of Social Text's status) publishes a piece of transparently vacuous, purposefully nonsensical garbage, that DOES say serious things about much more than just the editorial practices of that particular journal."

How, exactly? Forgetting for a second that Social Text wasn't some sort of holding pen for the incredibly vague and empty category of "the postmodern", and forgetting that it didn't enjoy the kind of pre-eminence you've given it--

Describe for me how, in any logical way, how the editorial failures of a single journal can call into question the legitimacy of thousands of critics, many of who died decades before the article in question was published? Do you think Social Text went into their postmodern Rolodex and faxed the article to everyone in there for comment? Your side is creating the bullshit category of postmodern and then attacking everyone inside of it for something they have utterly no control over. This kind of guilt by association and muddled thinking dominate criticism of postmodernism. There's tons of these sort of vague accusations that are never actually ascribed to any individual people, or any individual works by them. Since you all are the defenders of logic, describe for me the logical progression from this incident to dismissing postmodern thought entirely.

No Longer &c &c:

Sorry, but your response doesn't answer my question. Some of the questions which burritoboy says every scientist needs to be asking himself are: What is reliable? What is rational? Why is it important that information be reliable?

This is a bit different from the concerns you raise.

Bottom Line: postmodernism is a bunch of rhetorical hogwash.

What authors/texts would burritoboy and no longer &c &c suggest to working scientists? I'd like to see more discussion of Richard Feynman, especially his "Cargo Cult Science" lecture and his "Nature will not be fooled" conclusion to the NASA shuttle explosion report. That would seem to me to answer all but the most abstruse epistemological questions about reliability and rationality and the nature of evidence.

"every scientist needs to be asking himself are: What is reliable? What is rational? Why is it important that information be reliable?"

Every scientist needs to critically analyze those questions precisely because science's claims to truth are so outsized AND because science is funded by society on the basis of those claims. Many other professions' value claims are simpler: farmers produce food, soldiers fight enemies and so on. Scientists are a rare profession where two conditions exist:

A. Scientists claim that science is the best way to obtain truth.
B. Society lavishly funds science believing that claim.

Plenty of others - philosophers, poets, artists, prophets - make claims like A. Almost none of them also get condition B. We don't have $500 million dollar centers for research on modern poetry. We don't have philosophy labs that employ millions in equipment. Theology professors aren't on the board of Genentech, or novelists being administrators at NASA. Technology moguls don't usually give tens of millions of dollars to support teaching of sculpting.

burritoboy:

Thanks for the response, but I find your A ambiguous.

I suppose that scientists do believe that science is the best way to obtain the truth about what happens when you mix chemicals or freeze an O-ring or other such questions about the physical world, questions which are tightly limited and with clear cut standards of success (that's what an experiment is, after all).

BUT, they are not claiming, as philosophers, poets, artists, prophets generally do, to be obtaining Truth, as in The Truth About Life, Death, And Everything Else.

So, which truth are you talking about?

burritoboy:

I always hit post too soon. I meant to add that I disagree with science is funded by society on the basis of those claims.

Science is funded on the basis of its previous track record of success. If poetry and sculpture led to inventing computers or flying to the moon, they would get plenty of funding too.

If I could split the difference between wmr and burritoboy:

A. Scientists claim that science is the best way to obtain truth. B. Society lavishly funds science believing that claim.

Plenty of others - philosophers, poets, artists, prophets - make claims like A. Almost none of them also get condition B. We don't have $500 million dollar centers for research on modern poetry. We don't have philosophy labs that employ millions in equipment. Theology professors aren't on the board of Genentech, or novelists being administrators at NASA. Technology moguls don't usually give tens of millions of dollars to support teaching of sculpting.

BB is half-right on A. Scientific materialists like Dawkins (and Sokal?), believe that science is not the best way to discern truth, but the only way: that which is non-scientific cannot be said to be true. Taken to extremes this gets into stuff like "proving" emotions through brain scans and the like. It's not pretty. But not all scientists believe this. Probably not even most.

But B is just silly. Some science is lavishly funded, some isn't. It depends on all kinds of factors, including commerce, national defense, intellectual fashion, among many others. Science most likely to get results--according to the standards of the funders--gets funded. That's hardly an all-inclusive category.

On top of which, poetry and philosophy are extremely inexpensive compared to gene research or particle acceleration, and even if prophets and poets were funded as lavishly, it wouldn't do much to augment thier grasp of truth, big-T or little-T.

Squeech,

The Feynmann article is interesting. It's refreshing to read admonitions to beware one's biases directed inward at the scientific community. All too often one hears from scientists how much better it would be if laymen would just be as reasonable as they.

In general I would stay away from most so-called "postmodern" writers unless you like crawling through thickets. They use an extremely specialized language, almost impossible to understand without a familiarity with the major works of continental philosophy. Precursors to these works can be found in Kierkegaard, Kant, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Whitehead--more or less anyone whose last name starts with a K or W. Also in the presocratic philosophers. Anthropology and mythography can't hurt either. One of the best places to start playing around with these ideas might be in the works of Alan Watts, the populizer of Eastern religions. His books contain very little of the cultural baggage of Zen and Hinduism, and almost no practical considerations like meditation or yoga. They are also free of philosophical jargon and buzzwords like "metanarrative." But they do an extremely effective job of conveying the epistemological conundrums of being a human being. It's a good place as any to start.

Deets:

You have aroused my curiosity. You gave us your problems with burritoboy's last comment, but didn't indicate what you objected to in mine. I can't help but wonder.

Sorry wmr,

I thought it was implicit that if burritoboy was wrong on B, and half wrong on A, then you were also half wrong on A, and therefore 1/4 wrong altogether, or 3/4 to put a better spin on it.

Think about the squabble being kicked up by the "New Atheists," wherein any concepts arrived at by other than scientific means are mocked as craven or juvenile. When I listen to Dawkins go on about natural selection, it is clear to me is not just talking about the "truth" of it (to which I also adhere, more or less), but also the "Truth" of it. For him, the explanatory power of natural selection is just short of mystical. But this is allowed, because, after all, Dawrinism is science.

Deets:

OK, I can see that. As it happens, I do not agree Dawkins's forays into philosophy, but I keep that distinct from what he says about science.

Crap, hit "post" too soon again. Should have been: As it happens, I do not agree with the substance of Dawkins's forays into philosophy, but I keep that distinct from what he says about science.

Thanks your article

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