The controversy over the book
Higher Superstition, by
Gross and
Levitt
and the recent articles by
Sokal
The OAMSRPDAAAS (Official
AMS
Representative to the Physics Division of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science) was trying to look
wise at a meeting in Baltimore last February, while silently wondering whether
his was the absolutely most obscure bureaucratic position in North American
Academia. He was diverted from this relatively engrossing problem of
optimization by the appearance of one Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, bearing
Among other things he learned that this and other attacks on science have been
thoroughly discussed in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its
Quarrels with Science, by
Virginia biologist Paul R. Gross and
Rutgers
mathematician Norman Levitt
[GL]. The assembled scientists in Baltimore were
avidly reading the book and reporting that it was ``a real eye-opener'' and
``not just the usual anti-PC screed.'' Best of all, it was on sale! At that
time, before a recent prank by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at NYU,
focused the mass media on tensions between scientists and the ``academic
left,'' most scientists were astonished to be told that there are social
scientists and humanities scholars who believe not only that they have produced
incisive and significant criticism of the role of science in society, but that
they have also revolutionized its methods, its content, and its claim to
truthfulness. Can a revolution have occurred in science without scientists
being aware of it? Just what are these critics saying, and are the attacks on
science something scientists need to worry about?
Gross and Levitt have dealt with these questions and written a call to arms for
the community. The ``left'' as seen by Gross and Levitt is quite diverse, including
those labeling themselves
feminists, ecological activists, afrocentrists, and others,
but the greatest concern is with a
movement in the tradition of postmodern literary
theory, called ``cultural studies.''
(The somewhat fluid terminology includes ``science studies'' and some other variants.)
Attacks from the other side - creation
science and so on - are not discussed, mostly because they are virtually
unrepresented on our own soil, the universities.
At the beginning this book feels academic and formal, because the authors show
off their vocabulary and because they protest painstakingly that their targets
are limited to specific fools and foolishness and not to sociologists of
science or the politically engaged at large, with whom they express sympathy.
(Later events confirm their decision to be careful in this regard.) It soon
gets lively, however, as the case relentlessly builds against the postmodern
critics and others, damning them with their own words. These critics are
depicted as ideologues with an intense envy of science, born of
adolescent fixations on power and authority. Their analysis
consists of ``turgid and opaque'' jargon and servile quotations from their
intellectual idols, in defense of politically foreordained conclusions. With
these shabby intellectual weapons they are furiously tilting at the windmills
of science. An example is Stanley Aronowitz, whose Science as
Power, is described as follows [GL, pp. 50-51]:
The view promoted in this influential book is described (by an admirer
[R1])
as:
Most ridiculous are many critics who sling scientific terminology about with an
air of authority, while revealing to anyone with technical training that they
have not the slightest idea what it means. In examples drawn from mathematics,
they have picked up some vogue words like chaos and nonlinearity, and have
eagerly misunderstood them as showing that mathematics has been fundamentally
rethought and has retreated from its claim to objective truth. (The cultural
critics have little to say about logic or the foundations of mathematics, where
there are some long-standing and quite vexatious issues. They are instead
drawing words and phrases selectively from the popular press.) Similar
silliness is babbled about quantum and relativistic physics and about other
branches of science. Indeed, scientific objectivity is flatly rejected as a
bogus and dangerous notion associated with the evils of capitalism,
colonialism, militarism, patriarchy, etc. Some advocate repression
[H]:
Innocence in this context refers to doing pure research, carried on without
political oversight.
Finally, cultural critics declare victory over science: ``We are witnessing
the slow, discontinuous breakup of the old world-view according to which
physical science offers context-free knowledge of the external world ''
[A]
...... ``Science is no longer accepted as a given without the mediation of
cultural codes, social and economic forces, and professional interests''
[N]
...... ``It is safe to say that many of the founding certitudes of modern
science have been demolished''
[R1]. The opinions of scientists on this point
are not actively sought.
The indictment made in Higher Superstition, buttressed as it is with so
many direct quotes and meticulous documentation, is forceful and persuasive.
This reviewer took the next step and examined the works of many of Gross and
Levitt's targets for himself, and found it rather easy to locate additional
dismaying examples. Not all of the crimes occur simultaneously, of course.
Sometimes turgid and opaque prose shrouds a true statement, and sometimes
ignorance is quite nicely expressed. And there is even some good sense here
and there - when they are not
shouting slogans or pretending to know things they don't.
Oh, for a Tom Wolfe to write a satirical novel about these folk!
Or for an Alan Sokal to write a parody article and actually
get it published in
Social Text, a prominent journal of the cultural
studies movement
[S1]! If cultural critics are free to use their (dim) lights
to examine science, then it is fair to use the scientific method to verify
whether Gross and Levitt's description of them is accurate. In a companion
article to his parody, published simultaneously in another journal
[S2], Sokal
explains:
...to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest
(though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American
journal of cultural studies - whose editorial collective includes such
luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross - publish an article liberally
salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors'
ideological preconceptions?
The parody was a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose
quotations, and outright nonsense, centered on the claim that physical reality
is merely a social construct. In defense of their decision to accept Sokal's
article, the ``editorial collective'' has revealed that it makes decisions
according to postmodern standards unhampered by such quaint traditions as peer
review
[RR].
But wait... aren't the portraits painted by Gross and Levitt and illuminated by
Sokal a bit too familiar? Could we have glimpsed something not so different
when we last peered into our collective mirror? Mathematics and science
certainly have idols and personality cults. How often does a seminar speaker
explain that a problem is important because such and such a famous
mathematician said it was? Believe it or not, we have jargon. As for puffery
and pretension, have you never read an article in ``applied'' mathematics which
starts by grandly stating that the equation about to be given a wonderful
analysis is of utmost importance for a long list of branches of physics?
Details about these applications may be in shorter supply than future citations
in
The Physical Review.
Most but not all readers of stories about the Sokal affair in the mass media
are on the side of scientific rationality in the dispute.
Others view it as a turf war between two similar
communities of self--important pedants, one of which happens to have scored off the other.
Objectively, the enemies of science cannot simply be dismissed as fools
(not all of them all of the time),
and indeed they are disturbingly like ourselves in many ways.
This suggests another modest experiment: Could a parody be published in a
serious mathematical physics journal, for example, if it used authentic
sounding jargon and made references to fashionable trends in the field? Spoof
posters are not uncommon at meetings, but they are recognized for what they are
(by most onlookers most of the time). This experiment, too, has been carried
out at least twice to my knowledge, in July, 1988, and in October, 1993, by
investigators who prefer to remain anonymous. The result? Alas,
the
counterrevolutionary cads who edit our publications, with their retrograde
allegiance to objectivity and peer review, wouldn't even let such an article
into a conference proceeding or
mp-arc, the electronic archive. Strangely,
there seems to be a correlation between belief in objectivity and quality
control.
The correlation is not perfect -- scientific error and even fraud get
published from time to time, and clever parodies might have a decent chance of
appearing in some journals devoted to the softer sciences. Systematic
experiments quantifying the susceptibility to parody of various academic
disciplines, in units called the sokal, the millisokal, etc., could be quite revealing.
Even more revealing would be the response to the parody, judging from the
recent affair. In the case of Social Text, Sokal's experiment not only
bought out its lack of scholarly review, but also found the editors so far out
to sea that they had trouble understanding the point of the parody. Perhaps,
one said, Sokal just had a "change of heart" when he revealed the hoax
[RR].
The sanctimonious tone of the critics upon being criticized can be pretty funny when set
beside their other writings. For instance, Andrew
Ross, the editor of
Social Text, usually writes aggressively (he's not one of the turgid and opaque ones):
``Be prepared for another season of asinine anecdotes about feminist algebra, [etc.]''
[R2] and "This book is
dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been
written without them.''
[R3] are typical. After his own nose was tweaked, the aging
enfant terrible and his coeditor
wrote [RR]:
Notice that the power of science has apparently nothing to do with its content.
The passage ends with:
Here and elsewhere
([R2], [Fi]), Gross, Levitt, Sokal and other scientists are
charged with arrogantly opposing any examination of science by outsiders, but
this is squarely contradicted by the evidence of their words. Of course
science is an appropriate object of study by anthropologists, sociologists,
historians, and philosophers, and of course it exists in a political context.
But the examination should be intelligent and honest. Humbug, on the other
hand, cries out to be exposed, and it has been. Obviously, defensiveness is a
motivation, but Sokal was feeling more defensive about left-wing politics, of
which he is an adherent, than about science. He feels that left-wing politics
has been damaged by its association with nonsense, whereas science has been
unscathed
[S2]. Sokal is far from alone on the left in his dismay at sharing
the company of the cultural critics
[P]. Or perhaps this is a naive view:
Despite contrary evidence, Ross has cleverly deconstructed Gross, Levitt, and
even Sokal into the far right wing:
[R4] (see also [R2],
[P]).
How could anyone imagine that the motivation for
cultural studies is political?
Since it is inconceivable that anyone would allow his honest
judgment to override political partisanship, Gross, Levitt, and Sokal must have sinister
designs!
Thoughtful scientists do pay attention to philosophical issues about science,
though usually without getting distracted from their work. Few see the
cultural studies movement as serious in this regard, revealing as it so often
does a dearth of scientific knowledge or even communication with scientists.
(In contrast, Feyerabend
[Fe1] [Fe2], whom some cultural critics revere, was both
scholarly and eager to discuss science with scientists.) Moreover,.
if the prevailing intellectual standards in cultural studies are as low as
Gross and Levitt make them out, most of the damage will be localized
at the source, as was the case in the Soviet Union, where the more
politicized academic disciplines settled into mediocrity. This was
ultimately to the benefit of Soviet mathematics, in which the talented
often sought refuge.
The threat is not to the epistemology of science, but to its social context,
and this is the true battleground. Science is terribly important, but not as
an accidentally powerful example among many equally valid forms of
discourse, or as a state religion. It is paramount because it constantly
transforms the human condition, and its power to do so arises from a
unique relation to objectivity, which some cultural critics fail, or refuse,
to grasp. Any political system or ideology has to deal with the phenomenon
of science, but only damage can result from ignorance and dishonest
motives. This can be seen every day in education, the workplace, and
the courts - the legal avatar of the movement, known as critical legal
studies, is far more influential than cultural studies, and the other
groups described by Gross and Levitt are all at work in the legal system
as well. We suffer much more as citizens than as professionals, but as
professionals we are both able and responsible to improve the uses of
science in society. In this it would be foolish arrogance not to work
together with outside critics, who not only potentially have much to
offer, but have a substantial track record of doing so. For example, the
Tuskegee experiment,
in which uninformed people were intentionally not treated
for syphilis as part of a controlled experiment, is only one of the most
notorious of many ethical abuses which have occurred in science,
in this country and not so long ago. The scientific community was not
alone or even in a unique position of leadership in establishing better
principles of beneficence and disclosure in human experimentation.
None of the sciences, including mathematics, has a monopoly on wisdom
as to its uses.
Gross, Levitt, and Sokal have done us all a great favor. Thanks to them the
scientific community is now aware of this breed of critics and is ready to respond
with its own indispensable perspectives. Even those who have been embarrassed
may now curb their excesses, and ultimately benefit. Let us now be equally
vigilant about our own shortcomings, and, most importantly, let us not neglect
the serious issues surrounding science in our amusement over the latest
skirmish.
[A] Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern
Society. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 265.
[Fe1] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an
Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. London and New York: Verso, 1978.
[Fe2] Paul Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society. Manchester: NLB, 1978.
Feyerabend pioneered the modern philosophical critique of the objectivity of
science. His comparisons of science to pseudoscience and even his language -
abusing his own critics as illiterate, putting the word "fact" in quotes (p. 158) -
are echoed by the cultural critics.
[Fi] Stanley
Fish, ``Professor Sokal's Bad Joke,'' The New York Times
OP-ED page, 21 May 1996, electronically available at
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jwalsh/sokal/fish.oped.txt
(URL verified 29 June 1996). Not coincidentally, Fish is the publisher of
Social Text..
[GL] Paul. R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic
Left and its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp. 50-51. (It can be
ordered on line.)
[H] Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 90.
[N] Dorothy
Nelkin, ``Perspectives on the Evolution of Science Studies,'' in
Technoscience and Cyberculture, edited by S. Aronowitz, B. Martinsons,
and M. Menser, 31-36. (quote on p. 33). Nelkin cites Gross and Levitt, oddly
with the wrong date.
[P] Katha Pollitt, "Pomolotov Cocktail", The Nation, 10 June 1996,
electronically available at
http://www.thenation.com/issue/960610/0610poll.htm
(URL verified 29 June 1996).
[R1] Andrew
Ross, Strange Weather, Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age
of Limits. London and New York: Verso, 1991, p. 11.
[R2] Andrew
Ross, "Science Backlash on Technoskeptics" in The Nation,
October 2, 1995, electronically available at
http://zelda.thomson.com/routledge/cst/ross.html (URL verified 28 June
1996).
[R3] Andrew
Ross, Strange Weather, Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age
of Limits. London and New York: Verso, 1991, acknowledgment page.
[R4] Andrew
Ross, in the Times Higher Education Supplement (6 June
1996), electronically available at
http://weber.u.washington.edu/%7Ejwalsh/sokal/rossTHES.txt (URL verified 28
June 1996).
[RR] Bruce Robbins and Andrew
Ross in Lingua Franca (July/August
1996), electronically available at
http://www.designsys.com/socialtext/sokal.html
(URL verified 28 June 1996).
[S1] Alan Sokal, ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,'' Social Text., Spring/Summer 1996.
Sokal's articles and related materials are electronically available at
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/physics/faculty/sokal/index.html
(URL verified 28 June 1996).
[S1] Alan Sokal, ``A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,'' Lingua
Franca, June, 1996, electronically available at
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/physics/faculty/sokal/index.html
(URL verified 28 June 1996).
Many materials related to the Sokal affair are obtainable at
http://weber.u.washington.edu/%7Ejwalsh/sokal/,
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/physics/faculty/sokal/index.html
and
http://www.feedmag.com/96.06chapman/96.06chapman.html
(URLs verified 28 June 1996)
Return to Evans Harrell's
home page
Its chief method seems to be to invoke from the philosophy of science as many
names as possible ... names and phrases are simply run in and out of the text
as props for Aronowitz's views.
Critics like Stanley Aronowitz see science not as the realization of universal
reason but simply as an ideology with a power that extends well beyond its own
institutions...
The ``innocence'' of science communities ... is extremely dangerous to us all.
Perhaps people who have exhibited tendencies toward such innocence should not
be permitted to practice science or construct metatheories of science; they are
a danger to the already disadvantaged and perhaps even to the species!
This breach of ethics is a serious matter in any scholarly community, and has
damaging consequences......[Sokal's] adventures in PostmodernLand were not
really our cup of tea.......Why does science matter so much to us? Because its
power, as a civil religion, as a social and political authority, affects our
daily lives and the parlous condition of the natural world more than does any
other domain of knowledge.
Should non-experts have anything to say about scientific methodology and
epistemology? After centuries of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and
scientific domination of nature one might have thought this was a pertinent
question to ask.
The erosion of the Cold War funding contract with the state, combined with the
decrease in public respect for scientific authority, has created a demand for
scapegoats in the demonic form of politically motivated scholars in science
studies. Accordingly, Gross, Levitt, Sokal and others are simply recycling all
of the usual suspect ideas from the Culture Wars in order to persuade
scientists ... to get involved in the academic P.C. wars.
Copyright 1996 by
Evans M. Harrell II.
Reproduction is permitted for any
reason, provided that the text is unaltered and contains this notice. The
opinions expressed here are the author's and not necessarily those of the
American Mathematical Society or the
Georgia Institute of Technology.
Readers of the Notices may recall an earlier article on feminist aspects
of the science wars: Allyn Jackson, ``Feminist Critiques of Sciences,''
Notices of the Amer. Math. Soc., 36 (July/Aug 1989) 669-672 .
Additional endnotes (not in the article in the Notices) and links.