Template:M intro philosophy transgressing hermeneutical boundaries

L’affair Sokal

In nineteen ninety-six physicist Alan Sokal submitted the paper Transgressing The Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity to Social Text, a respected academic journal in the field of cultural studies. It argued:

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

Social Text published it. This turned out to be a bad mistake. Rather than it representing some major concession on the part of hard science, Sokal announced that he had been joking. In another journal — no doubt the irony was not lost on him that it was called Lingua Franca — he trium[phantly announced that the whole paper was a hoax, stuffed with deliberately nonsensical arguments and absurd claims purporting to connect theoretical physics to postmodernist ideologies. He meant the whole thing to be ridiculous. Those morons at Social Text were exposed as pretentious gadflies as, apparently, were the leading lights of the post-modern movement.

Sokal made much of this wheeze, eventually publishing a best-selling book about it (Fashionable Nonsense) in which he extended te scope of his ambition from simply mocking the cretinous editors of an academic periodical to vanquishing postmodernism altogether.

As such, Alan Sokal takes his place in the pantheon of muscular 21st-century rationalists besides Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Weinberg and others, who, they claim, spent the next decade wiping the floor with simpering relativists.

Interlude: God is dead

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

Western thought is punctuated by a few monumental ideas. None since “the unexamined life is not worth living” more profound than this, from a gentleman naturalist in 1859: organisms with heritable traits better suited to their environment tend to survive and reproduce more successfully, leading to changes in populations over time.

This basic statement of evolution by natural selection does not only provide a compelling account of the origin of species, but at a deeper level operates as a kind of universal acid.

Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers—welcome or not—to questions in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in the other direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn't that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down?

In the simplest case evolution by natural selection does away with the need for a creator as anything more than a “prime mover”. On omnipotence, no omniscience, no omnipresence required. There was, and remains, a great deal of resistance to that idea because of the abundance of apparent designed in the universe. I don’t want to get into the does God exist debate, but simply to point up the intellectual proposition presented by Darwin and wholeheartedly adopted by his successors in intellectual, er, spirit: just because something seems to be intentional, coherent, planned, consistent and designed, that doesn’t mean it is.

Darwin’s dangerous idea wasn't quite the bolt out of the blue that Daniel Dennett proposed: indeed it was anticipated by more than a century by a very similar idea, only in the then nascent field of economics:

Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

We can trace the chain of this idea back even further than Adam Smith: in 1734, David Hume proposed:

We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin’d together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable.

— David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

Hume, Smith and Darwin are three of the monumental figures of the Western enlightenment. Exactly the kind of colonial hegemonists that the deconstructionists and the “third wave” of postmodernism reject outright — yet their insights form the foundation of contingency and skepticism which Sokal abhors. They more than anyone else to undermine the idea that just because something seems to be ordered, structured, planned and deliberate, that it is.

There are no platonic forms. There is no divine plan. The economy is not controlled by the King. These are self-organising systems with no blueprint, no direction and no goal.

Science has freed itself from the tyranny of the almighty, but there was a heavy price to pay.

They think it’s all over

So it must be a bit galling to note that, twenty years on, the battle for the sould of truth still rages. Baudrillard and Derrida may have taken a back seat — dead straight white dudes, after all — but a new generation of intersectional critical theorists seem intent on de-colonising science and straining it through a filter of gender, race, and cultural hegemony.

What is going wrong?

What are the claims?

It’s important not to make a category error about the issue at stake here. Sokal frames it as one between existing established scientific “truths” and nonsensical hypotheses put up by the postmodernists. Taking established, functional theories about the practical world and running them against indulgent social theorising is a fun debate and an easy one to win. Richard Dawkins applies the coup de grace:

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite.

But to take this as a straight fight between, say, Isaac Newton and Judith Butler is to frame it as an argument between two competing truths, and not as to whether there is any truth at all. Butler has, well, their truth, Newton has his. This is not the conversation we need to have. It would be better to clear the field of both Newton and Butler, and stick to the dry principles of epistemology.

These were picked out not by provocative Frenchmen, but, largely, by Germans. Thus, Sokal will happily pick fights with Derrida, Lacan, Latour, Lyotard, Deleuze and Kristeva — “deconstructionists” whose main industry was attacking existing power structures behind received knowledge, intending to wipe away the power structures and radically reinterpret the world — but he has less to say about Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Kuhn and Rorty — who started from a position of that objective truth is unattainable, and sought to explain how humans manage to attain knowledge, understanding, and progress anyway, within that limited framework of human perception and given the complexities of language and culture.

Here is the difference between what the deconstructionists saw as “power structures” — bad, colonial, oppressive to marginalised people — and the pragmatists’ “research programmes” and “paradigms”, which are a precondition to any kind of community knowledge or culture.

The question is this: does the aquisition of knowledge — let’s park for a bit what we mean by “knowledge” — depend on the social structures through which we amass that knowledge or not? Park any questions about whether these social structures are valid, or effective, or good — and ask whether they are necessary. Can knowledge exist without them?

Unfortunately, that makes for a far more boring conversation, and much less scope for sledging from either side. Undoubtedly Newton was influenced by his cultural milieu — as outrageous as we might find it today — in arriving at his theories. So was Butler. But, what’s done is done: how, historically, we got to our working theories of the world does not matter. What effect they have on society is also moot: they must, after some kind of fashion or other, work, because they are still here. The question is abstract. Can knowledge develop without a supporting social structure, and if it cannot, once it has developed, can it acquire any validity independently of that or any other social structure? Can it bootstrap itself into independent existence?

Can knowledge develop without a social structure?

A difficulty the scientific realists have here is that all historical knowledge appears to have grown up in a very rigid social structure: academia.

While there are celebrated cases of intellectuals working outside established fields (Bayes’ inferential reasoning, Mendel’s genetics, Faraday’s electromagnetism and Wegener’s continental drift theory for example) each of these theories acquired scientific credibility only when ultimately adopted into the academy and subjected to community standards: peer review, replication of results, integration into or adaptation of existing theoretical frameworks to generate practical applications for the learning or further research building on the findings. As research programmes grow more sophisticated the prospect of gentlemen scientists stumbling across meaningful new theories in their greenhouses recedes. As new paradigms arrive the possibility arises (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their Cupertino garage) but is quickly overtaken by the scale and money and structure that flows in. The influence of research programmes grows as a scientific field matures that is to say.

This is not to falsify the notion of independent objective knowledge but to note that it is strangely co-relative with a social structure. Yes; the causal arrow may fly the other way, but still.

Can knowledge exist independently of its social structure?

Once generated within a social structure can knowledge escape it it can certainly be adopted by other social structures: indeed this kind of, well, cultural appropriation is exactly Alan Sokal’s objection had to the fruity French deconstructionists appropriating concepts from theoretical physics.

But you can’t have it both ways: either the knowledge exists and is free and may be appropriated by any academic discipline, or it is captive of the research programme that generated it, and there is some proprietary ownership in it, in which case it is difficult to maintain that the knowledge is not socially constructed.

Can knowledge have a truth value independently of its social structure?

Here again, the answer appears to be no, if Sokal’s own professions on the subject are anything to go by. Again, you can't have it both ways: either the knowledge exists free of a given social structure and therefore may be pressed into use without criticism from those within that social structure or it does not. If only quantum theorists are entitled, or qualified, to opine on the validity of quantum theory — If only they have the credentials and sufficient education, all imposed by a social structure, criticise applications of the knowledge, it is hard to see how the knowledge is not derived, developed and gate-kept by those holding senior positions within the, well, power structure.

We must start with a simpler question what are our grounds for believing we have access to the truth in the first place? A cursory look at the scientific method is sobering. As far as science depends on observation, and proceeds using inductive reasoning — and if you accept the scientific realist perspective it absolutely does then the fundamental means of gathering knowledge is incapable of yielding truth. The deductive argument that because something has always happened in the past, therefore it will always happen, in the future does not follow as a matter of crystalline logic. The best we can say is, Because X has always happened in the past we have no reason to think it will not continue to happen in the future. This is a significantly weaker claim especially insofar as it comes to the matter of transcendent truth.