Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 00:41:31 -0400 (EDT)
Reply-To: CSALL@gmu.edu
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From: beth armitage 
To: csall@gmu.edu
Subject: Sokal's Reply to Social Text Editorial (fwd)
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sokal's reply to the social text editorial


I confess to amusement that one Social Text editor still doesn't
believe my piece was a parody. Oh, well.

As for Social Text's editorial process, readers can judge for
themselves the plausibility of the editors' post facto explanations,
which if true may be more damning than the incident itself. Some of
their chronology is at variance with the documentary record (e-mail
and regular mail between Ross and myself, which I've saved), but let
me not beat a dead horse.

More interesting than the scandal provoked by the article's acceptance
is, I think, the scandal that ought to be provoked by its content. My
essay, aside from being (if I may quote Katha Pollitt's flattery) "a
hilarious compilation of pomo gibberish," is also an annotated
bibliography of charlatanism and nonsense by dozens of prominent
French and American intellectuals. This goes well beyond the narrow
category of "postmodernism," and includes some of the most fashionable
thinkers in "science studies," literary criticism, and cultural
studies.

In short, there is a lot of sloppy thinking going around about "social
construction," often abetted by a vocabulary that intentionally elides
the distinction between facts and our knowledge of them. I'm no expert
in epistemology, but some of this work is so illogical that it doesn't
take an expert to deconstruct it. I've analyzed one representative
example in an Afterword submitted for publication in Social Text; I
hope the editors will print it, perhaps along with replies. I'd
suggest they also invite contributions from philosophers far sharper
than myself, such as Susan Haack and Janet Radcliffe Richards.

Robbins and Ross say that I "declined to enter into a publishable
dialogue" with them. Quite the contrary: we're having that dialogue
right now. What I declined was an oral dialogue, which in my opinion
usually yields a low ratio of content to words.

Robbins and Ross guess wrong when they say I feel "threatened" by
science-studies scholars. My goal isn't to defend science from the
barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but
to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. Like innumerable
others from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, I call for the Left
to reclaim its Enlightenment roots. We're worried above all for the
social sciences and the humanities, not the natural sciences.

In their last two paragraphs, Robbins and Ross bring up a plethora of
real issues, but it would take quite a bit of space to disentangle the
substance from the rhetoric. They conflate science as an intellectual
system with the social and economic role of science and technology.
They conflate epistemic and ethical issues.

These confusions lead Robbins and Ross into a serious error: setting
up an opposition between science and progressive politics. They
describe science as a "civil religion" that supports existing social
and political structures. It is of course true that scientific
reasearch is skewed by the influence of those with power and money.
But a scientific worldview, based on a commitment to logic and
standards of evidence and to the incessant confrontation of theories
with reality, is an essential component of any progressive politics.

Despite these differences, there is a potentially vast common ground
between Robbins--Ross and myself. When scientific research is
increasingly funded by private corporations that have a financial
interest in particular outcomes of that research -- is the drug
effective or not? -- scientific objectivity is undermined. (But to
make this argument, one must first have a conception of objectivity:
not as a state that human beings can ever attain, but as an ideal
standard of comparison.) When universities are more interested in
patent royalties than in the open sharing of scientific information,
the public suffers. There are hundreds of important political and
economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of
science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But
sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even
counterproductive.
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/physics/faculty/sokal/reply.html