Sep 24, 2007 11:56 pm

Old News on the Science Wars

Meant to post this two weeks ago, but got myself into a massive time sink after reading this article online: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” by Alan Sokal. No hurry though, this is apparently old news for most people who care about the matter — the paper was published in 1996 in a well-known cultural studies journal called Social Text. Among other juicy pseudo-intellectual non-sequitors (of the sort I routinely peppered my high school english papers with), I quote the following from the article:

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;

Yes, you’ve heard it before, the “science as culture” argument. But before that even has time to sink in, things rapidly take a weird turn:

In mathematical terms, Derrida’s observation relates to the invariance of the Einstein field equation $latex G_{\mu\nu}=8\pi G T_{\mu\nu}$ under nonlinear space-time diffeomorphisms (self-mappings of the space-time manifold which are infinitely differentiable but not necessarily analytic). The key point is that this invariance group “acts transitively”: this means that any space-time point, if it exists at all, can be transformed into any other. In this way the infinite-dimensional invariance group erodes the distinction between observer and observed; the π of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.

If you’re wondering what Derrida could possibly have said that would suggest the inconstance of π and G, you need not worry — it’s all a big joke. The article was a deliberately meaningless hoax, and the author was a physicist with a point to make, which he (rather diplomatically) explains as an attempt to answer the question:

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?

In other words, “Does Social Text publish bull shit?” Obviously, in this case, the answer was yes. You can imagine Social Text’s reaction to what amounted to a big fat middle finger from someone outside their field. Once the dust had settled, and a zillion different writers from every scientific and humanities field imaginable had put in their two cents, everyone seemed to leave the debate with a slightly bad taste in their mouths and some frustratingly unresolved issues. This all reminded me of a frequent debate I have with certain non-scientist friends of mine, as to the real worth (or if we’re feeling really argumentative, epistemological legitimacy) of modern scientific inquiry. It wasn’t until I read the Sokal article and the discussion that ensued that I began to grasp some of the very subtle distinctions that need to be made, ones which I found impossible to keep track of during protracted verbal discussions.

A particularly sticky point is the relation between sociological critiques of science and their epistemological implications. There are usually two logically distinct questions being asked here, one concerning the nature of scientific theory or practice, and one concerning the nature of scientific knowledge itself.

First of all, is our knowledge of the physical world mediated by a socially constructed set of rules? The answer has to be yes. Consider the difference between a molecular theory of disease and a traditional theory, the latter perhaps having been informed by a geographically and culturally different set of empirical observations. Alternatively, simply recall the history of classical and quantum physics, and the social changes that accompanied, and indeed, made possible, the new experiments required to revise our notions of the natural world. But now we ask, to what extent is scientific theory a social construct? Can science be considered completely equivalent to any other cultural practice, and what does this imply about the objectivity of the truths it purports to reveal? Notice so far that we are only talking about scientific theory, our attempt at explaining, in some systematic and self-consistent way, a natural event. These must be socially determined for no other reason than the innate differences in technological capacity between societies wishing to conduct experiments — by which I mean anything from running particle accelerators to watching rocks fall off a cliff. However, presumably the point of doing any sort of “experiment” in the first place is that what you are observing or measuring, the scientific fact provided by nature, will not change.

Thus we have our second question, which has to do with the facts themselves, and which has inspired decades of ink-spilling and accusation-hurling: Is a scientific fact true regardless of the culture or society which evaluates it? Post-modernists and sociologically minded students of science say no. This critique of scientific objectivity is often accompanied by the related claim that there is no meaningful distinction between the socially-constructed explanations of natural phenomena and the phenomena themselves. Wait, what? Why? Aha! Here is the post-modernists’ rhetorical coup-de-grace, the apparent profundity of which must account for the immense popularity of this view. All of the above holds, because when you think you know some objective fact about the natural world, the reason you know that fact was actually that you’ve inferred it using a set of socially-constructed rules, i.e. a scientific theory. That fact doesn’t really exist without the theory! R.I.P. scientific objectivity.

You can guess that I (along with Alan Sokal) don’t agree with this view at all, for two simple reasons. First, it is a vast oversimplification to say that theory is determined absolutely by cultural considerations. It is in part, but the relationship also works the other way around — a theory is formed as an inevitable consequence of certain observations about nature, and that theory in turn causes profound changes in social attitudes. In fact, part of the problem is a basic (or deliberate) confusion of cultural with technological or economic explanations. Secondly, science is fundamentally comprised not so much of the rules or theories that tell us facts about the world, but a way of thinking which formulates those rules given another set of facts. Ancient Egyptians calculated the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius by equating the area of the circle to 8/9ths the area of a square with a side length equal to the circle’s diameter. Now we compute this same ratio, π, through notions of infinitely long sums of rational numbers or by cleverly applying principles of trigonometry. That the two values end up within a tenth of each other is no coincidence. The multiplicity of possible scientific explanations which all give the same answer for a given natural fact is itself evidence of the existence of natural objective truths. Behind the differences in these theories may be technological or cultural explanations, but the facts they tell us are real, and we can know them precisely because they do not change.

Lest I be preaching to the choir or attacking a straw man here, let me conclude by linking to a few who have said all I’ve summarized above, in more eloquent terms and with a greater appreciation for the subtleties of philosophizing. All of the articles related to Alan Sokal’s paper, including the paper itself, can be found here. For some more context, see Wikipedia: Science Wars. If science isn’t your cup of tea, don’t miss the (gasp!) political implications of the so-called “Science Wars” between intellectuals in different fields (which Sokal himself also discusses a great deal), this time expounded upon by an unlikely suspect: Bruno Latour, a figurehead for cultural critiques of science.

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