Andrew Ross, ed., Science Wars (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 352 pages ... of literature. SW authors George Levine and Katherine Hayles are ...
Continental Philosophy Review 31: 95–106, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Review essay
Where learned armies clash by night
Andrew Ross, ed., Science Wars (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 352 pages, $49.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). The so-called “Science Wars” concern the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge in relation to the historical and social context of scientific institutions. These topics, previously confined largely to the journals and conferences of philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science, have noisily surfaced in the mass media in the USA and elsewhere in the form of a debate misleadingly portrayed either as one between scientists and humanists or as one between scientists and “the academic left.” The debate is driven in part by a number of academic institutional factors including the spreading impact in the academy of continental views concerning science and also by what scientists perceive as a growing lack of public respect for the authority and support for the funding demands of scientists. In recent decades various forms of social critique of science have developed in Anglo-American thought which partially absorbed various continental philosophies of science. A number of these intellectual developments are represented in Science Wars (SW). The purpose of SW is to reply to recent (primarily natural scientific) criticism of science studies, especially that found in The Higher Superstition (HS) by biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt.1 Within the academy, sociology, literary criticism, and cultural studies have engaged the content of natural science. American sociology of science, which formerly limited itself to the study of the organization of scientific institutions, has been transformed by the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which emphasizes the intellectual claims of science and accounts for the content of theories and experiments in terms of structures of scientific authority and negotiation.2 This trend is represented by SW contributors Stanley Aronowitz, Sharon Traweek, and Steve Fuller.3 Literary critics and professors of rhetoric examine scientific texts as well as the influence of science on the imagery of literature. SW authors George Levine and Katherine Hayles are
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leading writers in this field. Most recently, cultural studies turned its attention to science popularization as a cultural phenomenon. SW editor Ross has been a major figure in this development. Other movements giving rise to cultural critiques of science were not initially academic. The Radical Science Movement, growing out of opposition to the Vietnam War, included scientists as well as laypersons. SW contributors Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, and Ruth Hubbard are scientists who participated in this movement. The feminist movement gave rise to critiques of science as male-dominated in its style and structure (work exemplified in SW by Hubbard, Sandra Harding, and Hilary Rose). The ecology movement began with critiques of technology as ecologically destructive and moved on to criticize reductionist scientific theories. This trend is represented by SW authors Les Levidow and Ross. More recently, multiculturalism has emphasized the contributions to science of non-Western peoples and criticized mainstream science for excluding or rejecting indigenous knowledge (In SW Harding writes on multicultural feminism, and Fuller discusses Japan and multicultural science.) Interest in SSK as well as in the various political critiques of science has led to the partial reception of tendencies from continental philosophy. Of course, Foucault has been immensely influential. Radical social theory of science absorbed Frankfurt School critical theory. The Bath school of science studies makes use of Husserl’s phenomenological bracketing. Oddly, the sociologists of science refer to “bracketing” in their defences of social construction (p. 233), but apparently, for the most part, are ignorant of the phenomenological origins of the term, let alone the details of phenomenological method. However, the literary critic Hayles does briefly but laudably call for going beyond “bracketing” to investigate the deeper philosophical issues (pp. 235–236). Sociologist Bruno Latour follows Derrida in style as well as in the deconstruction of dichotomies (such as science/society, human actors/inert apparatus).4 Literary critics of scientific texts use Derrida more directly. Until a few years ago, mainstream scientists paid scant attention to these tendencies. However, the growth of science studies as a field distinct from analytical philosophy of science, the popularity of cultural studies, and the more systematic academic output of feminists, Afrocentrists, multiculturalists, and political ecologists have recently begun to gain the (mostly irritated) attention of the scientific community. Fuller notes that while the Radical Science Movement, like the Protestant Reformation, wished to reform science, practitioners of science studies, like nineteenth century “higher critics” of the Bible, attempt to demythologize. The higher critics thought of themselves as separating genuine faith from
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superstition but were shocked when accused of atheism. Similarly, social theorists of scientific knowledge are sometimes surprised by accusations that they lack the proper belief in science (p. 47). Opposing sides in the Science Wars are not arrayed in the traditional ways, such as C.P. Snow’s “two cultures.” There are radical scientists (i.e., SW authors Hubbard, Lewontin, and Levins) who are allied with the humanists against the science warriors. Conversely, conservative cultural critics (such as Roger Kimball of The New Criterion), antagonistic to identity politics and postmodernism, array themselves on the “scientists’ ” side. Likewise, the opposition is not simply between analytic and continental philosophy. Most AngloAmerican philosophers of science oppose claims by science studies that scientific content is socially determined, but some analytic philosophers including feminists (such as Harding), and social epistemologists (such as Fuller) do claim social determination of science. Even the dispute between realism and idealism does not delineate the opposing groups. The scientist critics accuse their sociologist and literary opponents of subjectivism, but they do not criticize anti-realist philosophers of science, whether logical positivists or recent anti-realists, since these thinkers are “pro-science” and do not discuss the politics of science.5 Nor can one simply oppose sociologists to natural scientists. Some empiricist sociologists reject social constructivism, exempt claims of natural science from social determination, and ally themselves with the scientists against science studies. Also, not all opponents of science studies are conservatives. The conservative John M. Olin Foundation and the National Association of Scholars have aligned themselves on the side of the critics of science studies, but two of the most active of these, Alan Sokal and Levitt, consider themselves to be on the left. Because I cannot refer to the opponents of science studies as “scientists” in general, I call them “science warriors.” Ever since the attack in HS on a variety of science critics (usually lumped together as the “academic left”) a debate has raged that Ross and others call the “Science Wars” – by analogy with the “culture wars” in the humanities concerning the canon, multiculturalism, and so-called political correctness. Although Gross and Levitt are the most industrious and vituperative of the science warriors, others such as British biologist Lewis Wolpert,6 Harvard physicist and historian of science Gerald Holton,7 and Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg8 have also made extensive contributions.9 The Social Text journal issue which was the basis for SW became itself a site of preemptive strike by the science warriors. Absent from SW is the article which was by far the most famous in the journal version, Sokal’s hoax article,10 a spoof created to show the lack of critical skills and scientific knowledge of the Social Text editors and pursuers of science studies generally. The hoax was claimed
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by media pundits to discredit inter alia deconstruction, postmodernism, and science studies in general.11 The heterogeneity of the SW authors reflects the diversity of the targets of HS. Indeed, Lewontin objects that the assemblage of “academic left” targets in HS is indiscriminate. It includes radicals who are not academics (e.g., Jeremy Rifkin) and academics who are not leftists (e.g., de Man), but exempts scientists who are leftists (e.g., Stephen Jay Gould) (p. 296). Philosophers and historians of science are specifically exempted from their original criticisms, perhaps with what Langdon Winner satirically calls “the good old days, the days of Carnap, Bronowski and ‘our friend, the atom’ ” in mind. (p. 112). The Science Wars debate itself is influenced by a number of social factors, the most important of which are the decline of funding of science, and the still more general culture wars of which the Science Wars are a part.12 Several authors claim that the animus of attack on the humanities and social sciences by natural scientists is an expression of anger at their declining prestige and greater public accountability. Humanists and social scientists are easy targets. Lewontin compares Gross and Levitt to people who, berated by spouse and children, kick the family dog (p. 298). Alliances in the Science Wars are also influenced by the general controversies concerning the canon and multiculturalism. The National Association of Scholars and the Olin Foundation have found allies for general attack on “subjectivity” and anti-science attitudes among physicists such as Weinberg and Holton, whose views are politically much less conservative than those of a majority of the humanists in those organizations.13 Ross notes that scientists who “haven’t been sorely vexed by curricular displacements of T.S. Eliot by Toni Morrison” (p. 9) have become recruits via the Science Wars in the general attack on postmodernism.14 Some of Gross and Levitt’s harshest critics nevertheless credit with exposing many errors of science and history among the science critics.15 However, Roger Hart’s essay casts doubt on the accuracy of many of the “errors” cited in HS by showing how quotations are taken out of context, and he notes how use of ellipses often changes the meaning of passages quoted. He even catches the topologist Levitt mistranslating the French for differential topology in an attempt to castigate Derrida,16 and notes that Derrida’s much-derided quotation about Einstein (also quoted by Sokal and Weinberg) is cited by Gross and Levitt in a second-hand and abridged form.17 The science warriors give relatively little critical attention to hermeneutics, and what they do say is superficial and indirect. Typical is Sokal’s use of the word in the title (but not in the text) of his hoax article, and Weinberg’s claim that “A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look
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up the word ’hermeneutics’ in the dictionary.”18 HS refers to “hermeneutic hootchy-koo,” (p. 115) which is supposed to suggest that hermeneutics is seductive. Rose (pp. 81–83) notes that the science warriors have claimed Frederick Crews as one of their own for his attack on Freud and on recovered memories of child abuse. Crews cites with approval Adolph Grünbaum’s reliance on the notorious exposition and critique of hermeneutics in Habermas, whom Grünbaum characterizes as a holder of cave-man views of physics. The Science Wars is a debate in which the social significance of a number of philosophical theses are claimed. The debate certainly draws public attention to the importance and relevance of philosophy in public affairs, specifically in popular attitudes toward science. The dispute has brought to public attention (albeit in a distorted form) a number of issues concerning the status and social context of scientific knowledge. These include 1) the objectivity or subjectivity of science in general and of quantum mechanics in particular, 2) the relation of science to other ways of knowing, 3) the question of whether scientific knowledge, particularly of laws of nature, is truly universal or is culture-bound “local knowledge,” 4) the role of metaphor in science, and 5) the extent to which bracketing scientific truthclaims in SSK studies of the social determinants and guiding interests of science undermines the belief that scientific results are objective and universal. Unfortunately, for the most part, the level of the debate has not been such as to clarify these issues. It has tended to be a battle of the sort which Kant described between dogmatism and skepticism. The science warriors have typically been naive realists and dogmatic objectivists. Most of the leading sociologists and literary critics who have publicly responded to them have tended toward sophomoric skepticism. Literary critics such as Stanley Fish and sociologists such as Stanley Aronowitz have debated the science warriors in the mass media. More sophisticated philosophers (such as Joseph Rouse or Helen Longino) who would have given a more insightful and nuanced account of the roles of conventions and language in science did not take part in the widely read debates. This has led to a framing of the debate between naive realism and subjective, arbitrary conventionalism. The science warriors object particularly to the notion that “science is simply one among many ways of knowing.” They decry talk of “women’s ways of knowing,” and of indigenous or non-western peoples’ ethnoscience or views of nature. Perhaps from a lack of familiarity, they do not explicitly criticize phenomenology and hermeneutics for their refusal to follow the method of mathematical, experimental science. Some of the science warriors do, however, contrast science to “common sense,” which they emphasize is inferior to real science. Science is shown superior to “common sense” in making physical predictions.19 A positivist identification of all genuine knowledge
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with science seems to be implicit in many of the science warriors’ claims, but their general unwillingness to commit themselves to it seems in large part to be a function of the fact that one cannot commit to an epistemology one does not understand one has. For example, in his chapter “Against Philosophy,” Weinberg blames philosophy for positivistic views of scientific theories which he rejects.20 Weinberg means by “positivism” the denial of the reality of theoretical entities such as atoms or fields. Particularly offensive to Weinberg and Sokal is the notion that science is “local knowledge” or craft knowledge. Chief among their accusations is that social theorists of science deny the reality of laws of nature.21 Donna Haraway responds “What Sokal doesn’t know is that there is a whole literature on metaphors and how nature took on legal language and property metaphors.”22 Harding (p. 22) aptly cites Joseph Needham, who argued that the concept of scientific laws central to modern science but lacking in traditional Chinese science is closely tied to the extension of the Western jurisprudential concept of law to the natural world. The scope of the legal system in human affairs was extended in the late Middle Ages to cover physical and biological events.23 Of course, maintenance of the Humean-positivistic conception of laws as regular sequences of constant conjunctions does not depend on the rhetoric or metaphysics of God-imposed or even of real laws over and above the events described. In the debate concerning laws the distinction has not made between the objectivity of laws as accurate descriptions of sequences of events which individually qualify as brute facts, and the objectivity of laws as realities over and above the particular events that they “govern.” To disbelieve in the latter is not to deny the intransigent objectivity of particular event sequences, as Sokal implies. Moreover, the question concerning the role of metaphors derived from the juridical concept of law in natural science is not followed up. One of the unnoticed ironies of the Science Wars debate is that not only does the approach to science favored by Levitt and others derive largely from Hume, but Hume’s appeal to custom and habit as the source of our belief in necessary connection is the uncredited precursor of the social constructivists as well.24 Neither side considers a notion of real causes which does not involve the notion of real laws superimposed upon events. A conception of laws of nature which the social constructivist sociologists would find helpful but have not so far utilized, which avoids both the Humean notion of causality and the notion of a scholastic realism of imposed law, is that of Nancy Cartwright, who treats causes as real but considers “fundamental” laws to be inaccurate idealizations. Physicists’ models of particular processes often neglect the laws that supposedly govern them.25 More generally, the crucial issue of the legitimacy and general significance of metaphor in science and discourse about science is not sufficiently debated.
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Certainly a number of literary critics have made very sloppy metaphorical use of the terminology of quantum mechanics, chaos theory, logical theory of undecidability, etc., and they make easy targets for the science warriors. Yet the critics are not all of one mind here. Weinberg, Gross, and Levitt allow that literature and art may borrow metaphors from science.26 However, Gross and Levitt dismiss gender metaphors in science as “merely” metaphorical, considering metaphor to be insignificant for serious thought.27 Michael Ruse notes that the authors seem unaware that the second word in HS’s title, “higher,” is itself a metaphor.28 Rather than giving ontological priority to the (realistic) “literal” over the (decorative) “metaphorical,” as do the science warriors, perhaps we ought to reverse that priority. The rich context of associations and identifications in the half-conceptual life-world is prior to the abstracted and purified idealization which is called the “literal” scientific description of the world. Much of the criticism of science studies is aimed at its alleged epistemological idealism. Yet here also the philosophical level of the discussion is disappointingly low. As mentioned above, Gross and Levitt exempt philosophy of science from the topics of HS. Sokal is seemingly shocked that anyone would even suggest that the world is a construct of mind, language or society, or that the world, even if it exists, cannot be known. Much of the scientist warrior’s discussion of these matters is pre-Kantian. That is, it assumes direct realism, but does not argue against and is not even cognizant of the notion that language or mind might structure the forms of experience without making nature arbitrarily subjective. Journalist Katha Pollitt (showing more philosophical awareness of the Kantian doctrine than either the science warriors or many of their literary opponents) has pointed out one of the theses that physicist hoaxer Sokal denounces as a product of postmodern degeneracy is really the Kantian claim that there exists an unknowable thing-in-itself.29 Many of the science warriors (but also quite a few literary postmodernists) are ignorant of the tradition of idealism in philosophy; they imagine the positions against which they rail were invented by 1960s radicals or 1970s deconstructionists. They say nothing about the idealism or idealist strains in figures such as Berkeley, Hume, Kant, or Fichte, and they display no knowledge of the nineteenth century empirico-critics and neo-Kantians, including figures like Cassirer and the early Carnap who were hardly enemies of the sciences and who nevertheless held positions to which the science warriors object. The science-warriors seem to think that the denial of scientific realism entails the denial of both the obduracy of facts and the formal universality of laws, as well as lack of respect for the achievements of science. Certainly phenomenalists and neo-Kantians denied scientific realism, but phenomenalists accepted the obdurateness of scientific observations and the neo-Kantians
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accepted the universality of scientific laws. (Of course both the early logical positivists and the Marburg Neo-Kantians held mathematics and science to be paradigms of knowledge). Indeed, the scientist warriors are embarrassed by their knowledge that many of the founders of quantum mechanics held epistemological positions which Gross and Levitt, Sokal, et al claim are antiscience. Heisenberg as well as Einstein imbibed Kant in their teens. Bohr and Planck were likewise influenced by neo-Kantianism.30 In reaction to accusations that their socio-historical contextualization of science reduces it to an arbitrary linguistic or social convention, some in science studies have claimed that social constructionism is only a methodological position. This retreat resembles the earlier one of some anthropologists, who claim that anthropological relativism is merely a methodological device and is not to be held as a literal position. Yet this will not do. Just as anthropological relativism in the 1920s and 1930s meant to deny the superiority of Western culture to other cultures and was not solely a methodological stance, so early social constructionism in the sociology of science was a substantive as well as a methodological position.31 One of the ironies of the Science Wars debate is that the sociologists of science, like Thomas Kuhn earlier, seem shocked and anxious to retreat when confronted with the idealistic implications of some of their own statements. Rather than confront the scientist warriors with arguments for idealism (or the more fashionable analytic “anti-realism”),32 the sociologists too often retreat to the claim that theories, but not nature, are socially constructed-a claim which, without the qualifier “socially,” would be denied by almost no one. SW contributors such as Martin and Levine call for communication and dialogue, but the past history of the Science Wars makes this goal seem an improbable event. At least this volume provides an antidote to the superficial claims about science studies often made in the popular press in the wake of the Sokal hoax article. Nonetheless, many of the difficult philosophical issues implicitly involved in the dispute are not really dealt with at suffciient length or depth in SW. The Science Wars do offer an opportunity for professional philosophers to illustrate to the public the philosophical significance of attention to context and the role of bracketing in the description of science as a human activity and for the scientists to engage in detailed investigation of philosophy of science. It is not clear to what extent this opportunity will be taken.
Notes 1. The Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
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2. Departments of science studies, notably Edinburgh and Bath, developed this sociology, which is strongly influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s work, but emphasizes the “scientific community,” an aspect of Kuhn’s work he himself later de-emphasized and that analytic philosophers of science did not develop. 3. Neither Aronowitz nor Fuller is typical of the British SSK. Aronowitz relies primarily on Marxism and the Frankfurt School, but has now turned somewhat toward postmodernism. The British sociologists are more influenced by Wittgenstein (Edinburgh) and phenomenology (Bath). Fuller, trained in philosophy but now holding the Chair of Sociology in Durham, England, is highly critical of Thomas Kuhn’s work, unlike members of the Edinburgh School. Traweek, who has done ethnography of high energy physicists, is now in History and Cultural Studies of Science. 4. This connection was hardly noted in the enthusiastic reception of Latour by science studies in the U. S. 5. Levine notes that anti-realist positions such as that of Bas Van Fraassen are ignored out of principle because his project is to establish the validity of science (p. 125). 6. Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 7. Gerald Holton, Science and Anti-Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), and Einstein. History, and Other Passions (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995). 8. Steven Weinberg, Dreams of A Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992). 9. There have been several conferences on this topic, most notably “The Flight from Science and Reason,” published as Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis, The Flight From Science and Reason, Annals of the New York Academy” of Science, vol. 775, (New York: The New York Academy of Science, 1996). This conference was supported by the Olin and Bradley Foundations. At this conference, deconstruction, post-modernism, feminism, and social constructivist approaches to science (and hermeneutics in passing) were identified as threats to science and reason along with Biblical creationism and belief in UFO abductions. No proponents of the enemy positions were invited. 10. Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text, 14/1 and 2 (1996): 217–252. Ironically, in the issue of Social Text containing Sokal’s spoof, which denies external reality and praises feminist mathematics, editor Ross denies that science studies advocates feminist algebra or rejects the reality of subatomic particles. (SW pp. 7, 11). 11. A selection of the journalistic literature spawned by Sokal’s spoof can be found at Sokal’s home page http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal.html. In Japan an extensive, worldwide index of postings on the web concerning the Sokal hoax debate is http://www.math.tohoku.acjp/ kuroki/Sokal/indexj.html. The international scope of the debate is illustrated by a series of articles in Brazil’s leading daily, Folha de Sao Paulo, including ones by Robert Campos, a leading rightist politician on Sept. 22, 1996, replies by Sokal himself and Jesus de Paula Assis on Oct. 6, and a defense of Campos by Olavo de Carvalho on Oct. 22. (Postings by Mark Lutes and Marilia Coutinho on the STS-list.) 12. Ross asserts provocatively that Congress’ refusal to fund the super-conducting supercollider in Weinberg’s state of Texas played the same role of wake-up call for scientists that the siege of Waco did for the militia movement (p. 7). Levine says of the dedication of Ross’s Strange Weather (London: Verso, 1991), that it “seems impossible not to read as a provocation: ‘This book is dedicated to all the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them’ ” (SW, pp. 134–5). Levine makes the same claim as Ross concerning the role of funding threats in motivating the science warriors in a less inflammatory manner (p. 125) with some documentation (p. 131). The National Association of
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Scholars conference announcement cited by Levine warns that criticism of science are “dangerous” because, among other things “they affect funding”(p. 131). Holton, for instance, who has co-edited two books on women in science, argues that absolutism, not relativism, has been the source of “most of the horrors of history,” and counts anthropology’s denial of claims of western racial superiority as one of the gains of science (Einstein. History and Other Passions. pp. 48–49). Anthropological relativism is the bete noir of many members of the National Association of Scholars and the Olin Foundation supported academics with whom Holton has allied himself. Some leading members of the National Association of Scholars have defended sociobiological theories of women’s or various ethnic groups’ innate inability to pursue science successfully. The recruitment of Weinberg and Holton to the Science Wars resembles that to the culture wars of formerly liberal historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward in opposition to multiculturalism and “political correctness,” respectively. HS castigates treatments of science in African-American and Women’s Studies, usually in their most extreme forms, while neglecting gender- or class-based criticisms which are themselves scientifically documented, such as those of biologists Hubbard, Lewontin or Levins (all contributors to SW). Since these criticisms are made by scientists, they undermine the theme of HS that all social criticisms of science are based on ignorance, and that scientific knowledge leads to positivism and/or objectivism. One example of the latter is Hayles’ claim that the late 1800s were the heyday of logical positivism (presumably confused with nineteenth century positivism) (p. 272). Indeed, Aronowitz, in an instructive article in SW on the social context of science, makes statements that are either carelessly phrased or outright misunderstandings of various theories, thereby offering just the sort of examples science warriors love to exploit. See Aronowitz, “The Politics of the Science Wars.” on the connections implied between Kant and Bohm (p. 211), Kuhn and Peirce (p. 218), Hobbes and hermeticists (p. 220), Shannon and Turing (p. 222), the time of opposition between wave and matrix mechanics (p. 223), the misspelling Michelson (p. 218), and mistaken titles of J. Agassi’s and G. Werskey’s books, (pp. 223, 225). Derrida is criticized for pretending knowledge of mathematical differential topology when Derrida is in fact writing about topoi of différance (p. 278). Levitt apparently thought the “a” in differantielle was a misprint. In HS, p. 265, n11, it is noted that there is a tradition in French theory of using scientific terms metaphorically, and this was assumed to be an example of such use. Levitt notes that the translator, Derek Attridge, is a scholar of Derrida, and can be expected to convey Derrida’s intentions. It is possible that, if not Derrida, then the translator was playing on the mathematical term (Levitt, personal communication). It is also possible that neither noticed the mathematical connotations. They found the quote in the Skeptical Inquirer, where it is part of a conference discussion, rather than a published article, a fact obscured by Gross and Levitt’s editing. Even Hart is willing to say that Derrida’s statement is an “error” (p. 272) and “makes little sense” (p. 277). In fact, the quotation makes more sense in context. Although misleadingly phrased, the point about Einstein is unrelated to the task of Derrida’s article, which was to criticize the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. Derrida himself did not bring up Einstein, but was responding to a question from Jean Hyppolite. Harvard mathematician Gabriel Stolzenberg has pointed out (Dec. 23, 1996 post on the STS-list) that Derrida was discussing the “center” of a centered or decentered totality. He contrasted the notion of a center of a totality, with a “game” in which there is an indefinite regress of references. (“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 278–293.) In discussion, Hyppolite asked Derrida whether
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Einstein’s constant c (the speed of light) was such a “center.” Derrida replied that “The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability – it is, finally, the concept of a game” [“Discussion” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970)] Derrida means by “constant” the center of a totality, and contrasts this with his alternative structure of reference, the “game.” Sokal, Weinberg, Gross and Levitt, all quote this statement as self-evidently absurd, even claiming falsely that Derrida is denying the physical constancy of the speed of light. Derrida hardly ever discusses the natural sciences, as Sokal admits (personal communication). One other rare example is his comment concerning cybernetics in Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 9. Steven Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” New York Review of Books, 43/13, (August 8, 1996), p. 11. See Wolpert, The Unnatural, and Alan Cromer, Uncommon Sense: the Heretical Nature of Science, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Yet their notions of “common sense” are extremely vague, and as Michael Lynch shows the accounts of common sense by Wolpert is confused and contradictory (SW 241–242). Wolpert claims common sense is “unconscious.” Oddly, after denigrating “common sense” as “unconscious” and “unreflective”, Wolpert, then calls for a “common sense realist” philosophy of science. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, pp. 175–182. Sokal challenges believers that scientific laws are social conventions to walk out of his upper-story apartment window. This is an example of annoyance with supposed denial of the reality of laws. Sokal, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca, 6/4 (May/June 1996): 62. Liz Macmillan, “The Science Wars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 28, 1996, p. A13. There were late medieval trials of animals, such as roosters that laid eggs. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954–), vol. 2, 1962, p. 582. E.g., Harry Collins discusses Hume’s doubts about causal necessity, but ignores Hume’s “habit and custom” solution, so close to Collins’ own. Changing Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 6–7. Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 50, 143–144. Joseph Rouse in Knowledge and Power, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987) makes reference to Cartwright but does not deploy her notion of laws in detail. Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” p. 12, HS, pp. 116 and 273 nl5. One of the most notorious and damning quotations which the science warriors use, Sandra Harding’s reference to Newton’s Principia as a “rape manual,” (Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 113.) is in fact, as Hart notes (p. 270), ripped out of context. Harding was arguing that those who dismiss gender metaphors in science (such as Bacon’s sexual imagery of scientific inquiry) as irrelevant because “merely metaphorical” ought not call Newton’s physics “mechanics.” Nature is not literally a machine any more than scientific method is literally rape of nature, but both metaphors shed light on the deployment of science. Michael Ruse, “The Struggle for the Soul of Science,” The Sciences 34 (1994), pp. 40–41. “Pomolotov Cocktail,” The Nation, 262/23 (June 10, 1996): 9. This leads to a peculiar internal contradiction in the platform of the science warriors. They usually appeal to scientific consensus to dismiss views of lay science critics and
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even of the maverick scientists whose views conflict with theirs. However, the science warriors must change gears and attempt to discredit mainstream science in the case of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. For here the “orthodox” version of the most comprehensive scientific theory available today (Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics) is anti-realist. Tellingly, Sokal refers to interpretative writings of founders of quantum mechanics and its Copenhagen Interpretation, Bohr and Heisenberg, as “vulgarizations,” and lumps them with New Age writings, (fn 14 in “Afterward,” Dissent, 43.4, (1996): 93–99). Levitt and several allies wish to replace the anti-realist Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory with David Bohm’s realistic and deterministic version. The difficulty here is that Bohm was an outsider to the mainstream view, and his approach has been ignored or misunderstood by most of the physics community. Worse, Bohm started as a Marxist and ended dialoging with Krishnamurti and Sufi masters. To preserve scientific realism and determinism, the defenders of “mainstream scientific views” must both discredit the standard Copenhagen Interpretation and support a view (Bohm’s) outside of the scientific consensus to which they usually appeal. See Norton Wise, “The Enemy Without and the Enemy Within,” Isis, X7.2, (1996): 323–327. Interestingly, Wise, a fairly traditional historian trained in nuclear physics, was refused a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, largely because he criticized the science warriors’ misleading statements about quantum mechanics. Solicited letters to the Institute by science warriors falsely portrayed Wise as an ignorant relativist. Liz MacMillen, “Science Wars Flare at the Institute for Advanced Study,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 1997. 31. Anti-realist statements exist, such as Harry Collins’ assertion that “the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge,” “Stages in the Empirical Program of Relativism,” Social Studies of Science, 11, (1981):3. Collins later disclaimed this assertion as exaggeration, but there is an ambivalence, in his Changing Order, between bracketing, or purely methodological constructivism, and claims that constructivism will change the way the public thinks about science. Consideration of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s reflections upon the role of phenomenology in general culture would be helpful here. 32. Social constructionists could but so far have not confronted the science warriors (who claim that conventionalism destroys science) with scientists such as Poincare and Eddington who held conventionalist views yet were obviously knowledgeable about mathematical physics.
University of New Hampshire
Val Dusek
