This post was widely circulated. I do not have a specific location where it could be found. [jwalsh@u.washington.edu] http://weber.u.washington.edu/~jwalsh/sokal/unsorted/gans.txt --------------------------------------- It has become quite clear that many of those participating in the current "great debate" have not had access to Alan Sokal's article in _Social Text_ entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". That article raised serious questions about some aspects of post-modern literary criticism, especially its relationship to the physical sciences. The main question, as raised by Sokal himself in the current _Lingua Franca_ is "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 editor's ideological preconceptions." Sokal continues: "The answer, unfortunately is yes." But a more important question is this: given that _Social Text_ published an article "liberally salted" with obvious nonsense, is the editor of that issue (Andrew Ross) able to distinguish actual intellectual content from nonsense. I suggest that the answer to this question is no. This is a strong charge; evidence is needed. Thus as evidence I submit the first three paragraphs of Sokal's _Social Text_ article and invite readers to judge for themselves. "There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines con- cerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in "eternal" physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the "objective" procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method. "But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics (Heisenberg 1958; Bohr 1963); revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its creditibility (Kuhn 1970; Feyeerabend 1975; Latour 1987; Aronowitz 1988b; Bloor 1991); 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 facade of "objectivity" (Merchant 1980; Keller 1985; Harding 1986, 1991; Haraway 1989, 1991; Best 1991). 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 counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissent or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz' analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics (1988b, esp. chaps. 9 and 12); in Ross's discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science (1991, intro and chap. 1); in Irigaray's and Hayles's exegeses of gender encoding in fluid dynamics (Irigary 1985; Hayles 1992); and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular (1986, esp chaps. 2 and 10; 1991, esp. chap. 4). "Here my aim is carry these deep analyses one step further, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity; the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science-- among them existence itself--become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science." The reader will not need to be reminded that the editors of _Social Text_ (particularly Andrew Ross, who edited this issue) evidently do NOT regard any of the ideas expressed by Sokal above as nonsense. As far as the remainder of Sokal's article is concerned, I cannot reproduce it all. But I quote Sokal (from the _Lingua Franca_ article) "The fundamental silliness of my article lies, however, not in its numerous solecisms but in the dubiousness of its central thesis and the "reasoning" adduced to support it. Basically, I claim that quantum gravity--the still-speculative theory of space and time on scales of a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter--has profound political implications (which, of course, are "progressive")." Sokal continues: "In its concluding passages, my article becomes especially egregious. Having abolished reality as a constraint on science, I go on to suggest (once again without argument) that science, in order to be "liberatory," must be subordinated to political strategies. I finish the article by observing that "a liberatory science cannot be complete without a profound revision of the canon of mathematics." We can see hints of an "emancipatory mathematics," I suggest, "in the multidimensional and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory; but this approach is still heavily marked by its origins in the crisis of late capitalist production relations."" Sokal concludes: "_Social Text_'s acceptance of my article exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory--postmodernist _literary_ theory, that is--carried to its logical extreme. No wondeer they didn't bother to consult a physicist. If all is discourse and "text," then knowledge of the real world is superfluous, even physics becomes just another branch of cultural studies. If, moreover, all is rhetoric and language games, then internal logical consistency is superfluous too, a patina of theoretical sophistication serves equally well. Incomprehensibility becomes a virtue; allusions, metaphors, and puns sustitute for evidence and logic. My own article is, if anything, an extremely modest example of this well-established genre." Followers of the discussion of this issue on the internet perhaps have seen some of this in the "debate". ------ Paul J. Gans [gans@scholar.chem.nyu.edu]