Only one cheer for Sokal and Bricmont: Or, scientism is no response to relativism

Res Publica

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 1-20

  Haworth, Alan ^a  

^a Franklin Wilkins Building   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Bricmont; Epistemic relativism; Intellectual impostures; Philosophy of science; Relativism; Science; Sokal; Two cultures

Indexed keywords

EID: 27944471239     PISSN: 13564765     EISSN: 15728692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/a:1009609519077     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (London: Profile Books, 1988), 274 pp.
2. Noam Chomsky (1992-3), 'Rationality/Science' in Z Papers Special Issue, http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/chompomoart. html, p. 5: Chomsky is referring to a remark by another contributor to the Z Papers debate, hence the scare quotes.
3. Chomsky describes his piece on postmodernism as a "personal quest for help". After the passage quoted, he continues, "... no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is not (for the most part) truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed. Perhaps the explanation lies in some personal inadequacy, like tonedeafness". Chomsky, Z Papers Special Issue op. cit., 5-6.1 sympathise. However, perhaps I should add that, where I do discuss postmodernism, I take what I say to apply to typical or standard cases. There are always exceptions. If Foucault counts as a postmodernist then his Discipline and Punish is one.
4. Social Text 46/7 (spring/summer 1996), 217-52. The article is reprinted as an appendix to Sokal and Bricmont, 199-240. They give a brief account of the 'affair' in their Introduction: 1 ff.
5. Some of the overstatements with which its publication was greeted by the press are reproduced on the back cover. Examples are, "We are in his [Sokal's] debt" (Lewis Wolpert, Independent on Sunday),
6. and "Sokal and Bricmont have dared to say what no one else would" (Jon Henley, Guardian).
7. Sokal and Bricmont, ix-x.
8. Jonathan Rée, "The Storm Is Put Back in Its Teacup", The Times Higher Education Supplement, July 10 1998, 22.
9. Well, perhaps I should give just one example. Consider, then, how the sociobiologist Matt Ridley fatuously credits John Rawls with the neglect of an 'evolutionary perspective'. According to Ridley, Rawls could have learnt from recent studies of "how the complex societies of monkeys and apes work" (Wow!): Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1996), 156.
10. This is not quite the way Sokal and Bricmont themselves define "relativism". According to them, it is "any philosophy that claims that the truth or falisty of a statement is relative to an individual or a social group" -51. Still, I am not too worried because most versions of relativism they attack don't match their own definition either.
11. There is a fairly clear parallel with language here. Just as the sounds can be heard only as music, as a contrapuntal sequence, and as resolved by a major chord, by inheritors of a certain musical tradition, so Japanese writing can be seen as forming words only by someone who knows Japanese. Anyone else will only see marks on a page. To this, Bob Brecher has responded by pointing out that descriptions of the music as contrapuntal, or the writing as Japanese words, can be recognised as true by someone 'for' whom they are not true. (One person can say of another, "He hears those noises as music", or "She sees those marks as words".) Of course, Brecher is right, but what is the implication for the version of cultural relativism at issue here? A defender of that relativism could respond that Brecher has noticed something which is only to be expected, and which results from the fact that any realistic definition of "culture" must recognise that a culture is not a hermetically sealed entity, so that the inheritor of one culture can learn to understand another, and so on. If so, is relativism really undermined? There is clearly room for discussion here, but nothing which need detain us at present, for I am not out to defend cultural relativism beyond suggesting that it can have a certain prima facie plausibility.
12. Sokal and Bricmont, 52.
13. The Origins of Virtue Ibid., 51.
14. The Origins of Virtue Ibid.
15. Of course, each of these writers gives a different account of what it is for a description to 'work', but it is unnecessary to consider these differences here. Sokal and Bricmont also criticise Barnes's and Bloor's "strong programme" for the sociology of knowledge. For this, see Barry Barnes and David Bloor, "Relativism, Rationalism, and the Sociology of Knowledge", in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Apparently, Barnes and Bloor hold that "there is no sense attached to the idea that some standards or beliefs are really rational as distinct from merely locally accepted as such" (ibid., 27). This does not strike me as a position I would want to defend.
16. Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London; Hutchinson, 1959), 280.
17. Thomas S. Kühn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edition) (Chicago: Universtiy of Chicago Press, 1970), 76.
18. See Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1978 [1975]). Feyerabend writes, for example, that "there are circumstances when it is advisable to introduce, elaborate, and defend ad hoc hypotheses, or hypotheses which contradict well-established and generally accepted experimental results, or hypotheses whose content is smaller than the content of the existing and empirically adequate alternative, or self-inconsistent hypotheses, and so on": 23-4.
19. Sokal and Bricmont, 51.
20. Against Method Ibid., 58. I'm glad Sokal decided to become a physicist and not a lawyer. What he calls having proven beyond reasonable doubt is what I would call having circumstantial evidence.
21. Against Method Ibid., 61. Of course, however successful at generating predictions a theory may be, it doesn't follow that there can't be equally successful competing theories.
22. See René Descartes (1619), Private Thoughts, in Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, eds., Descartes: Philosophical Writings (London: Nelson, 1954), p. 3.
23. The status of possibility (ii) is ambivalent. It depends what else you believe. If you believe (i) you will see it as representing the possibility of there being tentative explanations which await final confirmation or refutation. On the other hand, if you believe (iii) and/or (iv) you will see it as representing an unsurprising cosequence of incommensurability.
24. The Guardian, September 21 1998, Letters page.
25. Invoking the naturalistic fallacy isn't much help here. If the responsibility for our actions is borne by our selves, not our genes, it is incumbent on sociobiology to explain how come. For examples of this move see Ridley, The Guardian op. cit., 253ff
26. and Pinker, How the Mind Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 50ff.
27. Sokal and Bricmont, 178.
28. However, my earlier discussion of the truth of "the grass is green", etcetera, suggests that they won't. If I am right, it is always possible that there will arise new categories of proposition whose truth is relative to different entities.
29. Sokal and Bricmont take pains to stress that there are "canons of rationality that are or (should be) common to all scholarly disciplines" (6) and that they can appeal to these, ".. .even though neither of us holds a diploma in philosophy" (51). I think they are right, and I assume they would extend a similar courtesy to me.
30. How the Mind Works Ibid., 56-7. It may be relevant to mention here that Sokal and Bricmont are making the point that, in their opinion, the principles of good methodological practice cannot be codified in a definitive way.
31. I skirt around any difficulties which may be raised by positivism or the possibility of Cartesian scepticism here.
32. Popper, How the Mind Works op. cit., 280.
33. Sokal and Bricmont, 95.
34. For another example, see Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 31-2. Dawkins writes, "Show me a cultural relativist and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work ... Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't."
35. For my comments on this see my Free Speech (London: Routledge, 1998), 99ff.
36. According to Rorty, truth, being a property of descriptions and not of the world, "cannot be out there": Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 5. Of course, truth is such a property, but then - maybe - it is a property of descriptions in the way that being a left hand is a property of some hands; that is, in a way which depends on its relation to something independent of and beyond the thing itself.
37. Sokal and Bricmont, 30.
38. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Ibid., 54.
39. So, I don't accept the (postmodernistic) position for which Rorty argues in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, according to which intellectual change is a question of the persuasion of some by others through a process of description and re-description. This places reason on a level with other forms of persuasion.
40. On this, see my Free Speech, op. cit., 104-13.
41. Sokal and Bricmont, 73: shades of J.S. Mill!!
42. I suppose Sokal and Bricmont's account roughly characterises the way a historian might try to determine whether, say, the Battle of Hastings took place on a Thursday or a Friday, or the number of men in William's army. But it couldn't possibly do justice to, say, Simon Schama's brilliant discussion of the cultural and historical significiance of Louis David's Death of Marat. For this, see Simon Schama, Citizens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 742ff.
43. Sokal and Bricmont, 180-81.
44. Citizens Ibid., 177.
45. Citizens Ibid., 54.
46. Citizens Ibid., 34.
47. Citizens Ibid., 59.
48. Citizens Ibid., 65.
49. For their discussion of the "two cultures" debate, see Sokal and Bricmont, 174ff. For Eysenck on psychoanalysis, see H.J. Eysenck, Uses and Abuses of Psychology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), chapter 12, 221-41.
50. R.D. Laing, The Divided Se//(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1959]), 31. According to Laing, Freud would often draw the same analogy.
51. Laing, The Divided Se// ibid., 37.
52. Mark Buchanan, "Why God Plays Dice", New Scientist, August 22 1998, 27.
53. Sokal and Bricmont, 51.
54. The Times Higher Education Supplement, September 18, 1998, Letters page.
55. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3-4:
56. Chomsky, The Nature of Space and Time op. cit., 4.
57. See the preface to Kuhn, op. cit., vff.
58. Sokal and Bricmont, 196.
59. I think all readers of Res Publica will be able to think of relativist thinkers whose ideas have influenced the twentieth century Zeitgeist. My own list would include, at least, Einstein, the postmodernists and Wittgenstein.
60. Sokal and Bricmont, 50-51.
61. I should like to thank Bob Brecher for his useful comments on an earlier version of this piece.