(3089/898) Sokal's Hoax

1906) A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation that he would never again have to look up the word "hermeneutics" in the dictionary.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)

["Sokal's Hoax" refers to Alan Sokal's article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", in the journal Social Text (Spring/Summer 1996), and his description of the hoax in "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies" in the journal Lingua Franca (May 1996).

For more on Sokal's Hoax, see #1801 Rothstein.]

1907) I suppose it might be argued that articles in physics journals are [...] incomprehensible to the uninitiated. But physicists are forced to use a technical language, the language of mathematics. Within this limitation, we try to be clear, and when we fail we do not expect our readers to confuse obscurity with profundity. [...] In contrast, [Jacques] Derrida and other postmoderns do not seem to be saying anything that requires a special technical language, and they do not seem to be trying very hard to be clear.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)

1908) Those who seek extrascientific messages in what they think they understand about modern physics are digging dry wells. In my view, with two large exceptions, the results of research in physics (as opposed, say, to psychology) have no legitimate implications whatever for culture or politics or philosophy. (I am not talking here about the technological applications of physics, which of course do have a huge effect on our culture, or about its use as metaphor, but about the direct logical implications of purely scientific discoveries themselves. The discoveries of physics may become relevant to philosophy and culture when we learn the origin of the universe or the final laws of nature, but no for the present.

The first of my exceptions to this statement is jurisdictional: discoveries in science sometimes reveal that topics like matter, space, and time, which had been thought to be proper subjects for philosophical argument, actually belong in the province of ordinary science. The other, more important exception to my statement is the profound cultural effect of the discover, going back to the work of Newton, that nature is strictly governed by impersonal mathematical laws. Of course, it still remains for us to get the laws right, and to understand the range of their validity; but as far as culture or philosophy is concerned, the difference between Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravitation or between classical and quantum
mechanics is immaterial.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)

1909) What are the implications for science of its cultural and social context? Here scientists [...] find themselves in opposition to many sociologists, historians and philosophers as well as post-modern literary theorists. In this debate, the two sides often seem to be talking past each other. For instance, the sociologists and historians sometimes write as if scientists had not learned anything about the scientific method since the days of Francis Bacon, while of course we know very well how complicated the relation is between theory and experiment, and how much the work of science depends on an appropriate social and economic setting. On the other hand, scientists sometimes accuse others of taking a completely relativist view, of not believing in objective reality. [Alan] Sokal's hoax cites "revisionist studies in history and philosophy of science" as casting doubt on the post-Enlightenment dogma that "there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole." The trouble with the satire of this passage is that most of Sokal's targets deny that they have any doubt about the existence of an external world. [...]

I don't mean to say that this part of Sokal's satire was unjustified. His targets often take positions that seem to be (and I gather to Sokal) to make no sense if there is an objective reality. To put it simply, if scientists are talking about something real, then what they say is either true or false. If it is true, then how can it depend on the social environment of the scientist? If it is false, how can it help to liberate us? The choice of scientific question and the method of approach may depend on all sorts of extrascientific influences, but the correct answer when we find it is what it is because that is the way the world is.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)

1910) When I was an undergraduate at Cornell I heard a lecture by a professor of philosophy (probably Max Born) who explained that whenever anyone asked him whether something was real, he always gave the same answer. The answer was "Yes." The tooth fairy is real, the laws of physics are real, the rules of baseball are real, and the rocks in the fields are real. But they are real in different ways. What I mean when I say that the laws of physics are real is that they are real in pretty much the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks in the fields, and not in the same sense [...] as the rules of baseball. We did not create the laws of physics or the rocks in the fields, and we sometimes unhappily find out that we have been wrong about them, as when we stub our toe on an unnoticed rock, or when we find we make a mistake (as most physicists have) about some physical law. But the languages in which we describe rocks or in which we state physical laws are certainly created socially, so I am making an implicit assumption (which in everyday life we make about rocks) that our statements about the laws of physics are in a one-to-one correspondence with aspects of objective reality. To put it another way, if we ever discover intelligent creature on some distant planet and translate their scientific works, we will find that we and they have discovered the same laws.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)

1911) Although natural science is intellectually hegemonic, in the sense that we have a clear idea of what it means for a theory to be true or false, its operations are not socially hegemonic - authority counts for very little.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)

1912) What Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history is legitimate in the history of science in a way that it is not in the history of politics or culture, because science is cumulative, and permits definite judgments of success or failure.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)

1913) If we think that scientific laws are flexible enough to be affected by the social setting of their discovery, then some might be tempted to press scientists to discover laws that are more proletarian or feminine or American or religious or Aryan or whatever else it is they want. This is a dangerous path, and more is at stake in the controversy over it than just the health of science. [...] We will need to confirm and strengthen the vision of a rationally understandable world if we are to protect ourselves from the irrational tendencies that still beset humanity.

Steven Weinberg
"Sokal's Hoax" in
New York Review of Books (8/8/1996)