Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of the Sokal Hoax
In academic circles, liberal-arts people have started to talk about science in a non-technical way, and use their own interpretations of scientific theories to make statements about the world they live in. For example, there's a theory called the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle," which is actually kind of complicated, but liberal-arts people choose to interpret it as saying, essentially, that you can't observe anything without changing it. Liberal-arts people take what I call "movie versions" of these theories (think "chaos theory" and "Jurassic Park") and use them to make all kinds of generalizations about the world.
Basically, it's a three-step process: 1) a scientific theory is given (for example, "1+1=2"). 2) The "movie version" comes out (for example, "two things added together become one thing"). 3) Metaphors for understanding the world are taken from the movie version (for example, "two people in love become one person").
Scientists complain that the liberal-arts people don't really have an understanding of the things they are babbling about, and therefore shouldn't be babbling about them. I agree with this statement in a way; what the liberal arts people are doing doesn't amount to knowledge of a scientific topic. However, I think the liberal arts people's thinking about the theories in their own ways is something that should be taken as-is.
For example, if you say "1+1=2," and this makes me think about the unity of two people in love, then it doesn't really matter whether or not I really understand "1+1=2" in the same way you do. I've come up with my own stuff inspired by it, that doesn't have to be compared unfavorably to your original statement of "1+1=2." You're saying something about the world, and I'm saying something about the world, and these things are "related" in the sense that our trains of thought started in the same place, but they aren't the same statement.
What happened was that this New York University physicist named Alan Sokal published an essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," that linked science to progressive politics, quantum mechanics to social relativism, topology to Lacan, etc. The essay's thesis was, as I understand it, that there is not an objective reality, as confirmed by applications of postmodern thought to scientific inquiry (and specifically, as implied in the title of his essay, that gravity is a social construct).
He published it in an artsy Johns Hopkins University journal called "Social Text," and revealed shortly after its publication that it was a hoax, in his revelation carefully illustrating what now seemed to be obviously glaring logical inconsistencies and other fallacies in the article. Sokal's intent with this prank was to take a bloody, ragged bite out of the underbelly of postmodern cultural theorists, and, in fact, postmodern cultural theories, showing them to be irrecoverably caught up in their own bullsh*t and deliberately ignorant of logic and objectivism. Sokal also mentioned something about seeking to defend the left from a trendy faction of itself, but I suspect his motives of being less altruistic.
The Sokal hoax got me thinking less about postmodernism than about the topic of "science studies", the humanities' own interpretation of scientific knowledge. Specifically, I thought of scientific ideas that I’ve heard or read about, described in non-technical terms for the benefit of those of us without a technical background. I have focused here on popular topics in math and science around which humanists (a group in which I place myself) like to try and wrap their weepy, gooey, short-circuiting right brains, because they are readily able to draw all kinds of philosophical, spiritual and even practical metaphors from heavily abstracted, non-technical explanations of these topics. Essentially, humanists cathect romanticized "movie versions" of these ideas, which are the source of the metaphors.
Three examples immediately come to my mind -- it's likely that I get some subtleties of the theories wrong when I try to explain them in non-technical terms, but that's sort of the point: as a humanist, I'm more interested in the "movie versions." The process to focus on is that first, a complex theory that has very specific applications is asserted. Next, a "movie version" comes out which may be an good simulacra of the original theory in some ways, but is likely missing some crucial elements. Finally, all kinds of metaphors for understanding the universe come out of the movie version.
Chaos theory applies to systems that are so complicated that they are unpredictable no matter how tightly you squint your eyes at them. An example of a simple system to which chaos theory does not apply is the old arcade game "Pong," in which the player tries to position his paddle to interrupt the path of a ball that is bouncing around a room. In Pong, the ball travels in a perfectly straight line with perfectly constant velocity, and hits a perfectly flat wall, thus one can predict with 100% accuracy where the ball will next be sent.
Contrast this model to a bumper pool table, in which there are multiple balls bouncing within a rectangular border, inside which there are also some cylindrical posts. Bumper pool doesn't sound, when you first hear about it, to be all that much different than Pong. But the fact that the balls are round, spinning, moving objects that hit each other, the walls, and the round posts somehow introduces chaotic, non-linear initial conditions, and the end position of a ball set rolling on a bumper pool table is in fact impossible to predict.
Another frequently given example is that of weather systems; the conditions that give rise to weather patterns are too many and too dynamic to allow consistently accurate weather prediction. So this, as I understand it, is what a chaotic system is -- essentially a system that is so complicated as to be unpredictable, no matter how one accounts for initial conditions or variables.
The movie version of chaos theory is that the world is too complicated for formal study, an interpretation to which the humanist's ensuing metaphors are readily applicable. In the mind of the chaos theory-enthusiast, the fact that there are an infinite number of variables in any experimental model eclipses the insignificance of most of these variables, to say nothing of initial conditions.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is more complicated than the way it is often non-technically interpreted, but it is this somewhat erroneous (but related) interpretation that has made its way into the humanities. This slightly-off version of Heisenberg states that it is impossible to observe a phenomenon without affecting that phenomenon, specifically within the realm of the extremely tiny, where this is readily observable among tiny little particles being upset in their motion when electrons bounce off of them.
Since this is the way humanists understand the uncertainty principle, let's pretend that the principle amounts to the impossibility of observation without alteration, instead of the impossibility of knowing both position and movement to arbitrary precision. Needless to say, the "movie version" of t.h.u.p. Generates a large number of humanist metaphors. For instance, think about an anthropologist watching a tribe of people from inside a bush, his pipe poking out from between the leaves. The natives are going to notice his pipe poking out, and stand there, scratching their heads and staring at the bush. This is not their usual behavior. So, the anthropologist is affecting the natives by observing them.
Godel's incompleteness theorem proved that within any mathematical system, statements can be constructed that can neither be proved nor disproved. The movie version of g.i.t. Is basically that reliance upon axiomatic assumptions is a flawed (but unavoidable) thing, and that in order to deduce anything one has to start with an unprovable idea. If one tries to work backwards and deduce the original assumption, then one ends up creating an infinite chain of deduction, or "going outside the system."
So, for everything one wants to "prove," one has to start somewhere -- this starting point is the axiomatic assumption that cannot be proven within the given system. Humanistic metaphors arise out of the notion that logical deduction only works because we have set up constructs: mini-worlds in which we view reality. An example I use is the Sherlock Holmes murder mystery; an encapsulated world in which cause and effect as well as deduction work smoothly.
In fact, every instance of deduction is applied within a constructed model, which is in fact a closed-off system. Any chain of cause and effect, in all of its applications, has an arbitrary starting point. Specific derived metaphors are literally everywhere. For example, let's say that one were to deduce that Jenny's mom will be given a paper snowflake for mother's day through a particular chain of cause and effect.
First of all, Jenny has no money and mother's day is tomorrow. We know Jenny was making paper snowflakes because there were only two activities in the class (snowflake making and finger painting), and Jenny wasn't finger-painting because her fingers aren't green. We can move backwards through the chain of cause and effect until we get to the first term, and then we're forced to seek out a new cause.
We can struggle further back along the chain of causality, but we'll always be able to go farther back. So, we have to start somewhere -- this is our axiomatic assumption, our unmoved mover. In this case, our axiomatic assumotion was that jenny has no money and Mother's Day is tomorrow. In summary, the movie version of g.i.t. And its ensuing metaphors imply that understanding based on deductive logic is inherently incomplete.
There is a glaring commonality to all of these three ideas as they are humanistically interpreted: that science is somehow unscientific; that one can't predict, control and order the natural world around, just because things don't work that way. The incompleteness theorem, uncertainty principle and chaos theory are appealing because they seem to imply the undermining of science.
From what I’ve gathered from my math and science-oriented friends, they in fact do not; chaos theory is chaotic in a very orderly way, mathematical systems break down in predictable places, and Heisenberg-affected phenomena are unobservable in the same ways. These three scientific ideas have a great deal of literary appeal because of what they seem to imply: that scientific rigor is unable to measure, control and predict the splendor of the cosmos.
This notion is tempting to humanists because the world appears insanely complicated, and categorizing it with scientific rigor an impossibility. So, chaos theory, the incompleteness theorem and the uncertainty principle are applied to everything that doesn't immediately make sense. I can readily imagine them tacked on to computer science, sociology, economics, and in fact just about everything, simply because the world isn't a game of pong. There exists in reality a huge number of disparate causal agents, a chain of cause and effect that doesn't have a starting point, and a fundamental interconnectedness to all being.
A lot of people, including myself, friends and family of mine, and many other students and scholars of the humanities, secretly yearn to be studying real science. I had my embarrassing little episode with math (which is thankfully past), a friend laments that he didn't study math or classics, another likes to brag that he has a brother who's a scientist, and even my mother has remarked that she "must study physics." All of this wistful yearning is being sparked by the "science studies" at which Sokal scoffed; when we artsy folks are exposed to a glimmer of the either beauty, social status, or some combination of the two, of deductive science and logical thinking, we get all teary-eyed and start to wonder, "Can't I do this too?"
In defense of humanistic "interpretations" of scientific ideas, I would argue that these movie versions I’ve discussed should be taken at face value, and not necessarily be compared to the science that they bastardize. If a non-technical description of chaos theory was sufficiently inspiring to cause a humanist to dream up a philosophical metaphor relating to his or her version of reality, that is perhaps unrelated in content, but related in form to its scientific counterpart, then credit should be given to the human mind for creativity, and liberties taken with scientific rigor chalked up to something like artistic license.
Humanists get themselves into trouble when they claim a better (or even different) understanding of something outside their field than those who study the thing within the field, gleaned by applying their own tools to scientific ideas, but I don't think that this is what most on the "science studies" bandwagon are attempting. The scientist is saying something about the world, the humanist is saying something about the world, and these statements are "related" in the sense that the trains of thought started in the same place, but they aren't in any way the same statement. I assume, or at least I hope, that humanists approach their science-metaphors with the same humility and rationality with which scientists approach (or at least are supposed to approach) their deductions.
The Sokal hoax deeply hurt my feelings, but at the same time it reminded me that I'm independent of all this; I don't wear a badge that says "postmodern charlatan" on my sleeve, nor do I think "a watched pot never boils" to be an application of Heisenberg -- no one even has to know that I was an art major.