The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Alan Sokal’s hoax is rapidly ceasing to be funny. An enterprise that originally had all the marks of a good joke is beginning to bring out the worst in respondents. This was obvious first in Sokal’s own account in Lingua Franca of what he had done (very amusing) and why (tedious and self-righteous), and then in the firestorm of letters in The New York Times and various professional journals. But as teachers of a course on literature and science at Yale, we found Steven Weinberg’s response to the hoax [NYR, August 8] particularly troubling.

We do not, of course, wish to defend the shoddy scholarship of the Social Text editors, and we deplore the pan-culturalist views of those whom Weinberg attacks. But Weinberg has gone to the other extreme. If, in what follows, we concentrate on his views, it is because as a distinguished scientist, his intervention has the capacity to create mischief far beyond that of Social Text. Culture is too important to be left to soi-disant cultural critics, but it is also the case that Nobel prize-winning physicists should not go unchallenged when they pronounce on culture—or science.

Alan Sokal and other scientists like Weinberg who have declared him a hero share one important feature with the editors of Social Text: both sides wish to locate science in a particular relation to other aspects of culture. The Social Text tribe sees science as merely a subfunction of the covering category “culture,” while Weinberg flatly states, “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 not for the present.” The Social Text editors fail to grant science sufficient distinctiveness in their homogenizing zeal. And Weinberg errs in the other direction: he argues science has no connection to the rest of culture. Both sides are guilty of egregious overstatement and impatiently exclude a middle where the real complexities are to be found.

Social Text and Weinberg both get the relation of science and culture wrong, but they do so in different ways. The claims of the Social Text editors have been self-discredited, not only by their acceptance of the Sokal piece, but by subsequent attempts they have made in statements to the press and in a Lingua Franca article to explain away their simple lack of basic seriousness, not only as scholars, but as intellectuals. Of Weinberg’s seriousness, however, there can be no doubt. For this reason his argument is ultimately the more dangerous of the two, not only because it has a certain superficial plausibility (especially when presented in such clear prose and with so many entertaining examples), but because it represents in highly reductive terms a view probably held by many other scientists.

Such believers hold that science is an undertaking fundamentally different from other human activities for a number of reasons, but primarily because of its relation to a reality that is ultimate in the sense that its truths cannot be reduced to any other form of explanation. Such truths are objective, impersonal laws (a phrase Weinberg repeats like a mantra). Insofar as it is universal and extrahistorical, science is qualitatively distinct from the rest of culture: science is nature, and therefore the very opposite of culture.

The most striking feature of this argument is its radical dualism: on the one side are timeless laws and selfless truths; on the other, is the social world of culture, with its ineluctable contingency, its ramifying particularity, its dictates that change with time. But the poles of this opposition are not equally weighted. Despite Weinberg’s claim that in natural science “authority counts very little,” his remarks are clearly intended to be definitive: Weinberg clearly sees himself as giving voice to the impersonal laws of natural science. These two fundamental aspects of Weinberg’s argument—its obsessive dualism and and its assumption of overwhelming authority—are grounded in a mode of thought frequently encountered in traditional societies where the distinctive feature of the culture is the dualism that separates the world of the profane from the sacred.

It would be absurd to compare the erudite and cosmopolitan scientist to a member of, say, one of the tribes of central Australia described by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life were it not for the binarism that so compulsively attends the thinking of both: “…The real characteristic of religious phenomena is that they always suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe, known and knowable, into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other.”

What does Weinberg’s dualism include—and exclude? The innermost sanctum of his temple (before which all else is, in the etymological sense of the word, profane) is occupied by particle physicists. His use of the covering term “science” is deceptive, for it excludes microbiology, genetics, and the new brain sciences, to name merely a few. “Science” boils down to the work being done by a relatively small number of men in theoretical and high-energy physics. Outside the temple would be found first of all the enemies of the truth Weinberg specifically attacks for their impurity—the Social Text editors, of course, but as well most other historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science: “Scientists like Sokal [among whom Weinberg clearly counts himself] find themselves in opposition to many sociologists, historians, and philosophers as well as postmodern literary theorists.” But in another circle of darkness would be found even other scientists, heretics such as Heisenberg and de Broglie. This list of apostates can be extended, by the same logic, to include the Newton who in his old age said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Why, we may reasonably ask, has the mantle of purity Weinberg assumes in his attack on the editors of Social Text fallen precisely on the shoulders of particle physicists? Is it because defending pure science against philistine non-scientists gives particle physicists the opportunity to define science in their own image? The particle physicist stands ready in his role as pre-Kantian shaman to declare tabu all that which falls outside his narrow definitions. He defends pure science from the philistine laity by defining “science” in his own image. But it is not necessary to accept the mantras of particle physicists, with their reductionist view of science, to reject the foolishness of Social Text.

Since at least the pre-Socratics the greatest minds have striven to understand the relation of the incommensurable to our situatedness at a particular moment in a specific time. Since at least the Enlightenment this problem has been articulated in questions about how we relate physical sensation to processes of the understanding. All the gains we have made in this inclusive endeavor that has given new power not only to the natural sciences, but to other aspects of culture such as poetry and art as well, are now endangered by new polarizations in the science wars that rage about us. If we are to preserve a more holistic view of nature and our own place in it, we must resist not only those extremists who exclude formal knowledge in the name of a homogenizing concept of culture, but those as well who make equally privative claims for an immaculate conception of science. Or as Lionel Trilling deduced from the Leavis-Snow controversy, what gets lost in such conflicts between extremists is that quality of mind which creates the culture they claim to protect.

Michael Holquist

Professor of Comparative Literature

Yale University

New Haven, Connecticut

Robert Shulman

Sterling Professor of Molecular

Biophysics and Biochemistry

Yale University

New Haven, Connecticut

To the Editors:

With all the broad discussion of the Sokal affair, not enough has been made of the way the counter-attackers against “postmodernism” and science studies get irrational and unscientific in the name of science and with the voice of common sense. Since part of the project of the writers Sokal mocks and Steven Weinberg criticizes is to force awareness of the metaphysical assumptions embedded in the language of common sense, they will often, even when sensible, sound obscure and irrational. I hope nobody wants to defend the awful jargon of much current theory and criticism. But Weinberg’s demonstration of Derrida’s vacuity on the basis of his failure to make sense of a passage selected by Sokal for mockery has no more weight than would a similar comment on science from a distinguished literary critic. Like Derrida or not, his linguistic project can’t be dismissed with a commonsensical “I don’t understand it.”

Moreover, whereas every writer knows that all written words escape authorial control, Weinberg claims that the conclusions of physics can have no cultural implications. This is an extraordinary, a profoundly irrational claim. “Those who seek extrascientific messages in what they think they understand about modern physics,” says Weinberg, “are digging dry wells.” This is special pleading with a vengeance and Weinberg even provides two counter-examples.

How special the pleading is can be suggested by making an example of material from Sokal’s parody. Sokal, Weinberg chortles, “leaps from Bohr’s observation that in quantum mechanics ‘a complete elucidation of one and the same object may require diverse points of view which defy a unique description’ to the conclusion that ‘postmodern science’ refutes ‘the authoritarianism and elitism inherent in traditional science.”’ Weinberg laughs at the obvious absurdity of the conclusion, and then concludes that ANY cultural inference from Bohr’s argument is illegitimate. Sure, Sokal probably had some real targets among cultural critics; but that an absurd inference is drawn doesn’t for a moment preclude the possibility that there are other more reasonable ones. It is difficult not to see Bohr’s argument as loaded with telling cultural implications. If Weinberg is right that such ideas apply always and everywhere, Bohr’s observation ought to change the way lay people look at the world. Denying such possibility sounds more irrational, ideological, and misguided than anything Social Text did when it gave Sokal too much trust. It was not after all Social Text that drew the absurd conclusion about authoritarianism and elitism; it was Sokal, trying to ventriloquize work he didn’t fully understand.

The new counter-aggression of scientists hostile to “postmodernism” is surely the consequence of an economic pinch hurting them as well as humanists and social scientists. On all sides intellectual activity not for profit or salvation is under pressure. Both sides have got far too defensive and should be taking this awkward moment as an occasion for recognizing common interests and arguing their positions rationally. The most dangerous thing about Weinberg’s kind of response is that it closes doors. He waves the banner of common sense, a banner that has been held higher, and waved more effectively by ideologues and demagogues, and in the vanguard of a war that inhibits science and crushes cultural critique.