Old Email Archive

digest 1998-11-25 #001.txt

11:31 PM 11/23/98 -0800

From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
-> H-Nexa Post: J. Bernstein on Sokal/Bricmont
by WAYNEM@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU
-> Re: H-Nexa Post: J. Bernstein on Sokal/Bricmont
by fed@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 23 Nov 1998 08:53:43 -0800
From: WAYNEM@HUMnet.UCLA.EDU
Subject: H-Nexa Post: J. Bernstein on Sokal/Bricmont
Date:    Sun, 22 Nov 1998 12:38:23 -0800
From:    "Katherine B. Branstetter, Editor--H-NEXA" 
Subject: SUBJECT: J. Bernstein on Sokal/Bricmont
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 12:20:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Norman Levitt 
Sense and Nonsense; A review of
Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont; Picador
Many years ago when I was beginning my
career in physics I regularly attended meetings of the American
Physical Society hoping to find a job. The Society published
bulletins announcing the program of forthcoming sessions which
consisted in large part of brief abstracts of five minute talks
people would give to peddle their wares. I noticed that one of
these talks was to be given by the collaboration of I.Schmalhausen
and U.Talhausen. Ivan J.Schmalhausen was in fact a known scientist
but U.Talhausen was a name unfamiliar to me. In fact he did not
exist. The abstract was a joke, but it was sufficiently clever so
that it got by the referees of the American Physical Society who
were not noted for their sense of humor. I thought of this when I
first read about the "parody"-the reason for the quotes will
shortly be explained-written by the New York University professor
of physics Alan Sokal and published in 1996 in the journal Social
Text. The article was entitled "Transgressing the
Boundaries:Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
Gravity." The article which consisted of a great many
deep-sounding
statements about modern science got by the editors of the
journal.It was a parody because Sokal said it was. If Sokal had
said nothing instead of loudly proclaiming his triumph over the
forces of "postmodernism"-a term which sounds to me like an
oxymoron-it simply would have died a natural death as yet another
unread bit of academic ephemera. God knows it wasn't very funny.
Indeed, with its one hundred and nine footnotes and multi-page
bibliography one wonders how Sokal had time to do his day job which
was presumably teaching and doing research in physics.
Now Sokal is back at it again this time in
collaboration with another physicist Jean Bricmont of the
University of Louvain in Belgium. In this book which they call
Fashionable Nonsense; Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
they deconstruct the pretentious pseudo-scientific nonsense of a
selection of French intellectuals.( The original Sokal article is
also reproduced with an essay of equal length that follows it to
explain the "jokes.") To an American reader, at least this
reader,
names like Paul Virilio and Luce Irigaray draw a blank. They might
as well be I.Schmalhausen and U.Talhausen. Indeed. if Sokal were to
write a second book saying that this one was a parody I would
believe him. I was constantly reminded of a summer job I once had
when I was a student. My professor, Philipp Frank, one of the
original members of the Vienna Circle-scientists and philosophers
who met in the early 1930s in various coffee houses in Vienna with
the express aim of trying to rid science of what they called
metaphysics- was writing a book on some of the nonsensical things
philosophers and others had said about Einstein's theory of
relativity. My job was to go to the library and dig up nonsense-
rather like Sokal's. I discovered that Henri Bergson, the French
philosopher who wrote a great deal about space and time, was an
especially fecund source. At least he had won a Nobel Prize for
Literature and, it is said he had influenced Proust. Sokal and
Bricmont explicitly say that they will not deal with Bergson. Pity.
It would have been amusing to compare notes. As it is, we have to
settle for quotations like Irigaray's, " Or again: considerations
of pure mathematics have precluded the analysis of fluids except in
terms of laminated planes, solenoid movements ( of a current
privileging the relation to an axis}, spring-points, well-points,
whirlwind-points, which have only an approximate relation to
reality. Leaving some remainder. Up to infinity: the center of
these "movements" corresponding to zero supposes in them an
infinite speed which is physically unacceptable." [Italics in the
original] Reading this I was reminded of what a critic wrote about
Browning's Sordello; namely, he understood only the first and last
lines and that they were false.
Let is stipulate that the pages and pages
of quotations like this in Bricmont and Sokal's book are nonsense,
why then should we care. To this they give three
reasons,"..."a
waste of time in the human sciences, a cultural confusion that
favors obscurantism, and a weakening of the political left." Of
the
three the only one that makes any sense to me is the second. I
totally agree that anyone in another discipline who wants to make
use of the ideas of modern science has an obligation to make a
serious attempt to understand these ideas. To really understand
them requires a substantial intellectual investment. They are not
trivial. But there are good popular books. Moreover I am sure that
if any of the people in this book had simply gone to his or her
neighborhood physicist and said " I don't understand the quantum
theory, can you help me?", he or she, would have been greeted with
open arms. And,as Auden wrote," At least my pieces shall be
cheery/Like English bishops on the Quantum Theory."
Jeremy Bernstein
Jeremy Bernstein is currently working on a monograph on the
impeachment trial of Warren Hastings.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 23 Nov 1998 14:11:17 -0800
From: fed@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu
Subject: Re: H-Nexa Post: J. Bernstein on Sokal/Bricmont
Dear SLS list,
I had vowed not to venture into the territory of the trolls again by
commenting on the science wars.  It's just unrewarding, something like
suggesting to Kenneth Starr that the law is not sanctified.  I'm
getting
palpitations just thinking about it.  So consider this only as a
footnote to the post called "J. Bernstein on Sokal/Bricmont."
That post begins with
>                 Sense and Nonsense; A review of
> Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont; Picador
>
>                            Many years ago when I was beginning my
> career in physics I regularly attended meetings of the American
> Physical Society hoping to find a job. The Society published
> bulletins announcing the program of forthcoming sessions which
> consisted in large part of brief abstracts of five minute talks
> people would give to peddle their wares. I noticed that one of
> these talks was to be given by the collaboration of I.Schmalhausen
> and U.Talhausen. Ivan J.Schmalhausen was in fact a known scientist
> but U.Talhausen was a name unfamiliar to me. In fact he did not
> exist. The abstract was a joke, but it was sufficiently clever so
> that it got by the referees of the American Physical Society who
> were not noted for their sense of humor. I thought of this when I
> first read about the "parody"-the reason for the quotes
will
> shortly be explained-written by the New York University professor
> of physics Alan Sokal and published in 1996 in the journal Social
> Text.
Those highlighted words are Jeremy Bernstein's, apparently.  I'll
assume
that they are, for the purposes of this footnote.
Bernstein must know that it is the privilege of every member of the
American Physical Society to post an abstract for a ten-minute
contributed paper for any national meeting, and that the abstracts for
these contributions are not refereed.  All sorts of running jokes and
even, occasionally, pure lunacy show up in the Bulletin of the APS.
I'm not sure what impact, if any, this point has on Bernstein's brief
review--if indeed the text is Bernstein's; we know that internet
postings are not peer reviewed.
And please, Mr. Levitt, leave me alone.
Frank Durham