Science Wars Revisited

[campbel2][jungesam] I'm beginning to hate this conversation as much as I hate philosophy. Yet because for some reason I can't stop...

But I have revised my position a bit, in typical Grinnell fashion, from my original polemic. Alot of what you two have say has been quite good, and made me think about it all deeper than I did originally. Sorry that this is so long, but I'm going to try and rephrase what I think the issue is using Kant, simply because it is fresh in my mind, certainly applicable, and also fairly logical, which I think is also appropriate. I'll understand if you guys get bored and fade out, I totally understand why nobody except for me really likes this stuff.

[campbel2] "It seems to me that the goal of any good scientist is to discover the way nature works, and the mode of expression of any scientific discovery is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery." I don't think I agree with the second half. If the nature of the discovery dictated the mode of expression, then it would be a simple, apparent statement that is readily obvious. It would be an analytic statement, such as the famous, "gold is yellow". The expression in quotes is simply dictated by the nature of the discovery. Now, while in a sense, by the mode of "the scientific method" science attempts to maintain "objectivity" (quotes do not indicate irony here), so it is attempting to portray itself as simply an extension of an analytic statement. Thus any person will take the statement that "gold has 79 protons" as an simple, descriptive statement. However, logically, it is not. It is not given to representation as such. No one has ever seen a proton. This does not mean, as many would portray the "post-modern" argument to conclude, that "gold has 79 protons" is false, nor does it mean that the statement can never be proven. The statement is synthetic, because it takes a collection of analytic judgments and synthesizes them together following a logical pattern. In other words, it uses the scientific method. The scientist constructs a well-thoughtout experimental hypothesis, records data, attempts to find any weak point that could cause conflicting data, and at the end of the experiment presents whether s/he believes the hypothesis is proven. If... then... right? If I bombard an element with protons, then the atoms will split into these elements, provided I have understood the sub-atomic structure correctly. And, if the scientist is good (as is almost anyone who has worked in the field long enough to earn qualification) then the experiment will be repeatable, because the logical synthesis given in the hypothesis will logically be true, as a logical expression of the analytically verified end conditions of various supplied beginning analytically verifiable conditions.

My point is that while there is a basis of analytically verifiable conditions behind any fact of nature (we can easily get a consensus that gold is yellow) the fact that an experiment is necessary to verify the truth of scientific claims, not simply an experience, is a signal that a seperate logical process is going on in conjunction with "nature", and it is not simply nature working itself out before our eyes. The proof of this is that we have a scientific method which scientists take very seriously, because that is the only way to maintain "objectivity" in the sense of a consensus of people looking at the logical process of the experiment and concluding that the logical synthesis corresponds not only to analytic data available (e.g. the number of mg of solute that results) but also to the synthetic process of HUMAN logical thought (IF the chromatograph reads 760... THEN the element is... , IF an electron jumps an orbit, THEN the molocule releases a photon... , IF there is an impurity in the crystal, THEN the weight will NOT be indicative of... etc).

And this scientific method is deeply a human condition. Yet, a logical condition that allows us to have such an important thing such as truth. Even if the definition of the atom is evolving, that does not mean that atoms themselves are altered, becuase "atoms themselves" must maintain a static "truth" in order to be conceived as nature, because we cannot see them for ourselves. And you are correct, thanks to the scientific method, we can perceive of a static idea of the "real" atom, because we know that the scientists are using a logical method that means that as much as we have need to interact with things on an atomic level, we will be interacting with them according to a logical pattern (i.e. their true nature as we conceive of it) which is always "approximated based on the best current objective evidence," as you put it (and we create static terms accordingly to use as tools). And so we were able to build the atomic bomb, because we could put our ingenuity to work in nature to build things, to create and destroy (altough the law of thermodynamics prevents it) technology and nature in addition to our conceptions of those cateogories of physical existence.

This gets into what you said, [jungesam] (personally, I think your problem is that you have read "post-moderns" without reading very far into Kant, but I don't really want to get into that). Because our logical construction of the world, although heavily tied to the "world" itself through various perceptive organs, often gets a little ahead of itself, or gets confused. Simply, sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we make a mistake in our logical process, and don't realize it until some perceptual apparatus brings us information which causes us to go back and correct ourselves. Sometimes we perceive something "wrong" and so don't realize that the coat over the chair is not a person until we see that there is no face. Or sometimes we think we understand the way something "works", (antibacterial soaps stop us from getting sick) until we find something intruding upon that understanding (I'm puking because I have a virus, shit I didn't think about that). The problem is not that someone is being illogical, the problem is that their logic has taken a wrong turn. Newton was not wrong when he developed his physics, because it worked. Now that we have more information, we can add and change our logical conception of gravity. Someone who believes in a god is not logically wrong, they have more likely than not experienced what they believe to be evidence that logically proves for them the fact of god. Although in the latter there is obviously no general consensus. But, as we see now, people are finding plenty of "evidence" that evolution is "illogical". One of the things humans are best at is ignoring things and forgetting things. And so our logic, while a very powerful process that guides our complete existence in the world, is so subjectively strong that sometimes it takes turns down strange paths. Let's not forget little gems of history like hydrotherapy, eugenics, and phrenology that at one time had plenty of very logical people believing in their truth.

This is just as true in any social science as it is in hard science. Any philosopher is attempting to logically argue a point. Even someone as poetic as Irigaray, even someone as verbose as Guattari. I don't think that either of them fail logically. I can follow their logic perfectly well. What they may fail at is expressing their logical pathways and syntheses in a way that can convince a consensus of people of their validity. Which, according to the scientific method, would make them not true (not untrue, just not true). I would not agree, Sam, that physics does not have a choice about its use of jargon, whereas philosophy does. I think that physics presents its universally logical statements in a way that makes the impact of the statements only useful to people who are in a small circle. On the other hand, philosophy's universal statements are directed in the context of having a wide, world-changing impact, and so there seems, at least to you, to be some expectation of preparing a discourse for the masses. The problem however, as I see it, is that the discourse of the masses is precisely the problem in a large number of cases. Take race for example. You and I both know (and scientists have proved, for that matter) that race is not real. However, for billions of people it is, and in all different ways. Therefore, how do you objectively discuss something that is not objectively real? This is why alot of sociology is not very useful, in my opinion. So there is going to be some disconnect in a discourse that is attempting to logically argue something directed at people who in a contrary logical context (cf. Marxism's history as a discourse...). Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that Guattari is justified in breaking the dictionary twice a sentence, but it does mean that there are going to have to be alot of new ideas and new terms that are quite unfamiliar to the common person, and its going to be a difficult adjustment for anyone picking up the text, perhaps even from the last book they read. Although philosophy maintains a grounding in the "world", alot of its material comes from within the logical processes itself. Continuing to use Kant as an example, I don't think there is a person that could argue that the First Critique is not logical. It is perhaps the most logically argued and thoughtout book I have ever read. Yet it uses less than 10 real world examples in the entire text. That is because its focus is on the way we think, not on anything in the "world". That is its whole point, its "Copernican Turn", and why it has been so influential for so long. By deeply critiquing our understanding of how we think, he describes a new way of thinking on the basis of how we already think, despite how complex the idea and the actual substance of the book are.

Now, sticking with Kant, the reason he wrote the book was to answer the problems of the Rationalists and the Empiricists. One relied upon god's order to maintain the truth of the world, the other believed that there was no truth at all beyond individual experience. Kant's middle ground was basically the ideas I've been articulating here (although remember, I didn't do too well in the course!!!). The result was that we could trust scientists like Newton while still being able to continue experimenting. I've mentioned Husserl's critique of naturalism a couple of times. What this is about is basically reminding us about Kant. Naturalism is what happens when science forgets that objectivity is a logical process, and not a world that exists, waiting for us to uncover it. It is not normally a terrible problem, except when it prevents logical progress in science because by the failure in the scientific method of objectivity (As I started, Charlie, which is above all NOT derived from nature but occurring in our own logical processes) to imagine the possibility that its entire process is guiding it not towards the buried truth, but towards a fake, idealized truth that is getting us further and further from the actual problem we are concerned with. Husserl was mainly concerned with perception, which opens a whole other can of worms that would require me to rephrase everything I've said so far (Merleau-Ponty says it better than I ever could in Phenom. of Percept anyway), but just as a quick example, take Heidegger, Husserl's student. Heidegger became so obsessed by his pursuit of metaphysics as the true Dasein that he allowed himself to believe that the Nazi regime was the path towards it. Even apart from the horrible consequences of the Nazi's Heidegger soon became disappointed in the academic future of the 3rd Reich because he misunderstood that this movement was fascist, and constituted largely on anti-semitism. It simply did not occur to him that the "triumph of the will" was not actually about the metaphysical destiny of nations, and that it was actually about hatred and social control. And of course, we know that Heidegger had forgotten his Kant, after Being in Time that is... (god I'm a nerd with no life).

This is what I see the problem being. I think that in tossing aside philosophy science forgets that it is a philosophy, a philosophy of nature. Important in that philosophy is the self-critique that comes in every philosophy, whether it is in the context of post-structuralism or the scientific method. That's what "post-modernism" is, after all, a backlash of critique, albeit often immature and poorly organized, directed at the forces of modernism that allowed society to head down such poor logical pathways in the last century because it was so convinced of its truth that it didn't stop to consider its truth might be horrible error. This doesn't mean that "post-modernism" is correct above all, and that it doesn't have its own considerable logical errors. But a conservative retreat of science to the modern trends will not solve the problem, it will only continue the cycle. I really think that philosophers and scientists need to work together on this, and people like Sokal and Dawkins only widen the rift.

Alan Sokal Sucks (A.S.S)

[This post is a response to primarily Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, through the review of their book by Richard Dawkins. I use only Sokal's name for simplicity. This may make this a poor academic response, but it is a rant not a response anyhow.


PISSED:

[jungesam][campbel2] [although this rant is really not directedly at either of you]: Sokal is alot of bullshit. So he fooled some editors. This doesn't prove anything (although as Charlie mentioned, perhaps the fact that they still have jobs does). The fact is that Sokal is guilty of precisely the same thing that he is accusing philosophers; that is, using elements of others' actual work in paraphrased form merely to further a meaningless discourse AND one's own career.

Let's take a look at some of Sokal's work before he began his much more well-known career as a professional debunker (from which I'm guessing he sold a shit more books). Let's choose, say, his april 2002 piece, entitled "Transfer Matrices and Partition-Function Zeros for Antiferromagnetic Potts Models III. Triangular-Lattice Chromatic Polynomial". I quoth from the "abstract":

"We study the chromatic polynomial P_G(q) for m \times n triangular-lattice strips of widths m <= 12_P, 9_F (with periodic or free transverse boundary conditions, respectively) and arbitrary lengths n (with free longitudinal boundary conditions). The chromatic polynomial gives the zero-temperature limit of the partition function for the q-state Potts antiferromagnet. We compute the transfer matrix for such strips in the Fortuin--Kasteleyn representation and obtain the corresponding accumulation sets of chromatic zeros in the complex q-plane in the limit n\to\infty. We recompute the limiting curve obtained by Baxter in the thermodynamic limit m,n\to\infty and find new interesting features with possible physical consequences. Finally, we analyze the isolated limiting points and their relation with the Beraha numbers."


Whoa! And they get paid for that bullshit?!?!? Tell me THAT isn't the most pretensious thing you've ever read!!! I can't even understand a word! "m,n\to\infty" isn't in any dictionary I've ever seen! Who are Fortuin and Kasteleyn? Some of Sokal's cronies in the "cult of physics" no doubt, who probably have cushy jobs because of their supposed "ability" to write in this "theoretical" (theoretical means "made-up" in case you didn't know!) literary style. Somebody kick these guys out on their asses, and get to work trading bonds or some other job involving REAL things, fer crissakes!!

So I can't understand high-level math that describes physical environments measured on some "invented" scale. I can accept that there is a history of research that people have been working together very hard to build. So then, why should the theorists who trying to describe the workings of your subjectivity on a unconscious and pre-language level have to write for a 5th grade reading level? Because, for the simple fact that these sorts of physicists who would take time off from their VERY important research to critique a field that they know nothing about are pretenious pricks who have to further their ego by "defending" their field against the "threat" of philosophy. Read how happy that Dawkins shithead is about Sokal's book. You'd think someone proved String Theory isn't a gigantic... "theory"! I bet he had alot of sticky late-night pleasure when he got to talk about "erectile organs" and square roots in the same sentence. I for one have never taken any stock in Lacan's logic squares simply because I knew right off the bat that seeing as how I knew nothing about logic, I couldn't decide whether Lacan's lectures were worthwhile or not. But it seems like Dawkins couldn't even have gotten that far, because anyone who has opened the first five pages of "Lacan for Dummies" could have understood that the Phallus as a structure has nothing to do with the penis. If you think you can understand a psychoanalyst (Guattari, Lacan, or the one you might visit four times a week), or even a psychiatrist, conducting a theoretical discussion just because you walked into a room or opened a book to a random page, then you should try landing a plane, because that looks really easy on TV.

This is the trouble with people. They think they understand things. "Sure, I know how a cell phone works. They make it out of plastic, intergrated circuits, and other complicated electronics in Malaysia, I sign up for a bill for which I pay once a month, and then they beam calls to my phone from the national network through those towers I see by the interstate. But my phone is broken for no reason! It just broke! I didn't even drop it!" This is why people kick machines when they are broken, why they talk louder to people who don't speak their language, and why hundreds of people "who know how to drive" are stranded at the side of the road every year because they didn't change their oil or ran out of gas. It is the assholic nature of humanity to assume that if they can't understand something, FATE must be fucking with them, because god knows there SIMPLY COULD NOT be something outside of the understandable-realm of their own little mal-adjusted world. This is also why we have religion, by the way.

And while Sokal's has a prepubescent emerging-stump of a argument going with the whole "science out of context" thing, he totally loses it in his knee-jerk quotations. Sure, Irigaray gets a little happy with her fluids. But THAT IS THE WHOLE POINT!!!! If he had took a look at any serious literature on Irigaray, he would find other key elements about the nature of literature, the necessary departure from form, from substance, from science, from the world, etc etc etc etc. It is not supposed to be about science, as in what you learn in the lab. It is supposed to be about science as naturalism, as in the way that we think. She's not talking about the science you do at a lab bench, she's talking about the science of our thought. If you had done the work, and read Irigaray, Heidegger, and Husserl, or even had some concept of what post-modern means, you would already know this. Otherwise, you just assumed that you knew, even though you didn't. Did you know what I meant when I said "naturalism"? Maybe you thought you did. Maybe you thought you did, and then misinterpreted what I said, or thought my sentence didn't make sense, because you didn't know. Then again, maybe I made it up, or I got it wrong. What do I know anyway, I only have a half a master's degree in this sort of thing. However, that's more than you have, so I'm going to take my word for it. After all, this is not Reading Rainbow.

I don't really need to go back into the whole literary value of printed-word thing again, where I try and simplify really complicated big-kid ideas in to recognizable "small-words" to argue the fairly basic fact that literature and poetry are more important to human life than any hard science since building fires. I really don't care in the end if anyone gets it, least of all some asshole that has already made up his mind, and moreover made money off a book he published demonstrating his own idiocy. Because if he ever faltered in that idiocy, he'd probably have to give that money back, or at least stop getting more of it.

Yeah, I'm pissed off. But I really get tired of this sort of thing. I don't know why it is such a scandal that it might be harder than voting to be political, it might require more work to be right than publishing a book or being on TV, and why it might take language that you wouldn't find in a sportscast vocab to describe the feelings, emotions, and patterns of behavior in something as simply as, oh, say sex. And the other end of things is no better, when some prick with a piece of paper on his wall thinks that because he is good at describing some things, goddammit, he must be good at describing everything! And therefore, he should! Especially when he can influence other pricks who are like him into agreeing, and then finally, we can really save the world by getting some academics fired! With the exception of the last, most people I have met in academia certainly qualify. And not just the men, despite my use of the masculine pronoun. And this is why "inter-disciplinary" is only considered if their are strict "disciplines" to begin with. And as long as it mean MORE academic contracts. That goodness disciplines can intermingle within a constitutionally protected marriage of the general education requirements for the classically-republican education!

If you need anymore evidence to Sokal's shittiness, you can take his April-Fools-Day-Senior-Year-Prank-Publicity-Stunt-Entrapment scheme itself. Maybe we should have academia vice squad who prowl the academic docks looking for journals with a loose editorial board! If Sokal had only worn a wire, he could have gotten the editor joking with him on tape, saying how "post-modern" his essay was, with a nod and a wink! Incriminated! It's too bad that the journal takes open submissions and doesn't pay anything to its authors, otherwise maybe Sokal could have traded the editors a golf vacation with hookers for a three-part series, and there could be criminal preceedings! Just like that guy- oh, what was his name? You know, they guy who bribed a bunch of elected officials who run this country, oh whats-his-name? Oh well. I guess I was too busy circling typos in every collegiate academic journal and high school newspaper in the country instead of reading the actual news.

And yeah, it might seem that my ego is invested somewhere in this little rant. Well, it is. This is not what someone who is pretenious sounds like. This is what I sound like when I've invested a year of my life and $35,000 (so far) of my own money in something that I think is more important than any other thing I have going in my life, and therefore am spending all of that and most of my sanity trying to become better trained in it and having to deal with all the other asshole pricks that think just like Sokal and contributing to nothing but a waste of paper because this is the "best place in my shitty TV-watching flag-waving fast-food-eating blood-sucking murderous chauvanistic fatherland" to learn what I want to learn, or so I've been told by many of those same asshole pricks. Then, some jerk who can do math with tenure reads me three sentences of a 300 page text and then tells me that in addition to my job prospects either being non-existent or surrounded by many of the jerks who I loath, my job itself is bullshit. Yeah, you might say that my ego is a little bit invested. You might say that my life and mind is a little invested. And hey, philosophy is a bit of bullshit sometimes. So is everything. That's life. I think if Bill Clinton can cite a little semiotics in his legal testimony on his blowjobs, if physicists can shoot billions of dollars of electronics into space, and if Queer Eye can be a positive step for gay culture than Felix Guattari can coin a few choice phrases.
Does this mean that I, as a philosopher, could not be wrong? No, I could definitely be wrong, and I have been many times. Philosophy is not easy, its hard. I got a grade-inflated equivalent of a C in my Kant class, ok! I admit it! I don't know it all! I don't want to, I don't ever want to take a class on the First Critique again! If I died not knowing Kant's Critique of Pure Reason well enough to get an A from Jay Berstein, I would be perfectly happy. But I tell you what I do know: I do know that if I handed Jay a paper saying that "philosophy is bullshit", he wouldn't have given me a grade at all, because THAT is not any work at all.