Sokal-Fish

  Professor Sokal's Bad Joke


  By STANLEY FISH

  DURHAM, N.C. -- When the editors of Social Text accepted an
essay purporting to link developments in quantum mechanics with
the formulations of postmodern thought, they could not have
anticipated that on the day of its publication the author, Alan
Sokal, a physicist at New York University, would be announcing in
the pages of another journal, Lingua Franca, that the whole thing
had been an elaborate hoax.

  He had made it all up, he said, and gloated that his "prank"
proved that sociologists and humanists who spoke of science as a
"social construction" didn't know what they were talking about.
Acknowledging the ethical issues raised by his deception,
Professor Sokal declared it justified by the importance of the
truths he was defending from postmodernist attack: "There is a
world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts
and evidence do matter.

  What sane person would contend otherwise?"

  Exactly! Professor Sokal's question should alert us to the
improbability of the scenario he conjures up: Scholars with
impeccable credentials making statements no sane person could
credit. The truth is that none of his targets would ever make
such statements.

  What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is
real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the
world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to
their capacities, education, training, etc.

  It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in
whose terms we know them that are socially constructed --
fashioned by human beings -- which is why our understanding of
those properties is continually changing.

  Distinguishing fact from fiction is surely the business of
science, but the means of doing so are not perspicuous in nature
-- for if they were, there would be no work to be done.
Consequently, the history of science is a record of controversies
about what counts as evidence and how facts are to be
established.

  Those who concern themselves with this history neither dispute
the accomplishments of science nor deny the existence or power of
scientific procedure. They just maintain and demonstrate that the
nature of scientific procedure is a question continually debated
in its own precincts. What results is an incredibly complex and
rich story, full of honor for scientists, and this is the story
sociologists of science are trying to tell and get right.

  Why then does Professor Sokal attack them? The answer lies in
two misunderstandings. First, Professor Sokal takes "socially
constructed" to mean "not real," whereas for workers in the field
"socially constructed" is a compliment paid to a fact or a
procedure that has emerged from the welter of disciplinary
competition into a real and productive life where it can be
cited, invoked and perhaps challenged. It is no contradiction to
say that something is socially constructed and also real.

  Perhaps a humble example from the world of baseball will help
make the point. Consider the following little catechism:

  Are there balls and strikes in the world? Yes.

  Are there balls and strikes in nature (if by nature you
understand physical reality independent of human actors)? No.

  Are balls and strikes socially constructed? Yes.

  Are balls and strikes real? Yes.

  Do some people get $3.5 million either for producing balls and
strikes or for preventing their production? Yes.

  So balls and strikes are both socially constructed and real,
socially constructed and consequential. The facts about ball and
strikes are also real but they can change, as they would, for
example, if baseball's rule makers were to vote tomorrow that
from now on it's four strikes and you're out.

  [B] ut that's just the point, someone might object.

  "Sure the facts of baseball, a human institution that didn't
exist until the 19th century, are socially constructed.  But
scientists are concerned with facts that were there before anyone
looked through a microscope.

  And besides, even if scientific accounts of facts can change,
they don't change by majority vote."

  This appears to make sense, but the distinction between
baseball and science is not finally so firm.

  On the baseball side, the social construction of the game
assumes and depends on a set of established scientific facts.
That is why the pitcher's mound is not 400 feet from the plate.
Both the shape in which we have the game and the shapes in which
we couldn't have it are strongly related to the world's
properties.

  On the science side, although scientists don't take formal
votes to decide what facts will be considered credible, neither
do they present their competing accounts to nature and receive
from her an immediate and legible verdict. Rather they hazard
hypotheses that are then tested by other workers in the field in
the context of evidentiary rules, which may themselves be altered
in the process. Verdicts are then given by publications and
research centers whose judgments and monies will determine the
way the game goes for a while.

  Both science and baseball then are mixtures of adventuresome
inventiveness and reliance on established norms and mechanisms of
validation, and the facts yielded by both will be social
constructions and be real.

  Baseball and science may be both social constructions, but not
all social constructions are the same.

  First, there is the difference in purpose -- to refine physical
skills and entertain, on the one hand, and to solve problems of a
theoretical and practical kind, on the other.  From this
difference flow all the other differences, in the nature of the
skills involved, the quality of the attention required, the
measurements of accomplishment, the system of reward, and on and
on.

  Even if two activities are alike social constructions, if you
want to take the measure of either, it is the differences you
must keep in mind.

  This is what Professor Sokal does not do, and this is his
second mistake. He thinks that the sociology of science is in
competition with mainstream science -- wants either to replace it
or debunk it -- and he doesn't understand that it is a distinct
enterprise, with objects of study, criteria, procedures and goals
all of its own.

  Sociologists of science aren't trying to do science; they are
trying to come up with a rich and powerful explanation of what it
means to do it. Their question is, "What are the conditions that
make scientific accomplishments possible?" and answers to that
question are not intended to be either substitutes for scientific
work or arguments against it.

  When Professor Sokal declares that "theorizing about 'the
social construction of reality' won't help us find an effective
treatment for AIDS," he is at once right and wrong.  He is right
that sociologists will never do the job assigned properly to
scientists.

  He is wrong to imply that the failure of the sociology of
science to do something it never set out to do is a mark against
it.

  My point is finally a simple one: A research project that takes
the practice of science as an object of study is not a threat to
that practice because, committed as it is to its own goals and
protocols, it doesn't reach into, and therefore doesn't pose a
danger to, the goals and protocols it studies.

  Just as the criteria of an enterprise will be internal to its
own history, so will the threat to its integrity be internal,
posed not by presumptuous outsiders but by insiders who decide
not to play by the rules or to put the rules in the service of a
devious purpose.

  This means that it is Alan Sokal, not his targets, who
threatens to undermine the intellectual standards he vows to
protect.

  Remember, science is above all a communal effort.

  No scientist (and for that matter, no sociologist or literary
critic) begins his task by inventing anew the facts he will
assume, the models he will regard as exemplary and the standards
he tries to be faithful to.

  They are all given by the tradition of inquiry he has joined,
and for the most part he must take them on faith. And he must
take on faith, too, the reports offered to him by colleagues, all
of whom are in the same position, unable to start from scratch
and therefore dependent on the information they receive from
fellow researchers. (Indeed, some professional physicists who
take Professor Sokal on faith report finding his arguments
plausible.)

  The large word for all this is "trust," and in his "A Social
History of Truth," Steven Shapin poses the relevant (rhetorical)
question: "How could coordinated activity of any kind be possible
if people could not rely upon others' undertakings?"

  Alan Sokal put forward his own undertakings as reliable, and he
took care, as he boasts, to surround his deception with all the
marks of authenticity, including dozens of "real" footnotes and
an introductory section that enlists a roster of the century's
greatest scientists in support of a line of argument he says he
never believed in. He carefully packaged his deception so as not
to be detected except by someone who began with a deep and
corrosive attitude of suspicion that may now be in full flower in
the offices of learned journals because of what he has done.

  In a 1989 report published in The Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science, fraud is said to go "beyond error to erode
the foundation of trust on which science is built." That is
Professor Sokal's legacy, one likely to be longer lasting than
the brief fame he now enjoys for having successfully pretended to
be himself.

  Stanley Fish is professor of English and law at Duke University
and executive director of the Duke University Press, which
publishes the journal Social Text. His most recent book is
``Professional Correctness.''

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