Val,
You must be aware that your are making an utter fool out of yourself by
spreading your unalloyed nonsense about science and technology -- this
especially from a person who shows NO SIGN of knowing any significant
science whatsoever. As the perspicacious Normal Levitt has it
"Specifically, there are those who claim to have tamed the monster [i.e.,
science] by declaring that somehow [we are NEVER told how] it is all a
fake, science isn't 'real' knowledge, it's just a 'narative.' It's not
abstractly preferable to other systems of belief -- myth for instance --
merely attached to a culture that is, for the moment, more powerful than
others. To make this strange doctrine even marginally plausible would seem
to require an intellectual engine at least comparably powerful to that
deployed by the sciences. How could one hope to reveal the errors of a
flawed knowledge-system without having some keener insturment at hand to
dissect [analyze] it.?" (from More Higher Superstitions: Knowledge,
Knowingness, and Reality, by Norman Levitt, pages 78-82, Skeptic, Vol. 4,
No4., 1996)
Val, as science IS manifestly growing ever more powerful, at an exponential
rate, paralleling the development of Supercomputers, your RSTR critiques
look,
and are indeed, untenable, vacuous, and fatuous. So while we may, even
now, be in the process of being replaced by our own digitially created
progeny, you Val, and your like-minded RSTSR ignorminiousness' continue
spinning out postmoderenist 'theorie' and social constructivism while the
world goes to the Circles of Outer Cognitive Darkness ruled by The Sultan of
Postmondern Sophistry -- Derrida himself -- always attended with an
honor-guard of Orwellian double-speak. OTOH, the Earth's ecosystem could
easily collapse before you lifed a finger to do the real work that it takes
to make changes with regard to the REAL-WORLD-ENVIRONMENTAL-PROBLEMS. Val,
the pervasive magical thinking and mystical superstitions that permeates all
that you think and write and do and say really amounts to the inane
proposition that a mere change in "discourse" (i.e., from scientific
materialism, scientisim, and Enlightenment Rationality to Postmodernist
DoubleSpeak) equates to a change in objective actuality itself -- is
thorougly laughable.
Val, do the human race a favor, as you say you are doing, by adopting a
Popperian clarity-of-style and learning some _real_ science. Until then, we
have the best of reasons for ignoring anything and everything you have to
say about it (i.e. science, technology, etc.).
A Caveat: You have already lost the battle before the first shot was fired,
for science is now so very powerful that, for good or ill, its sweep
and tide are taking up more and more space and faculty and research at major
universities, and in all Economies of Scale, while the radical STS
racketeers, like yourself, continue to propagate (what seems to me)
Communist propoganda and unalloyed obscurantism in the name of some
pernicious Romanticism -- and ruining the humanities departments at the same
time with your nihilistic anti-art-art, anti-literature-literature, and so
forth. So go ahead with this kind of
drivel if you like; but for an accurate estimate of the REAL dangers facing
a Global Technocracy can only be had by using both science and technology.
A better strategy for you, Val, would be to make an Enlightenment
Rationalist Case for your position/positions rather than defending
Postmodernism and its acolytes (e.g., the pathetic and bethetic Derrida,
Lacan, Foucault, and the Nazis Heidigger and de Mann)
So much, then, for your review (of Fashionable Nonsense) which you do not
even have an iota of the requisite scientific background nor expertise nor
experience in scientific practice to even remotely do such a review
competently. Grossly incompetent is the job we see before us below.
Since far too many postmodernist humanists have apotheosized ABSOLUTE
UGLINESS in their literary analyses, art, and music, I will end this missive
with an ironic wink and a deconstructionst nod to two baneful icons of
postmodernist artistic and musical sensibility, viz., Andy Warhol and John
Cage.
DZ
------------------
Review of Intellectual Impostures
by Val Dusek
[To appear in Metascience 9.3]
Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont.
Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science.
London: Profile Books, 1998.
Sokal and Bricmont in their exposé of allegedly meaningless statements about
science by recent French philosophers take errors of particular applications
of philosophical ideas to science as refutations of the whole general
framework utilized. They also seem to think that taking snippets out of
context is sufficient to expose the "fashionable nonsense." In the early
twentieth century, British analytic philosophers such as Bertrand Russell
and A. N. Whitehead did the same with Hegel on mathematics. After deciding
not to bother to read Hegel because of distaste for what he wrote about
mathematics, Whitehead was later surprised to learn that his own relational
process philosophy resembled that of Hegel in various respects.
Sokal and Bricmont, like a number of other physicist and mathematician
science warriors, strive to maintain a view of science that preserves the
attitudes of the past century by reinterpreting the apparently unsettling
developments of twentieth century science. They wish to reassure
non-scientists that chaos theory and quantum mechanics have not radically
changed to nature of the universe presented by science. They debunk claims
that twentieth century science has undermined determinism or the
independence of the observer from the observed.
During the first half of the twentieth century, many leading theorists of
modern physics were also philosophers and humanistic scholars. Werner
Heisenberg first learned of atoms, not in a physics text, but from reading
Plato's Timaeus. He claimed that later reading of the same work (in Greek)
for relaxation during lunch break had some influence on his conception of
uncertainty in physical reality. Schrödinger took his lab notes in classical
Greek and wrote as did Heisenberg about the Presocratic philosophers in his
search for a way to understand subatomic reality.
After W.W.II, with the congealing of the official interpretation of quantum
theory, and the rise of big science, philistinism took over. Feynman, a
leading genius of the period, despised philosophy, though he often
misrepresented the positions of the philosophers he ridiculed. His proudly
dismissive attitude toward philosophers was linked with unconscious
personifications of Nature and an implicit philosophy of a plurality of
causes in mechanics resembling that (he would be horrified to hear) of
Aristotle. One perceptive reviewer of Feynman's anecdotes says that someone
familiar only with the beauty of Feynman's physics papers, would, on reading
his books of humorous anecdotes, react like Antonio Salieri on his first
encounter with Mozart. Physicist and science essayist Jeremy Bernstein, in
reaction to the mention of the influence of Hindu thought on Schrödinger's
later writings, replied simply "Yogic, Schmogic," and claimed recently that
only an historian of physics would have any interest in reading Niels Bohr,
the creator of the standard, "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum
mechanics. Einstein and Heisenberg read the philosopher Kant as teenagers,
and the Kantian strain in Bohr and Heisenberg is an alien realm to late
twentieth century Anglo-American physicists.
The changed situation in twentieth century philosophy is similar. In the
1920s, not only Henri Bergson, but also Whitehead, and George Herbert Mead
with their "objective relativism," strove mightily to grapple with the
general philosophical consequences of Einstein's relativity theory (whatever
one may think of their particular conclusions). Today in Anglo-American
philosophy the philosophers of science discuss such issues, but usually
without attempting in any way to discuss their implications for culture or
for patterns of thought in general, saying, with W. V. O. Quine, that
"Philosophy of science is philosophy enough." On the other hand, most
general analytical social philosophers don't even try to grapple with the
consequences of contemporary science and math for our worldview, and often
uncritically and tacitly presuppose older, flawed interpretations. (One
source of the "overdetermined" support for Sokal and Bricmont's position,
besides neo-conservatives denouncing "political correctness" and traditional
literary critics angry at French theory, is the community of analytical
philosophers who reject continental philosophy.) Would Sokal and Bricmont be
happier if general philosophers were to ignore science totally? Would they
admire the Oxford ordinary language philosophers of the 1950s who sneeringly
ignored both science and politics as irrelevant to "ordinary language" (the
supposed font of all wisdom)? Would they agree with neo-conservative
Straussian Alan Bloom that science has no relevance to human life? They
ought to welcome the sometimes fumbling attempts of recent philosophers to
make sense of science as a cultural phenomenon and to speculate about the
cosmological metaphysics that science reveals.
Alan Sokal calls the founders of quantum mechanics Bohr and Heisenberg,
"vulgarizers (in both senses)."(p. 255 fn 14) Odd that they should have
invented the things of which they are mere vulgarizers. Similarly, Sokal and
Bricmont sharply distinguish Einstein's "pedagogy" (discussed by Latour, and
explicitly called pedagogy by him, contra Sokal and Bricmont) and Einstein's
real theory (p. 116). What they ignore is that the early Einstein (who
credited Hume and Mach for inspiration, and Mach in turn credited Berkeley)
really did approach relativity in terms of the thought experiments
concerning possible measurements by conscious observers that he describes in
his popular book. Logical positivism and Percy Bridgman's operationalism
were inspired precisely by this approach of Einstein.
Sokal and Bricmont likewise are distrustful of philosophical claims
concerning implications of chaos theory (Ch. 7, pp. 125-136 ). Sokal
satirizes and with Bricmont certainly exhibits and exposes some confused and
misleading statements about non-linearity and chaos. Yet not all such
extrapolations from chaos theory are solely the product of mathematical
ignorance. One wonders what they think of André Lichnerowicz, one of the
great mathematicians our time, lending his name and authority to a
collaborative work that, although it does not, like Prigogine or Bohm, use
the word postmodernism, ranges afield into speculative applications of chaos
theory to biology, economics and philosophy, mentioning suspect, supposedly
anti-scientific figures such as Bergson, Tielhard d' Chardin, Freud, and
Foucault.
In the original French version of their book, Sokal and Bricmont discuss
Bergson's misunderstandings of Einstein and then trace what they consider
the sad history of French philosophers praising Bergson. Bergson probably
suffered from writing too well and deceptively simply. This made him
extraordinarily popular, that led to his soon being dismissed by "serious
philosophers." Part of Bergson's loss of respect in the English speaking
world is due to Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (with a
quotation from which Sokal and Bricmont's chapter on Bergson begins) that
portrays Bergson's intuitionism as proto-Nazi, when in fact Bergson died
from illness contracted while waiting on a bread line in occupied France
after he refused the Nazis' offer to give him special treatment as an
"honorary Aryan."
Before dismissing Bergson as a fool, and his philosophy of the intuition of
time and of the fundamental reality of process as nonsense, one needs to
separate several issues. Bergson indeed made mistakes (pointed out by
Einstein himself) in arguing about special relativity theory. Bergson
himself recognized his lack of expertise in physics, and refused to allow
further editions of his work to appear during the thirties. Do these
mistakes mean that Bergson's views on time ought to be dismissed, or that
his philosophical claims about time have no value? Bergson was not, contrary
to Bricmont's opinion, trying to "refute" Einstein. Bergson rejected
Newtonian absolute space and he accepted the demise of the classical aether,
unlike a number of reactionary philosophical holdouts against relativity
theory. Several physicists, such as de Broglie, Watanabe and Costa de
Beauregard have seen value in Bergson's ideas in relation to wave mechanics
and thermodynamics, despite his particular errors in relativity theory. Two
major mathematicians whom Sokal and Bricmont cannot accuse of ignorance of
mathematics made sympathetic use of Bergson. Norbert Wiener, in his
Cybernetics, opened with a discussion of "Newtonian vs. Bergsonian time,"
and A. N. Whitehead incorporated parts of Bergson's philosophy of process
into his own interpretation of relativity theory.
The spirit of Bergson's earlier writings contradicts the letter of his
unfortunate sally into relativity theory. Bergson's own, earlier Matter and
Memory contradicted the later denial of multiple temporal rhythms in his
discussion of relativity theory. Milic Capek points out in Bergson's
emphasis on the difference between time and space and his denial of
absolutely separate material particles fits well with much of relativity
theory and quantum mechanics, but that Bergson's own treatment of time in
reaction to Einstein mistakenly treated Minkowski's diagram as a dreaded
"spatialization of time" similar to that of classical treatments of time as
a fourth dimension in d'Alembert and others (a mistake shared, by the way,
by some of the physicist defenders of Einstein's theory as portraying a
"block universe" without genuine change).
At the center of the debate between Bergson and Einstein was the "twin
paradox." If rapid travel shows down time, then a twin sent into space at
high speed would return younger than the twin who remained on earth. Yet if
velocity is relative, should not the twin on earth be younger than the space
traveler, since, relative to the space traveler, the twin on earth receded
and then approached at high speed? Even if Bergson's claims about the twin
paradox are confused, that's not to say that the twin paradox is totally
cleared up. When physicist Herbert Dingle argued in Nature for the genuine
paradoxicality of the twin paradox, a number of physicists indignantly
claimed the solution was clear and simple, but gave "obvious solutions"
inconsistent with one another. Marder edited a whole book of such "obvious
solutions" to the twin paradox some of which are mutually incompatible.
Contd.
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