David

Why are you taking Sokal so seriously?

sdv

David Zachmann wrote:

> One point that Sokal and Bricmont miss making because of their fragmented
> approach to out-of-context quotes is the suspicious resemblance of Latour's
> "third observer" in his account of special relativity theory to Bergson's
> account (possibly via Deleuze's book on Bergson). Latour rarely gives
> reference to the sources of his ideas, preferring to appear to have created
> them out of whole cloth. He claims that in Einstein's special relativity
> theory there is a third observer who is describing the two observers
> mentioned in the exposition. Bergson makes a similar move in claiming that
> there is a unitary time subsuming the relative times of the two observers in
> Einstein. Sometimes, as in Latour's account, this is the time of the third
> observer subsuming the other two. Latour and his critics, as well as his
> physicist defender David Mermin confuse the issue of the number of physical
> "observers" needed in special relativity with the philosophical question of
> whether in thinking about some topic we are also thinking about ourselves
> thinking about it. (This latter issue leads to the old paradoxical claim
> that one cannot imagine oneself dead or unconscious, because one is
> imagining oneself consciously imagining oneself dead or unconscious. ) The
> third observer is not one of the observers in the physical system, but is
> this self-conscious theorist or reader thinking about the other two physical
> observers. Both Latour, Sokal and Bricmont, and Mermin treat this
> transcendental conscious observer as if it were an actual, physical observer
> located somewhere in the physical space-time being described.
>
> Ironically, David Bohm, whose deterministic quantum theory is admired by
> many of the physicist science warriors, has speculated in manners strangely
> similar to Bergson concerning notions that there might be other ways to
> think about or make models of physical processes other than the classical
> ones. This has been elaborated on by Capek, and the suggestions resemble in
> many respects Bohm's suggestions about trying new imaginary models and
> rejecting Bohr and Heisenberg's claim that we are trapped conceptually in
> classical models -- that supposedly prevents us from thinking directly about
> quantum reality.
>
> One philosopher who makes use of Bergson's ideas concerning time and process
> is Gilles Deleuze. Sokal and Bricmont seem to be particularly annoyed at
> Deleuze because he was excessively praised by Michel Foucault. (Deleuze and
> Guattari shared many interests such as anti-psychiatry and rejection of
> unitary systems, were both gay, interested in sadomasochism, and evidently
> took drugs together).. Much of the rancor in the science warriors' attack on
> the postmodernists seems to be jealousy at their undeserved fame. In
> Bricmont's case, the perhaps undeserved Nobel Prize and excessive fame of
> the popular writings of Ilya Prigogine, a fellow Belgian physicist who
> occasionally mentions Bergson and postmodernism, seem to stoke the fires of
> his resentment. Sokal and Bricmont should feel less of this now that they,
> through the Sokal hoax and this book, themselves have achieved worldwide
> fame.
>
> Sokal and Bricmont, like many of the uncritical epigones of Deleuze
> interested primarily in gay liberation, anti-psychiatry movements, focus on
> Deleuze's work with the psychiatrist and political activist Felix Guattari.
> Deleuze collaborated in his later life on a number of wild and unbuttoned
> books with his buddy. Sokal and Bricmont treat the two together in their
> critique, but have the harshest words for a passage by Guattari alone, with
> which they conclude as the ultimate in nonsense. Certainly Guattari, a
> lifelong rebel (whose early support of the Algerian independence and of
> reform of authoritarian mental institutions was admirable) rebelled even
> against the revolutionary sects he joined. His raging against the Oedipus
> complex seems to betray a major one of his own. Guattari was much wilder and
> sloppier in his writing than Deleuze, and the latter permitted much looser
> and free-associative formulations in joint productions written with his
> companion. However, Deleuze also wrote some seven academic books on various
> philosophers, such as Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche, that Sokal and
> Bricmont do not discuss. For instance, Deleuze's book on Leibniz, The Fold,
> contains references to topology (the mathematics of continuity), the use of
> which by postmodernists Sokal and Bricmont descry. Since Leibniz was an
> inventor of both the calculus and analysis situs (precursor of topology) and
> made the principle of continuity central to his philosophy, these references
> are not guilty of the irrelevance of which Sokal and Bricmont accuse
> Deleuze's other references to mathematics.
>
> One claim that Sokal and Bricmont make throughout their work is that if the
> authors they criticize and expose are using scientific metaphors to
> illustrate their philosophical, psychological or literary ideas, these would
> not be illuminating to an audience ignorant of science. They suggest these
> scientific or mathematical examples are simply added to impress the
> scientifically illiterate literateurs. This may be the case with some of the
> phrases of Kristeva and Lacan. However, another use of scientific and
> mathematical concepts in philosophy is as models for metaphysical
> speculation. Since much of our thinking is based on images and spatial
> diagrams (following Kant but pace Hegel, Wittgenstein, and others), the
> precise, worked-out structures of mathematics and physics can suggest
> metaphysical models. Here the mathematical models are not window-dressing to
> impress the ignorant, but sources of admittedly vaguer metaphysical
> extrapolations. Deleuze, in a manner similar to (though nowhere as ably done
> as) Whitehead, mathematical structures are used as models for metaphysical
> ideas. Sokal and Bricmont do not totally reject philosophical thinking or
> even metaphysics, as they present some philosophy of science in order to set
> aside skepticism and to argue against relativism and subjectivism.
>
> Sokal and Bricmont do comment on two of Deleuze's serious works. Bricmont
> also mentions, in an open letter concerning the dropping of Bergson from the
> English edition of the book that Bergson's influence on Deleuze shows the
> relevance of the former. Evidently Anglo-American analytic philosophers
> convinced Sokal and Bricmont to ignore Bergson in the English edition,
> though several English books on Bergson have recently appeared. Ironically,
> two of the passages in Deleuze that they ridicule assert that relativity
> theory, measurement in quantum theory, and information in statistical
> mechanics should not be interpreted subjectively.(pp. 14-150). This agrees
> with Sokal and Bricmont's own position, but they do not note this. It would
> spoil the fun.
>
> Sokal and Bricmont hold up for ridicule selective passages in Deleuze's
> Difference and Repetition concerning the differential calculus. They quote
> long passages, followed by the remark that the passage is meaningless or
> nonsense (pp. 151-155). They claim that the problems of the calculus were
> solved by Cauchy in the early nineteenth century. (They even claim that the
> problems "were solved by the work of d'Alembert around 1760," (p. 151)
> though d'Alembert did not clarify in terms of inequalities or explicitly
> apply the limit concept that he advocates in the Encyclopedia.) They claim
> the status of the infinitesimals in the derivative is no longer worth
> bothering about, as it has been replaced by the limit.
>
> Sokal and Bricmont's comments on Deleuze on the calculus resemble Bertrand
> Russell's comments on Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Russell claimed that the
> nineteenth century theory of real numbers and Weierstrass's "static theory
> of the variable" solves Zeno's paradoxes (and makes irrelevant the
> reflections on them of process philosophers like Bergson). But some later
> analytic philosophers noted that showing that mathematics is internally
> consistent hardly solves the physical version of Zeno's paradoxes. Unless
> one is willing to say that the mathematical structure (of all the real
> numbers) is physically existent, or one says that the mathematical formalism
> is all we need and that questions of physical reality should be rejected (a
> position that a scientific realist would have to reject) then there is still
> a physical problem of motion and infinitesimal processes, and the question
> of whether an infinite number of acts can be performed in a finite time.
> Similarly, Sokal and Bricmont, claim that the question of the status of the
> infinitesimal is eliminated by the limit notion. Sokal and Bricmont claim
> that Cauchy solved the problems of the status of infinitesimals with the
> concept of the limit and criticize Deleuze for puzzling over the status of
> differentials. If, indeed, the only consistent way to present derivatives
> were by reducing them to limits, this would be true. That is, if the
> infinitesimal has been reduced to a meaningless notational component of a
> ratio that is really a limit, then puzzling over the status of the
> infinitesimal in isolation is made obsolete. However Abraham Robinson's
> non-standard analysis (and Lawvere's less well known category theory
> approach) has shown how one can make direct mathematical sense of
> infinitesimal quantities without resorting to the replacement of their
> ratios by limits, and eliminating the individual differentials.
>
> Deleuze seems to borrow some of his discussion from Hegel. Similar criticism
> to that of Sokal and Bricmont has been made of Hegel., claiming that
> Cauchy's formalization of the concept of limit has made all such discussion
> otiose. However some are beginning to reexamine Hegel's writing on the
> calculus with less dismissive attitudes than had Whitehead and Russell.
>
> Marx also wrote philosophical discussions of the calculus. Edmund Wilson,,
> consulted a mathematician, who told him that Marx's comments on the calculus
> were worthless, and Wilson duly reported this. Some Marxist mathematicians,
> on the other hand, have defended the value of Marx's remarks on the
> calculus, even claiming he arrived at results similar to Cauchy. Marx's
> side-kick Friedrich Engels wrote far worse stuff concerning elementary
> algebraic operations and the dialectic. Would leftist Sokal move from a
> similar discussion of Marx and Engels on mathematics to discrediting Marx's
> insights about capitalism as Intellectual Impostures moves from Lacan's,
> Irigaray's or Kristeva's mathematical errors to question their honesty?
>
> Sokal and Bricmont skip a number of linking passages in Deleuze's
> discussion, that treat in great detail writings of various mathematicians
> and philosophers. These include early nineteenth century figures such as the
> mathematician Wronski (a mathematician with whose Wronskian matrix they are
> undoubtedly familiar, but whose mysticism probably embarrasses them) and the
> philosopher Salomon Maimon. In one of the passages that they do quote, they
> omit by means of ellipsis the reference to Maimon and Wronski's
> philosophical approaches to the calculus, that would help make sense of some
> of the "nonsense" of the passage. Deleuze does not simply discuss the early
> nineteenth century debates on the "metaphysics of the calculus," but also
> uses twentieth century philosophers of mathematics, such as Albert Lautman
> who wrote in the 1930s and Jules Vuillemin, a contemporary analytic
> philosopher. Lautman, whose conception of mathematical problems Deleuze
> uses, had a correspondence with great logician Jacques Herbrand and the
> philosopher of mathematics Jean Cavaillès, and was praised in a
> commemorative volume by the mathematician Jean Dieudonné, suggesting that
> his understanding of logic and mathematics was taken seriously by his peers.
> Several French philosophers of mathematics were inspired to attempt to build
> on Lautman's approach to a logic of mathematical problems and
> interpretations because of Deleuze's lectures.
>
> Obviously Deleuze is no mathematical virtuoso, but his treatment of the
> issues of the calculus is far more detailed, informed and serious than Sokal
> and Bricmont let on. For instance Sokal and Bricmont note in footnotes that
> some of Deleuze's errors are shared by Hegel, such as a dated treatment of
> functions in terms of Taylor series, but they neglect to note that Deleuze
> himself, in discussing Hegel mentions that he is well aware that the series
> approach to the calculus has been replaced in modern writers.
>
> According to the standard account of the Sokal hoax, scientifically
> illiterate literary critics and sociologists have been bamboozled by the
> pretentious claims of French postmodernists concerning science. Ironically
> those same benighted scientific illiterates now have to take on faith the
> words of physicists Sokal and Bricmont concerning the errors of the French
> theorists. In some cases the great unwashed masses of humanists and social
> scientists may be misled again.
>
> Val Dusek
> Department of Philosophy
> University of New Hampshire
> Durham, NH 03824
> USA