What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not ProveNotesWhat the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not ProveAlan D. Sokal Department of Physics New York University 4 Washington Place New York, NY 10003 USA Internet: [email protected] Telephone: (212) 998-7729 Fax: (212) 995-4016 April 8, 1997 To appear in A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, edited by Noretta Koertge (Oxford University Press, 1998)I did not write this work merely with the aim of setting the exegetical record straight. My larger target is those contemporaries who -- in repeated acts of wish-fulfillment -- have appropriated conclusions from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety of social cum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted. Feminists, religious apologists (including ``creation scientists''), counterculturalists, neoconservatives, and a host of other curious fellow-travelers have claimed to find crucial grist for their mills in, for instance, the avowed incommensurability and underdetermination of scientific theories. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time. -- Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism[1] I confess to some embarrassment at being asked to contribute an introductory essay to this collection of critical studies in the history, sociology and philosophy of science. Afterall, I'm neither a historian nor a sociologist nor a philosopher; I'm merely a theoretical physicist with an amateur interest in the philosophy of science and perhaps some modest skill at thinking clearly. Social Text co-founder Stanley Aronowitz was, alas, absolutely right when he called me ``ill-read and half-educated.''[2] My own contribution to this field began, as the reader undoubtedly knows, with an unorthodox (and admittedly uncontrolled) experiment. I wrote a parody of postmodern science criticism, entitled ``Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a TransformativeHermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'', and submitted it to the cultural-studies journal Social Text (of course without telling the editors that it was a parody). They published it as a serious scholarly article in their spring 1996 special issue devoted to what they call the ``Science Wars''.[3] Three weeks later I revealed the hoax in an article in Lingua Franca[4], and all hell broke loose.[5] In this essay I'd like to discuss briefly what I think the ``Social Text affair'' does and does not prove. But first, to fend off the accusation that I'm an arrogant physicist who rejects all sociological intrusion on our ``turf'', I'd like to lay out some positive things that I thinksocial studies of science can accomplish. The following propositions are, I hope, noncontroversial: 1) Science is a human endeavor, and like any other human endeavor it merits being subjected to rigorous social analysis. Which research problems count as important; how research funds are distributed; who gets prestige and power; what role scientific expertiseplays in public-policy debates; in what form scientific knowledge becomes embodied in technology, and for whose benefit -- all these issues are strongly affected by political, economic and to some extent ideological considerations, as well as by the internal logic of scientific inquiry. They are thus fruitful subjects for empirical study by historians, sociologists, political scientists and economists. 2) At a more subtle level, even the content of scientific debate -- what types of theories can be conceived and entertained, what criteria are to be used for deciding between competing theories -- is constrained in part by the prevailing attitudes of mind, which in turn arise in part from deep-seated historical factors. It is the task of historians and sociologists of science to sort out, in each specific instance, the roles played by ``external'' and ``internal'' factors in determining the course of scientific development. Not surprisingly, scientists tend to stress the ``internal'' factors while sociologists tend to stress the ``external'', if only because each group tends to have a poor grasp on the other group's concepts. But these problems are perfectly amenable to rational debate. 3) There is nothing wrong with research informed by a political commitment, as long as that commitment does not blind the researcher to inconvenient facts. Thus, there is a long and honorable tradition of socio-political critique of science[6], including antiracist critiques of anthropological pseudo-science and eugenics[7] and feminist critiques of psychology and parts of medicine and biology.[8] These critiques typically follow a standard pattern: First one shows, using conventional scientific arguments, why the research in question is flawed according to the ordinary canons of good science; then, and only then, one attempts to explain how the researchers' social prejudices (which may well have been unconscious) led them to violate these canons. Of course, each such critique has to stand or fall on its own merits; having good political intentions doesn't guarantee that one's analysis will constitute good science, good sociology or good history.But this general two-step approach is, I think, sound; and empirical studies of this kind, ifconducted with due intellectual rigor, could shed useful light on the social conditions under which good science (defined normatively as the search for truths or at least approximate truths about the world) is fostered or hindered.[9]Now, I don't want to claim that these three points exhaust the field of fruitful inquiry for historians and sociologists of science, but they certainly do lay out a big and important area. And yet, some sociologists and literary intellectuals over the past two decades have gotten greedier: roughly speaking, they want to attack the normative conception of scientific inquiry as a search for truths or approximate truths about the world; they want to see science as just another social practice, which produces ``narrations'' and ``myths'' that are no more valid than those produced by other social practices; and some of them want to argue further that these social practices encode a bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist world-view. Of course, like all brief summaries this one is an