While I believe that Alan Sokal is critical of Bruno Latour & Donna Haraway (I don't know about Emily Martin), even Sokal acknowledges the importance of science studies as a field of inquiry, especially the kinds of criticism of science conducted by scholars quoted in this and related threads. So, those who invoke the Sokal Affair to discredit all critiques of science are off the mark.
***** Alan D. Sokal, "What the Social Text Affair Does and Does Not Prove," available at <http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html>
...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 think social 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 expertise plays 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, if conducted 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]...
[6] I limit myself here to critiques challenging the substantive content of scientific theories or methodology. Other important types of critiques challenge the uses to which scientific knowledge is put (e.g. in technology) or the social structure of the scientific community.
[7] See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981, 2nd ed. 1996).
[8] See, for example, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York: Basic Books, 1985, 2nd ed. 1992); Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
[9] Of course, I don't mean to imply that the only (or even principal) purpose of the history of science is to help working scientists. History of science obviously has intrinsic value as a contribution to the history of human society and human thought. But it seems to me that history of science, when done well, can also help working scientists. *****
That said, while it is good that the Sokal Affair exposed something of "science envy" among certain postmodern critics, Sokal ended up doing damage to the credibility of the important work of people who have criticized the current practice of science with a view toward helping produce a better, more emancipatory science as well, due to the political alliances he made and the manner in which his hoax was received by the media, etc. Here's a criticism of Sokal that appeared on another list.
***** Date: Fri, 05 Nov 1999 10:54:23 -0500 To: marxism at lists.panix.com From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
<snip> ...I had never really given much thought to Alan's relationship to Marxism. I, like most people, just assumed that he had gone through volume one of Capital, etc., in the way that young orthodox Jews learn to read Hebrew. Anybody who describes himself as a "socialist" repeatedly in debates with Andrew Ross et al, clearly MUST have at least familiarity with, if not commitment to, the Marxist intellectual tradition.
I discovered that this is not true at all. Despite Alan's assertion that he is a socialist, in reality he is a left liberal. I had lunch with him on New Year's Eve in order to discuss my concerns about his defense of the "Kennewick Man" excavations near the Columbia River in Washington State. Alan had defended the scientists against the American Indian "creationists" in his debate with Andrew Ross and I hadn't given it too much thought at the time. Now that I had become thoroughly immersed in such questions, his position gnawed away at me like a piece of undigested food.
In the course of our discussion, it was revealed to me that Alan's defense of science has nothing to do with Marxism or socialism. It is virtually indistinguishable from everyday liberal concepts of the role of scientists in society. He said that bad science would expose itself in a free society, so there would seem to be little risk of running into the sort of horrors that took place in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia. All we have to do is criticize the excesses of archaeologists and everything would come out okay in the end. I sat there sipping my wine in a mood of total shock. Alan's trust in capitalist society was touching but a bit naïve. After all, this was a free country when anthropologists and archaeologists wrote all sorts of racist nonsense throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Leaving this aside for the moment, I had a completely different analysis of how science is conducted. As a stodgy old Marxist, I had become convinced long ago that the ruling ideas of society are those of the ruling class. Science was not immune.
I asked Alan if he had ever read Richard Lewontin or Richard Levins, co-authors of "The Dialectical Biologist." No, he had taken the book out of the library, but never read it. This was astonishing to me. How could Alan Sokal have become regarded as some kind of defender of Marxist rectitude when he had utterly no engagement with the main experts in the field. In his new book "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science," co-authored by physicist Jean Bricmont, there is no index entry for Marx, Lewontin or Levins. In the one chapter that deals with their own views on the science wars, as opposed to the follies of the pomos, they analyze Thomas Kuhn, not the Marxist analysis of what Lewontin and Levins call the "Commoditization of Science." That is the real issue, not what Lacan thinks of pi.
In point of fact, the Social Text issue that Alan's spoof appeared in is one of their better efforts. It is available now under the title "Science Wars" and contains first-rate articles by Levins and Lewontin. It turns out that the original Social Text issue was basically a rejoinder to Norman Levitt, Alan Sokal's ally in the so-called science wars. Alan told Lingua Franca that his spoof was inspired by Levitt's efforts to expose irrational tendencies in the academy.
Directing his attention to Levitt and co-author Paul Gross's "Higher Superstitions," Lewontin writes:
"What Gross and Levitt have done is to turn their back on, or deny the existence of, some of the most important questions in the formation of scientific knowledge. They are scornful of 'metaphor mongers,' yet Gross's own field of developmental biology is in the iron grip of a metaphor, the metaphor of 'development' To describe the life history of an organism as 'development' is to prejudice the entire problematic of the investigation and to guarantee that certain explanations will dominate. 'Development' means literally an unrolling or an unfolding, seen also in the Spanish desarollo, or the German Entwicklung (unwinding). It means the making manifest of an already predetermined pattern immanent in the fertilized egg, just as the picture is immanent in an exposed film, which is then 'developed.' All that is required is the appropriate triggering of the process and the provision of a milieu that allows it to unfold. This is not mere 'metaphor mongering'; it reveals the shape of investigation in the field. Genes are everything. The environment is irrelevant except insofar as it allows development. The field then takes as its problematic precisely those life-history events that are indeed specified in the genome: the differentiation of the front end from the back end, and why pigs do not have wings. But it ignores completely the vast field of characters for which there is a constant interplay between genes and environment, and which cannot be understood under the rubric of 'development,' Nor are these characters trivial: they certainly include the central nervous system, for which the life history of the nerve connections of the roundworm is a very bad metaphor."
This is the kind of discussion that matters most in the so-called science wars. Instead of shooting fish in a barrel, Alan Sokal should be responding to these arguments. Instead, he has constructed strawmen that are easy to knock down. <snip> *****
Yoshie