Post-Modern Logic

February 26, 2016Uncategorized

I was in graduate school (for the second time) when Alan Sokal pulled off his controversial hoax.  The fame it generated and the shame it heap upon the postmodern academic movement flared up for a brief time.  Unfortunately, based on a recent article by Peter Dreier, it seems that any lessons learned from it were lost of many academics. Fortunately it made a lasting impression on me.

For those who aren’t familiar, Sokal, a physicist at NYU specializing in quantum field theory and quantization of gravity, wrote an article for the social studies magazine Social Text, an academic journal that prided itself on being a champion of postmodern thinking.  In his article, entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Sokal attacks the very basis of the Western scientific method. His opening paragraphs read

There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

– Alan Sokal

and

But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of “objectivity”. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical “reality”, no less than social “reality”, is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific “knowledge”, far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.

– Alan Sokal

For those who don’t have the stomach to wade through that gibberish (let alone what followed), what Sokal is trying to say is that scientific principles and results depend upon the culture and class from which one comes. He backs up this assertion by blurring the meaning of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics into saying that the essential role of observer brings a social or cultural aspect to all science.

After the publication of this ridiculous nonsense, Sokal publicly announced that his article was a hoax. His aim in perpetrating this hoax was to demonstrate both the lack of rigor in certain academic circles and the clear introduction of bias if the writing appealed to the editorial slant of the journal. In his own words, Sokal said that he undertook this bit of hokum in order to see if a leading journal of cultural studies would

publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions

-Alan Sokal

An example of these very preconceptions is on display in the discussion where Sokal cites Madsen and Maden who, according to the article, have two criteria for distinguishing between modernist and postmodernist science. Their criteria for postmodern science are:

  1. it be free from any dependence on the concept of objective truth
  2. it be constructed from those theoretical elements which are essential for the consistency and utility of the theory.

Earlier this week, Peter Dreier came clean about a similar hoax he had pulled-off in 2010. In his article entitled Confessing my sins and exposing my academic hoax, Dreier describes writing a sham abstract for a social studies panel on the “Absence of Absences”. In his narrative, he talks about how he wanted to see if he could write pure gibberish and still get it accepted to an academic conference. About the abstract that got him an invitation to the conference being held in Tokyo, Dreier says

My paper had no point at all. It was filled entirely with non-sequiturs. I didn’t even bother to mention anything about “the absence of absences,” because I had no idea what it meant and would have thus revealed my ignorance of the panel’s organizing theme

-Peter Dreier

After describing his flirtation with obfuscation, Dreier goes on to show that the desire by certain academics to indulge in abuses against the language is, by no means, limited to his little jaunt. He cites several cases of overly complicated postmodern phrasing which desperately tries to mask silly ideas with “academic pomposity”. In one particularly biting paragraph, he says

I also have little patience for the kind of embarrassingly obtuse writing style preferred by many postmodern and allegedly leftist academics that obscures more than it enlightens and is often a clever mask for being intellectually lightweight. Professor Daniel Oppenheimer of Princeton University made a similar point in an article published in the October 2005 issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology entitled, “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly.” The Atlantic in March 2006 summarized Oppenheimer’s point thusly: “Insecure writers tend to reach for the thesaurus.”

-Peter Dreier

I applaud both Sokal and Dreier for making a vivid point about what sometimes passes for academic thinking in institutions of higher education but I can’t help but feel that they miss a bigger point. In both of their critiques, the notion of postmodern thinking is held up as an object of ridicule. But pointing out the ‘silliness’ of the postmodern logic isn’t enough. Sokal actually comes fairly close (whether accidentally or intentionally I don’t know) to what I am advocating in his treatment of Madsen and Madsen’s criteria for a science to be regarded as postmodern. Sokals passage shows, without explicitly stating so, the inherent contradictions of postmodern thought.

Briefly summarized, postmodern points-of-view use objective truths and logical tools built upon them, to try to prove the lack of objective truths. Each of the arguments rests firmly upon the unspoken and unrecognized assumptions that words mean something, that conclusions have a decidable truth value, that arguments supporting these conclusions can be logically derived, and that the argument put forth is objective – that is to say anyone of any culture will agree with the conclusions.

So how can postmodernism logically argue against logic? It can’t. It just isn’t consistent – and that is the real lesson of these hoaxes.

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