February 2, 1997
Paul --
here's the text version. The name with the weird symbols is Berube. Both Es have this ' accent over them.
“Is there such a thing as truth?” This was, unfortunately, the question under discussion at the January 31 MillerComm presentation by Alan Sokal and Michael Bérubé. Sokal had published a parody of post-modern, cultural-critical theory called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in Social Text #46/47 which caused a huge (mostly academic) media uproar when he revealed the article as a hoax. He has been using the notoriety resulting from this event to promote his desire for leftists to hold on to a belief in truth and objectivity. He believes that post-modern critiques of the ideas of truth and objectivity can lead to an anti-rationalist, anti-thinking subjectivism like that found in U.S. political campaigns. Bérubé, defending post-modernism, spoke about the need for communication between “local knowledges”, and he asked whether Sokal's distinction between values and brute facts was itself a value or a brute fact. The debate quickly deteriorated into agreement, with Sokal admitting that truth cannot be known (but objective evaluation of evidence gives the best approximation of truth), and with Bérubé admitting that he likes the distinction between values and brute facts as long as the dividing line between them is seen as socially constructed. I wrote the following letter to Professor Bérubé in a fit of passion the morning after the MillerComm event.
Dear Professor Bérubé,
Having heard your non-debate with Professor Sokal at MillerComm, I'm compelled to say that despite your cleverness and panache, you let Professor Sokal off the hook too easily. He mislead you by focusing the “brute fact” part of the discussion on the issue of how scientists know what scientists know, when the real matter under dispute is how lay people know what scientists know.
To take a very brute fact, how do I know that things fall near the surface of the earth at 32 feet per second squared? I presume that hundreds of thousands of undergrads and scientists have followed Gallileo in testing this for themselves. But me and 99% of the rest of the world, we are perfectly happy to take the matter on hearsay. Physical evidence will never need to support my knowledge of the earth's surface gravity - in fact, since I've learned all my science from books and none of it from lab experiments, I doubt that I have ever seen physical evidence for any scientific fact I know.
The reason I know the surface gravity of earth is that I'm sure they couldn't have lied to me about that. If someone had discovered that 32 feet per second squared was wrong, I'd have heard about it, it would have appeared in the papers - journalists have no vested interest in keeping that information from us.
So, my belief in the claims of science is not at all based on evidence but is entirely based on trust that about certain things scientists will not lie to me, and that trust is based on knowledge of social arrangements.
Obviously I've simplified extremely: I do not even believe in the claims of science based on the claims of scientists; I hardly even know any scientists. The only ways I know about their claims are through text books, high school teachers, newspapers, and popular accounts of science in books written for lay people. And I doubt whether any of these sources themselves rely on physical evidence. For the most part, the only people who test the empirical claims of scientists are other scientists with similar training. The rest of us just wait till the scientists stop arguing about a given matter, and when the dust settles, then we believe what they say.
Well, no, actually that's not true. We wait unless we happen to have a vested interest in the outcome, and when we do have a vested interest that can be legitimated by even a highly disputed scientific claim, we trot that claim around as if it were the law of gravity. In fact, every time a person uses a scientific claim to legitimate a contested social argument, the scientific claim will also be found to be disputed. The law of gravity may be beyond reproach, but it can't be used to argue for much in the political sphere. Whereas every statistic about unwed mothers or abortion is contested somewhere by someone's counter-statistic.
So the actual existence of underlying truth, which your discussion with Professor Sokal seemed to hinge on, is irrelevant. The issue is whether the underlying truth of scientific claims legitimates the use of scientific claims in political debates involving non-scientists. When Professor Sokal says that we can't let go of truth and objectivity, he's probably not asking us to believe those scientific claims that no scientist argues about (since they have no political relevance), and he can't be asking us to go discover scientific truth and objectivity for ourselves. If we all refused to believe what science told us until we had seen the evidence for ourselves, we wouldn't be believing much (which I would consider preferable). So when Professor Sokal asks us to believe in objective truth and fact, he must be asking us to believe what scientists tell us, even when scientists as a whole aren't quite sure. Or, if not to believe them, at least to give more credibility to what they say than to what people who don't base their arguments on truth and objectivity say. Well, I think it's quite reasonable that Professor Sokal, being a scientist, would want us to take scientists more seriously.
In conclusion, Professor Bérubé, I am addressing this letter to you rather than to Professor Sokal, because he has taken a reasonable position given his place in society, whereas you, I think, have let him get away with it.
Sincerely,
Sigfried (Steve) Gold
P.S. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to divine how the publication of this letter in The Octopus serves my own personal interest.
Published in The Octopus: Champaign-Urbana's Alternative Weekly, February 2, 1997.