Folks: Today I have a joint Los Angeles Times op-ed with New York University physicist Alan Sokal, of "Sokal hoax" fame, about the left, the right, and the misuse of science. The piece can be read here.
What's significant about this, I think, is that Sokal is very well known for his criticisms of left-wing attacks on science, particularly those coming from the academic left, during the 1990s. I, meanwhile, am known for my criticisms of right-wing attacks on science, particularly those coming from the Republican Party and its base. But now, the two of us have come together and pointed out who the real enemy is today (i.e., the modern conservative movement), how and why that's changed, and what we can do about it.
Here's a brief excerpt from the piece:
Sokal took on his postmodernist colleagues because he feared that the rejection of a rigorous, evidence-based standard for assessing claims of purported fact would disarm us not only in the face of quack medical remedies or alleged paranormal occurrences, but also when confronted by distortions of scientific information having major public-policy implications. A classic example is the tobacco industry's well-documented campaign to sow doubts about the health risks of smoking. Another is the interminable push by religious fundamentalists to undermine the teaching of evolution in American schools.
As these cases suggest, attacks on science by ideologues and special interests have a long history in this country. A stance of postmodernist relativism -- or, on the part of the media, of giving "equal time" to unequally substantiated viewpoints -- weakens us in the face of such strategic campaigns to undercut well-established knowledge.
But the abuse of science has lately materialized in an even more disturbing form, this time within the corridors of our own government. Driven by the Bush administration and its congressional allies, the new American "science wars" have reached an alarming stage.
The rest can be read here. Enjoy.
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Come off it, Chris. You know Sokal's an 'old leftist', who taught in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas. The fact that he also very effectively lampooned postmodernism does not signify what you claim it does.
What we have here is two leftists getting together to declare 'modern conservatism' the enemy of all that's good. Yawn! Meanwhile, vital research funds are being held up by the Dems in Congress.
Re Harbison
Well, Mr. Harbison launched a hit an run smear attack on John Edwards on Mike the Mad Biologists' blog and when challenged to back it up, disappeared. Now he launches a smear attack on Allan Sokol and accuses the new Democratic Congress of holding up important science legislation. Now I challenge him to cite specific examples of this alleged holding up. I suspect, like all right wing ideologues, he will duck this challenge also and disappear into the electronic void.
Folks,
This sure sounds like fun, but I'd prefer that this thread be a place for reactions to the Mooney Sokal piece...
Sorry, guy, not returning to a blog every 15 minutes is not a hit-and-run attack. Edwards' lawsuits, which were heavily based on the discredited theory that birth trauma is a major cause of cerebral palsy, are a matter of public record.
You can read my blog (it's linked) for one example of the Dems diverting research funds. You can check the New York Times last month for how the Dems policy of operating of continuing resolutions has hurt NSF and the national labs. Any ordinary, well informed layperson who has an interest in science knows about these issues. Hey, here's a letter from the director of the NSF:
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf0720/nsf0720.jsp
Here's an appeal from AGI
http://www.agiweb.org/gap/legis109/nsf-budget121806_alert_cont.html
I've published this stuff so far...but will not publish any more off topic comments on this thread.
At a university where I taught Math for a couple of years, and my wife taught and still teaches Physics, it was my impression that the Sokal hoax was not appreciated by the Physics chairman, in part because he had only one (!) refereed academic publication in his career, English was not his primary language, and he felt that Sokal was attacking and discrediting Physics as such.
Second, the American Culture and other professors with whom I discussed it, considered that it must be a right-wing attack on the predominantly leftist post-structuralisg deconstructionist dogma.
I contend that Sokal and Chris Mooney (I subscribe to the Los Angeles Times and read the editorial in question via hardcopy) are doing a great job of communicating to those of us who understand science, but are fighting a necessary but difficult battle to convince the majority who neither understand science nor the Bush administration war on science.
It is hard to discuss evolution with someone who states: "evolution is only a theory" because the are using the word "theory" in a vernacular stripped of the context of the scientific method.
Similarly, Bush accused those who questioned his economic assumptions, when he first ran for President, as "Fuzzy Math" -- both an abuse of the term of art in Math, and successful because Economics as a science is clearly not understood by the general public.
Against ignorance, there is the possibility of education, and I applaud Chris Mooney for doing so in a public forum. "Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain" [Schiller, cf. Asimov].
Off topic, but, recalling that you (Chris) debated Ron Bailey at one time, I thought you might be interested in Tim Lambert's blog about a recent Ron Bailey article.
Actually, given Ron Bailey's sometime conviction that science abuse is primarily an activity of the left, it may not be that off-topic.
Although I used the terms "right" and "left" upthread, I am tempted to withdraw their usage herein. The historical reference to which side of the aisle in the French postrevolutionary Assembly seems useless to me now.
In this context, I refer to the 2-axis representation, with one axis being State versus Individual, and the other being Rational versus Irrational means to policy ends. The Science Wars are primarily (I think) about Irrational (i.e. Faith-based, ideology-based, lobbyist-bribe-based) versus Rational (Scientific method).
This is orthogonal to the State v Individual axis (which is roughly related to Left/Right).
It is hard to address, in part, precisely because it cuts across the Democratic/Republican divide, the Liberal/Conservative divide, as well as eastern States/Western States, Souther States/Nothern States, big states/small states, and male/female divisions.
Having a Physicist congressman seems to be a plus, but having a Physician senatorial leader did not help (in my estimation).
Having an Islamic congressman is something that I appreciate, but the public is likely unaware of the major contributions of Islam to the History of Science; having a Christian Science congressman is not likely to help debate about biomedical policy issues; having a Buddhist congressman seems neutral, albeit the Dalai Lama is fascinated by science and technology, and has engaged in serious dialogue with Neurosciences communities.
Thank you for posting my followup.
On the topic at hand: I think you understate the potency of the postmodernist attack on science in the late 80s and early 90s. I vividly remember being told by a colleague from English that simply arguing for the idea of 'objective truth' was racist, sexist and heterosexist. I was told at a teaching conference that teaching students how to build scientific equipment, without considering the role such equipment plays in the nuclear weapons program and in 'corporate hegemonism', was unethical to the extent I should be thrown out of my job. BTW, and IMO, Gross and Levitt, neither of them a conservative (but both of them scientists or mathematicians) wrote the best take-down of postmodernism.
Has it changed? It's toned down a little, but the same people are still in charge in academia. Stanley Fish has a column in the New York Times. Scientific grant proposals are now required to include the appropriate dollops of political correctness; even if you just want to measure the motions of atoms in organic solids, you have to show how you're remedying a host of social ills. Maybe the Left regrets its worst excesses, but I tend to believe in Kuhn's rule: an academic culture changes only when the last generation dies off and the next replaces them. Even at my midwestern and rather understated university, the dominant culture outside of business and a few professional schools is hard-left.
And let's not forget Steve Fuller, pomo, was a witness for the creationists at Dover. I don't disagree that the Bush administration has been abusive of science. I just don't think it's in a partisan phenomenon. The Democrat's core constitutencies are, in their own way, every bit as prone to abuse science as the GOP.
What is most odd is that the "everything is political" idea that comes out of postmodern doctrine has now been taken up by people on the right to also discredit the idea that science can be objective.
So you can see how the right has been pilfering from the far Left when it serves their purposes.
Thanks, Chris, for the article and the pointer to it.
This may be a bit off topic, but I wrote one of my most negative book reviews of The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science by Theodore Roszak (1999). It ran in the Dallas Morning News with my suggested headline, "Helium, Shelium."
I offer this comment only to provide a bit of perspective on the potentially explosive mix of science and a political agenda, no matter where that agenda sits in the one- or two-dimensional philosophical plane.
The book had its merits, but its political agenda made it difficult for me to engage with its arguments. It and books like it would certainly be vulnerable to Sokol-type hoaxes.
If you read the review, you can see that I only managed to finish reading it because I had an assignment.
http://www.scienceshelf.com/GenderedAtom.htm
Being a fan of drive bys, let me quote from a Mayo clinic page:
"However, doctors don't completely understand the cause of most cases of cerebral palsy, which are present at birth (congenital). For many years, doctors and researchers believed that cerebral palsy was caused by a lack of oxygen during birth. Now they believe that only a small number of cases are caused by problems during labor and delivery.
Risk factors
Most children with cerebral palsy don't have any apparent problems during development in the womb and birth. But some factors may increase the risk of cerebral palsy:
* Babies that are premature or have a low birth weight
* Fetuses in a feet-first position (breech presentation) at the beginning of labor
* Complicated labor and delivery
* Maternal infection during pregnancy
* Health problems in the mother during pregnancy that impair normal blood circulation to the uterus and placenta
Meconium staining of amniotic fluid, caused by stool passed by the fetus in utero, also may indicate prenatal difficulties. However, most children with one or more of these risk factors don't develop cerebral palsy."
Strikes me that Harbison is trying a bit too hard to discredit Edwards. Now why would he do that?
I have to admit that I am somewhat nostalgic for the Science Wars of the 1990s and the lesser Evolutionary Psychology Wars (a continuation of the Sociobiology Wars).
This 1997 article by Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh, published in The Nation, criticizes the 'new creationists' - not 'Intelligent Design' advocates, but academic leftists opposed to any role for biology in human behavior.
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Ehrenreich.html
"In truth, there was nothing wrong with inventing science studies; the error was to leap from the valid observation that science arises in a social context to the extreme conclusion that it is nothing more than politics in disguise."
Latour did not invent "science studies". Historians of science have been studying science -- and scientists -- for a long time now.
...and scientists are human beings so Latour's observation that "science arises within a social context" is really nothing profound. Any idiot could have come to that conclusion.
Unfortunately, I'd have to say that several of today's most outspoken science policy "experts" have picked up right where Latour left off.
PZ has a post on your article now. I think it has by far the most important message: better science ducation.
My opinion (somewhat different from PZ's): Without adequate science education, most people will judge a message by familiarity, comfort, or appeal to pre-existing bias. If one has a poor science education, and one's worldview has a moderate intersection with reality, one will cherry pick scientific findings (e.g. Newt). If one has a poor scientific education, and one's worldview has little intersection with reality, one will reject science almost entirely (e.g., creationists) .
I suspect this is independent of being right or left, authoritarian or libertarian, conservative or liberal.
That's a pretty skewed summary of Latour's "Has The Steam Run Out of Critique?" essay (from Critical Inquiry a few years ago) to suggest that he asked if he'd gone too far. (Was it Sokal who threw that misinterpretation in there?)
I don't recall who "put it in there" but can you explain what's wrong with the quotation?
Here's Latour's essay, for comparison:
http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Latour.html
I don't think the quotation is that bad. He does seem to think that certain aspects of critical theory have gone too far, and he really does seem worried that his own work may have contributed to the anti-science nonsense that seems to be coming out of postmodernism. The essay concludes:
Compare this to the summary in the op-ed:
Seems like a pretty fair evaluation to me.
Chris, Sorry for being unecessarily obscure above. Latour makes a pretty deep venture into assessing the place of science in society. (Perhaps a clearer look at what he says about science, nature, and society can be found in the opening chapter of his (1999) Pandora's Hope.) Wes (just above this reply) takes a paragraph from the on-line version of the article (it's longer, if I recall correctly, in print) to show that Latour's concern was about how science studies concepts were deployed. The rest of the article, and the full breadth of the argument, goes on to discuss what to do with the question just quoted. You can't take the provocation of the argument as its endpoint -- that's just the set-up, the thing to be discussed. He isn't questioning the earlier work, as if to say, that was all bunk. He's asking if the way that work has been utilized is no longer useful. Reflexively, in part, he's wondering what the critique has brought us, if it hasn't helped open up views of science but, rather, become vulgar soundbites for those seizing on the possibility for countering science (say, fundamentalists, e.g.).
My sense here is this: L asks this, "What if explanations [have] deteriorated to the point of now feeding also the most gullible sort of critiques?" to push for a yet more elaborate examination of how one examines the place of science in society. To then take *that* starter question as a claim that science is objective is to miss the main point of his argument. Latour has never claimed that science was no more than discourse; nor that it was no more than politics; nor that nature has no part in it. In my experience in the field, I've not come across anyone who thought so. Latour, in the quoted article, asks what we are to do if analyses of science-in-society are interpreted as claiming what Sokal suggests him to be saying -- that it's just politics, or just discourse.
To take that as meaning that Latour questions whether his earlier work on the objectivity of scientific knowledge went too far is to miss the purpose of his argument, maybe almost ironically so. He's saying, well, what do we do if folks like Sokal don't follow the point? Or, worse yet, and the actual central concern in his article, what do we do if folks like creationists think we are saying only that science is not objective, and therefore it's whatever you want it to be?
Thus, what I meant with a poorly blurted out post above was that I think Sokal hasn't made it very far in ten years. He takes the provocation of Latour's argument to be the endpoint. And that's not helpful. If we want to pursue and promote better science -- and everyone I know wants to do this -- then supposing that it's apolitical won't get us very far. Ben
PS Thanks for writing the op-ed, which is a useful voice to have out there. Nothing I've written here should be taken as denying your basic point in the piece.
Last one, I promise: here are two links to the full Latour article, one in pdf, the other from his old website. The end of the excerpt available at the link given above by Wes (ending with "Criticalland"), and thus possibly leading to the mis/half-interpretation, is about page 5 of 24 in the full article.
the pdf
-or-
the website
Oops! I didn't realize that wasn't a complete copy of the article. Sorry that my comments were misleading. I should give the full essay a read, then.
I don't think Mooney was claiming that Latour claimed that critical theory was all bunk, though. That seems to be taking the op-ed quote farther than it was intended. It seemed to me like Latour and Mooney/Sokal were saying basically the same thing: Sociology of science isn't a bad thing, it's just that it can be (and frequently has been) taken way too far and gotten way out of control.
But now that I know there's more to the Latour essay, I'm not so sure of myself. Maybe I just misunderstood Latour.
First off, we weren't trying to summarize Latour's essay, we were quoting a relevant part of it. So there's a difference between that and misrepresentation. I still don't see how we've distorted his meaning.
Secondly, let me say that we're not claiming science is fully objective either, or apolitical -- just useful.