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Sokal's Hoax: A Pragmatist Response

Author(s): Raymond D. Boisvert


Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1999), pp. 39-55
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25670275
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Sokal's Hoax: A Pragmatist Response

Raymond D. Boisvert
Siena College

1. Introduction

hen Alan Sokal revealed his hoax at the expense of Social Text, a strident
V V intellectual eruption ensued. Sokal's aim had been to criticize supporters
of a field called "culture studies." Their sin, evident in the expression "social
construction of reality," was to deny the objectivity of science. Announcing his
hoax in a 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, Sokal complained that Social Texfs ac
ceptance of his article "exemplifies the intellectual arrogance of Theory?
postmodernist literary theory, that is?carried to its logical extreme." This "ex
treme" represented a postmodern epidemic of "subjectivist thinking" whose spread
Sokal sought to halt. "Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they
are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are
not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter" (Sokal 1996b, 63).
Not content with having confronted American foes, Sokal, the following year,
took his crusade to the land that had spawned the noxious and "extreme" ideas
in the first place, France. He and Jean Bricmont, a physicist at the University of
Louvain, published Impostures Intellectuelles, an attack on what they consid
ered to be pseudo-scientific, jargon-laden, incomprehensible, and meaningless
babble emanating from such French intellectual superstars as Lacan, Baudrillard,
and Kristeva.
Not surprisingly the counterattack was swift and pointed. Julia Kristeva com
plained that the whole polemic seemed to be an "anti-French intellectual enter
prise" that had succumbed to "francophobia" (Whitney 1997, A5). Bruno Latour
satirized the Sokal-Bricmont volume as insinuating that France was an intellec
tual Columbia, a land of dealers pandering hard drugs like "derridium" and
"lacanium." American intellectuals, it appeared, were as susceptible to these Gallic
drugs as inner-city youth to Columbian crack cocaine. Underlying it all, so said
Latour, was the frustration of a scientific community now deprived of the steady
stream of research monies generated by the need to stay ahead of America's Cold
War enemies. With the end of the Cold War came the need to create new en
emies, in this case the "postmodern intellectual" (Latour 1997, 18).

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1999.


Copyright ? 1999 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
39

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40 Raymond D. Boisvert

The previous year's polemic in this country had been no less acerbic. De
fenders of Social Text resorted to ad hominem attacks. Sokal was, one editor
charged, "ill-read and half educated" (Scott 1996, 1). The mere mention of
Jacques Derrida as a target of Sokal's critique, sent his most prominent Ameri
can defender into fits of disbelief.1 Gloating scientists, by contrast, could hardly
refrain from an easy opportunity to attack their non-science colleagues. One of
them2 pontificated sanctimoniously: "I don't want to claim that it proves that all
social scientists or all English professors are complete idiots, but it does betray
a certain arrogance and a certain out-of-touchness on the part of a certain clique
inside academic life" (Scott 1996, 22).
This low level of interchange was somewhat elevated by a more serious one.
On the scientific side, Steven Weinberg took up the battle in the New York Re
view of Books. From the side of culture studies came an op-ed piece for the New
York Times by Stanley Fish.
Challenging Sokal's central objection, Fish stated bluntly that "[i]t is no con
tradiction to say that something is socially constructed and also real." To ce
ment the correctness of this position, he offered the balls and strikes of baseball
as examples of what are unquestionably real, but just as unquestionably socially
constructed.3
Steven Weinberg would have none of this. The laws of physics, he forcefully
asserted, "are real in pretty much the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks
in the fields, and not in the same sense (as implied by Fish) as the rules of
baseball." Putting his position as boldly as possible, Weinberg asserted a "one
to-one correspondence" between the laws of physics and "aspects of objective
reality" (Weinberg 1996, 14).
In the very public side of this controversy, philosophers were strangely ab
sent. Yet the issues involved intersect with venerable philosophical questions.
What I would like to do in this essay is offer a perspective on such issues from
within American pragmatism. In a spirit of cooperation with alternative tradi
tions, my presentation will build on some moves made by a thinker more promi
nent in analytical and hermeneutic circles, Charles Taylor.
I plan to develop my response in two stages. The brief first stage will involve
a critique of the Weinberg and Fish positions. The second stage, more genera
tive, will indicate ways in which a twentieth-century philosophy such as prag
matism alters the philosophical assumptions that, strange as it may seem, are
shared by both sides in "Uaffaire Sokal."

2. Criticism

Fish and Weinberg build their cases around two faulty analogies. Fish's op-ed
piece is strong on indignation, but weak on reasoning. Especially problematic is

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Sokal'sHoax 41

the baseball analogy. By his own admission, Fish had to show how "socially
constructed" and "real" were not mutually exclusive. His analogy, however,
simply begs the question. Human artifacts, like baseball?activities that had no
existence prior to our devising them?are going to be both real and socially
constructed. Indeed, their reality derives from being constructs. This is neither
insightful nor controversial.
The contentious issue is not whether human constructs are real. The chal
lenge is twofold: (1) Are nature's forces and laws operative quite independently
of the verbal and mathematical formulations by which we try to comprehend
them? (2) Are these formulations just useful fictions, literary-style interpreta
tions that, while useful in terms of control and prediction, get us no closer to the
heart of reality than multiple readings of Conrad get us closer to the Heart of
Darkness! By selecting an artifact as his analogue, Fish sidesteps rather than
meets the challenge set for him.4
Such considerations would seem to leave the way open for accepting the
convictions voiced so forcefully by Weinberg. But here, too, a pragmatist is
likely to be wary. Weinberg's own analogy between laws of nature and rocks in
the fields is as misguided as is Fish's comparison to baseball. No one has ever
stumbled over a law of nature, stubbed a toe on one, used it to hold open a door,
or painted eyes and a nose on it. Laws of nature are different from things we
encounter in important ways: (1) They are not located in a particular place. (2)
They cannot be discerned by the senses. (3) Rocks are environment-conditioned,
subject to change as they are affected by external forces. Laws of nature, while
they might evolve, are not altered by meteorological or even geological factors.
Weinberg's additional claim about a "one-to-one correspondence" between
the laws of physics and "aspects of objective reality" (Weinberg 1996, 14) is
surely an exaggeration. He wants to emphasize that scientists discover some
thing operative quite independently of them. The language in which he chooses
to express this position, however, is taken from what are, although still promi
nent in popular culture, now antiquated philosophical assumptions allied to a
facile subject-object dualism.
The claim of "one-to-one correspondence" is also parasitic upon the laws of
physics, or rocks in the field analogy. But, as we have seen, this analogy is
problematic. A child, when asking about the utterance "rock," can be satisfied
by having someone point to an object in the world. Such a situation, paradig
matic for giving rise to the notion of one-to-one correspondence, cannot be du
plicated for laws of nature. The elicitation and articulation of such laws does not
result from mere pointing and naming. In the complicated world of contempo
rary particle physics, as described by the historian of science Peter Galison,
experimentation can take up to a decade, "involve tens of millions of dollars and
tens, even hundreds, of collaborators" (1987,2). The "experimental enterprise,"
Galison continues, involves decisions about when, ceteris paribus, the most
defensible conclusions can be said to stand and be ready for public presentation.

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42 Raymond D. Boisvert

Decisions about such readiness, not being perfect, will depend on the best judg
ment of researchers. The decision about when conclusions stand as defensible
are made "despite the fact that the end of an experimental demonstration is not,
and cannot be, based purely on a closed set of procedures" (3).
The phrase "when conclusions stand" is suggestive in two significant ways.
First, it identifies the opening, which is exploited by those who affirm a strong
role for social construction. It suggests that a combination of ingredients, in
cluding presuppositions, experimental results, logical reasoning, discussions with
colleagues, and general agreement, all factor into making the determination that
a conclusion does stand. This is a far cry from the claim that laws of nature are
like rocks in the world, merely data to be espied and labeled. Second, the em
phases on experimentation and degrees of confidence in conclusions reflect
themes that were already present at the turn of the century in American pragma
tism. These themes, in turn, can lead us to a sort of realism that is not dependent
on the language of "one-to-one correspondence."

3. A Pragmatist Excursus

Philosophy in the twentieth century has been rich and heterogeneous. Some
contemporary thinkers persist in setting up the sort of opposition voiced in the
Weinberg-Fish debate. In a recent defense of rationalism, for example, Thomas
Nagel articulates the problematic of determining the end of inquiries as a simple
dichotomy: "Do they come to an end with objective principles whose validity is
independent of our point of view, or do they come to an end within our point of
view?individual or shared?so that ultimately, even the apparently most ob
jective and universal principles derive their validity or authority from the per
spective and practice of those who follow them?" (1997, 3). In the territory
charted by Nagel, there are only two positions, the "rationalist" and the "subjec
tivist." The dilemma, as in the Sokal affair, is stark: Weinberg or Fish.
In spite of the beauty and power of Nagel's language, it remains the case that
much twentieth-century philosophy has worked out formulations that take us
beyond the terrain inhabited by such sharp polarities.5 This is true not just in the
continental hermeneutic tradition, but also within the analytic tradition to which
Nagel belongs (he mentions Quine, Putnam, and Goodman as people with whom
he disagrees). In addition, there is the homegrown, but underappreciated philo
sophical movement within which I am working, pragmatism. It, too, has much
to offer in moving beyond the stalemated, either/or dilemmas bequeathed by
modernity.6
I will begin with a historical claim, suggesting that the Weinberg-Fish anti
nomy is really just a family squabble. Both sides descend from a common lin
eage of assumptions prominent in the modern West. That claim will be comple

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Sokal'sHoax 43

merited by a case for drawing on the sort of help provided by the alternati
lineage of pragmatism.

3.1 A Family Squabble

Scientia is explained in a medieval philosophical dictionary as signaling


kind of knowledge resulting from procedures that guarantee necessity and
tainty. Scientia, as a special, privileged form of knowing, was opposed, not on
to ignorance, but also to fides, belief/faith, and opinio, opinion (Deferrari 19
939). Philosophers were among the privileged few who trafficked in the rarif
realm of scientia. Metaphysics, the crowning jewel of philosophy, even cam
be known as the "queen of the sciences."
Enlightenment rationalism secularized and physicalized the sources of
cessity and certainty. It tended to discredit philosophers and theologians as fi
order providers of necessary truths. The scientist was now given this role. Ev
so prominent a philosopher as Kant saw his work as derivative from that of
Newton. The scientist had spoken. The philosopher's task was that of providi
the conditions for the possibility of the claims made in physics. What this sw
in priority did not do, however, was alter the ideal of scientia as involving n
essary truths. Science continued to be contrasted with belief and characteriz
by certainty. The change was simply one of personnel. In place of the theolog
and philosopher, the scientist was now celebrated as having access to this realm
This shift in leadership sort of parallels the replacement of the Czar by the f
secretary of the communist party. The titles are changed; the vocabulary of po
and government sure sound different. Practice, though, has not really altered
that much. There has been no genuine revolution in the understanding of pol
cal authority.
Twentieth-century philosophy, by contrast, has undergone many revolution
with regard to the nature of gnoseological authority. To help explain one
these, I will draw on a nonpragmatist, Charles Taylor. His 'Overcoming Epist
mology" describes the pre-revolution view, a view he calls the "epistemologic
construal." The "single formula" summary for this construal is consistent w
Weinberg's "one-to-one correspondence." The epistemological construal, s
Taylor, thinks of knowledge "as correct representation of an independent re
ity. In its original form, it saw knowledge as the inner depiction of an oute
reality" (Taylor 1995, 3).
Once situated within this epistemological construal, philosophers tended to
highlight certain concerns over others. The most prominent of these might
called the "anxiety of uncertainty," a near pathological fear of anything tha
gives less than pure, perfect certitude.7 This anxiety, rooted in the limited
tions of perfect certainty or epistemic anarchism, has occasioned the sorts
questions that used to dominate American philosophy classrooms: Are the sens

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44 Raymond D. Boisvert

reliable? Which picture of the external world is objectively valid, that of science
or common sense? Are we really brains in a vat, fooled by electrical impulses
that simulate ordinary sensations?
Such questions did not always dominate the philosophical enterprise. Meta
physical, ethical, and existential concerns have, at different times, been equally
central. Our immediate inheritance, though, is that of modern Europe's episte
mological construal with its quadruple core convictions: (1) humans are prima
rily and essentially knowers; (2) the world is "external" and comprises a set of
objects-to-be-known; (3) knowledge is an inner depiction of outer reality; and
(4) a sharp distinction must be made between "knowledge," which provides
certitude, and "opinion," which does not.
From this ancestral cluster can descend feuding progeny. The Weinberg lin
eage is one such offspring. It exudes confidence that inner representations, de
livered to the mind by the scientific method, can accurately reflect what the
external world is like. It alleviates the anxiety of uncertainty by following what
a Deweyan would call the "spectator turn." Such a position orbits around a ven
erable philosophical metaphor, the mind as all-seeing eye.
In contrast, the Fish lineage considers the external world to be irredeemably
nebulous. The aim of one-to-one correspondence is naive and unverifiable. We
need to confront our uncertainty without comforting illusions. What we call
"knowing" is the best account we can concoct about the world. The anxiety of
uncertainty is overcome by embracing what is now being called the "rhetorical
turn."8 This turn gravitates around its own metaphor, that of mind as storytelling
tongue. One trailblazer for the rhetorical turn is a self-proclaimed pragmatist,
Richard Rorty. The starkness of his phrasings, abetted by his penchant, in the
1970s and 1980s at least, for sharp either/or formulations, give his work much
of the power it has. "The world," he says, "does not speak, only we do" (Rorty
1989, 6).9
My thesis is that nothing could be further from the truth. Rorty's literal, sharply
dualistic distinction is too stark. The world does speak. Once we grasp the full
sense of this expression, the Weinberg-Fish antinomy can be dissolved. A world
that speaks, I hope to show, is inhospitable to the "epistemological construal."
More congenial to the new philosophical landscape is what, inspired by Josiah
Royce and contemporary usage, is the "interpretive construal."10

3.2 The Interpretive Construal

Once again, it is Charles Taylor who provides an important opening move. "We
can draw a neat line," he says, "between my picture of an object and that object,
but not between my dealing with that object and that object" (1995, 12). This
one sentence is both the solvent for dislodging the epistemological construal
and a blueprint for constructing an alternative. The first step involves displacing

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Sokal'sHoax 45

the philosophical anthropology that gave rise to the epistemological construal


Humans, when considered in terms of ordinary life and experience, can readil
be understood as creatures who "deal with" their surroundings. They wake, bath
eat, engage in projects both remunerative and relaxing, take trips, love, worry
and generally try to live out a good life. When considered by academic philos
phers, the picture that emerges is quite different. By thinking of people in a
straction from everyday contexts, they can be characterized as essentially an
primordially knowers. Although such a picturing grasps an important aspect
human life, it remains nonetheless misleading because of its eliminative parti
ity. An inclusive appreciation of the human condition will be far more likely t
emphasize the multiplicity of ways in which humans interact with and exper
ence their surroundings. Even academics, were they to reflect on their lives,
would find much time spent in gardens, running errands, helping children wit
homework, listening to music, shoveling snow, collecting stamps, and a host
other activities not adequately encompassed by the modern identification
"man" with mind.
Taylor credits Heidegger with introducing a fuller, more concrete anthropo
ogy: "Heidegger, for instance, shows?especially in his celebrated analysis
being-in-the-world?that the condition of our forming disengaged representa
tions of reality is that we must be already engaged in coping with our world
dealing with the things in it, at grips with them." Such a revised anthropology
building as it does on coping, a more inclusive term that can incorporate kno
ing, undermines the basis for the epistemological construal:

Foundationalism is undermined because you can't go on digging under ou


ordinary representations to uncover further, more basic representations. What
you get underlying our representations of the world?the kinds of things w
formulate, for instance, in declarative sentences?is not further representation
but rather a certain grasp of the world that we have as agents in it. This show
the whole epistemological construal of knowledge to be mistaken. (Taylor
1995, 11, 12)

Instead of foundational givens (e.g., sense data, innate ideas), what we find, if
we pay attention to ordinary experience, is a context of practice. It is against th
background that come the more highly refined representations of the special
experimental studies. To begin with the latter, and assume that humans are neu
tral, disinterested "subjects" geared ultimately toward generating inner repre
sentations of the external world is what Heidegger wished to deny. This is not
deny that seeking knowledge is a good thing. The specialized studies, as
Wittgenstein suggested, are like the "suburbs," while the language out of whic
we work is like "an ancient city." The specialized suburbs are important places
where wonderful discoveries are made, but they should neither be confused wit
nor substituted for the "maze of little streets and squares" that defines the perv
sive ambient of ordinary existence (Wittgenstein 1953, par. 18).

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46 Raymond D. Boisvert

This was also the philosophical reconstruction that pragmatists, prior to


Heidegger and Wittgenstein, had attempted to undertake.11 Humans, in a full,
concrete sense, are not "subjects," disembodied, disinterested spectators of a world
that is "neutral." Instead humans are, well, "humans," that is to say creatures
enmeshed in a context of praxis. In a negative sense, praxis is shorthand for
denying that humans are essentially and exclusively minds, nothing but Carte
sian "thinking things."12 Positively, it stands for the complex, multidimensional
condition of being a creature concerned, as Dewey phrases it, with "use" and
"enjoyment." The specialized inquiries in which we engage are not erected on a
foundation of epistemological givens. Instead of a foundation, there is a back
ground, the realm of praxis, what Dewey sometimes calls primary experience.13
Once the issue is framed properly, with praxis rather than epistemological
givens as central, the task of contemporary pragmatists is to explore fully what
this means. Toward this end, they are aided by the figures of the classical gen
eration. One of the most significant is also one of the lesser known, Josiah Royce.
His importance derives from an articulation of what I am calling the interpretive
construal. Royce developed this at the turn of the century, a prescient attempt,
prior to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, and assorted others who later toiled
in the same vineyard, to weed it of the "epistemological construal." Royce's
interpretive construal, in turn, provides an appropriate road map for those who
wish to take a hermeneutically inspired "dialogical turn."
Building on Peirce, Royce claims that we live in a "world of interpretation"
(389). Its components are not bits of dead, meaningless matter. Instead, he pro
poses that we consider all of what surrounds us as signs. A sign, Royce says, is
that which "calls for interpretation" (390). Today, we would probably speak of
information rather than signs. A granite mountain face, dust from Mars, a biopsied
piece of tissue, all of these contain stores of information. Rorty, in other words,
is mistaken. To take a literal truth and turn it into a denial of dependence on
information and signals from our surroundings is both overly radical and mis
leading. The world does speak. This metaphorical formulation is truer to the
experience of scientific inquiry. The world, it seems a safe and suggestive gen
eralization to suggest, speaks in multiple and strange languages.
Because of this polyglot situation, we can neither attend to the languages
simultaneously nor have access to all the translational tools that would allow
comprehensive understanding of more than a few of them. Such an understand
ing involves complex loops, circuits, back and forth oscillation between the
languages we take with us and the new ones that need to be forged as a result of
inadequacies signaled by the subject matters we are researching. Within such a
hermeneutic circle, it is difficult to assign clear priority either to the researchers
(formerly known in the singular as the subject) or to the subject matters of in
vestigation (formerly known as the object). The foundationalist fears such cir
cularities, preferring the solid ground of the Kantian subject or that of the Ayer
style positivist. If we remain close to what actually happens in investigations,

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Sokal'sHoax 47

however, we realize that such circularities need not be vicious. From wit
such circuits do come fresh translations that capture real meaning.14

3.3 Beyond Weinberg and Fish

It is this amalgam of relevant but neither perfect nor total translatability th


commends the interpretive construal and its dialogical turn as a way of sup
seding the spectator and rhetorical turns. The more satisfactory nature of
interpretive construal can be explored by indicating how it allows us to dea
with the opposition embodied in Sokal's hoax. Facts and evidence do ind
matter, as Sokal insisted. The "rhetorical turn," best exemplified in Rorty's ar
ficial dilemma that "we can only compare languages or metaphors with
another, not with something beyond language called 'fact'" (Rorty 1989, 20),
hard to justify in light of actual scientific work. But this means neither that l
of nature are like rocks in the fields nor that we can assert a finalized "one
one correspondence" between our conceptions and outer reality. Such as
tions from within the "spectator turn" ignore the hermeneutic circle and uti
language that too severely minimizes the human contribution to research.
The "interpretive construal" situates us in a new philosophical landscape. I
contours make it difficult for both the spectator and the rhetorical turn to es
lish permanent settlements. Three important dimensions of these contours su
gest why this is so. Each has been shaped by a more concrete philosophi
appreciation of the human condition as one rooted in praxis.
The first can be formulated this way: inquiries necessarily involve me
tion, but mediation is not construction. The choice between the one-to-one
respondence championed by Weinberg and the social construction favored b
Fish is a false dilemma. Researchers work within a mediational network that
comprises presuppositions, questions deemed significant, data that is to be d
counted as irrelevant, equipment, reasoning, cooperation with some colleagu
competition with others, structuring of experiments. Researchers do not sim
face the world as a collective 20/20 eyeball. Between their desire to underst
and the results of their investigations lie a whole range of intermediate steps t
provide modes of translating nature's puzzling grammars. Such intermediary
stages provide the mediations, steps in between, that have been too often ov
looked by philosophers fixated on subjects directly confronting objects.
The history of science is filled with examples that indicate the requisite r
of mediation. Galileo, watching a chandelier sweeping an arc in a sanctua
used his pulse as a way of timing its periodization (Stewart 1990,28-29). Phy
cists at CERN examining computer screens rather than subatomic particles d
rectly, provide a more complex case. In a world that recognizes the promine
of chaos, such mediations can have important consequences, as the mathemat
cian Ian Stewart has noted.

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48 Raymond D. Boisvert

On several occasions we've run into a curious feature of chaotic dynamics:


the same problem, run on different makes of computer leads to different an
swers-There's a paper in the literature that solves a chaotic system numeri
cally on two different supercomputers to an accuracy of fifty decimal places
or so. Because the two computers have slightly different operating systems,
they handle numerical calculations in slightly different ways?and they're soon
giving totally different answers. (287)15

The interpretive construal makes it almost impossible to ignore the role of


mediation. Interpreters, wanting to understand signs, must turn to analogues, to
instrumentation, to accepted hypotheses, and to other mediating devices. Social
constructionists are on to something. Human creativity is involved in all inquir
ies. But mediation is not construction. The most defensible truths about nature
and her structures are evoked as the result of inventive procedures. The con
straints of external circumstances, so emphasized by Sokal and Weinberg, can
not be dismissed in pursuit of an exaggerated emphasis on the creative, active,
culturally conditioned dimensions of investigation.
This leads us to a second important modification: Truth is trust. A philo
sophical realist, asking "What is truth?" tends to follow the Aristotelian tradition's
answer in terms of correspondence with reality. A skeptic, however, will ask
how we come to accept truth claims. The annoying question, "But how do you
know there is correspondence, do you have a view outside of time/space?" can
never be answered to the skeptic's satisfaction. The pragmatist will work at
holding on to both questions. Within that more difficult context, an attempt to
formulate a satisfactory understanding of truth will be helped by a consideration
of its etymological roots. The term is associated with troth from which we get
words such as betrothed, truce, and trust. The "truth" then becomes whatever is
deemed worthy of firm and steadfast commitment.
James put it this way: "When a moment in our experience, of any kind what
ever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we
dip by that thought's guidance into the particulars of experience again and make
advantageous connexion with them" ([1907] 1981, 94). In other words, truths
are those beliefs in which we have confidence, so much confidence that we rely
on them in our dealings with things. This is as much the case when a tourist buys
a Portuguese dictionary in preparation for a trip to Brazil as it was for James
Joule whose experiments were guided by the belief that the older "caloric" theory
of heat was false, and the newer kinetic-molecular theory was true.
Truth as trust also helps the pragmatist make sense of scientific practice in
two other ways. First, it accounts well for choices made that then direct the
practice of research. Second, it allows for a generous flexibility in determining
truth claims for different sorts of studies.
(1) Choice, for pragmatists, goes all the way down. Decision, selection, and
the accompanying risk(s) are always factors in determining the direction and
the outcome of inquiries. Within the epistemological construal, choice was not

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Sokal'sHoax 49

thought to go all the way down. There was always a "foundation," sense dat
innate ideas, atomic facts, that was given directly to the knowing subject.
Pragmatism accepts no such foundations. At every level of inquiry, inste
of foundational "givens," there are "takens," items selected out of a backgro
for specific purposes. For example, units of measurement, the kilogram, th
meter, or the mile do not simply present themselves as "given" already arran
data signaling us to use them as foundational absolutes. These are "taken
selected as appropriate units of measurement. Potential energy is determined
multiplying weight by height above sea level. But sea level is not the only p
sible constant that could be used in this formula. It has been selected, "take
as a way of aiding mechanical calculations. Other options can be chosen;
bottom of Death Valley is one, but as Martin and Inge Goldstein point out in
Refrigerator and the Universe, scientists "rarely do so" (1995,23). Such "take
avoid the traditional bifurcation into objectivity versus invention. The data
real, but do not come already carved out and marked as foundational apart fr
human intervention.
(2) Without the foundation that guarantees apodictic certitude, pragmati
makes do with a variable scale of justification before trusting in claims. It lea
to live with the multiple in-between as opposed to the binary yes and no of
epistemological construal. Because there are many sorts of inquiries, and
cause there are numerous levels of successful translating schemes, varying
grees of commitment are called for. Within the sciences themselves, there
be differences between, say, vulcanology, oceanography, primatology, entom
ogy, genetics, and astronomy. In some subject areas, where the combination
empirical evidence, coherence of interrelated hypotheses, and mathematical p
cision are high, only minimally risky commitments need to be made. Trust
based on a case made to a high degree of probability. In other areas, where
same combination of mathematical precision, predictive power, and coalesce
of hypotheses is not as formidable, the risk involved in commitment will gro
This situation is, once again, analogous with that of the translator. Dougl
Hofstadter, whose latest book is a wonderful reflection on translation, poin
out the different levels of risk involved in various sorts of translations. At o
end, the channels of communication are relatively free of noise and translati
can even be undertaken by machines. But, such translations require high lev
of what might be called purification, careful control of what is written and
it is written. "One of the strangest techniques for reducing unpredictability?
a very standard one?is to severely limit not only the domain of discourse b
also the style of writing." Technical writers are told to write in "Multinatio
Customized English" (MCE). This "dialect" of English has been developed
have an absolute minimum of ambiguity and thus to pose as few problems a
possible to a machine that knows absolutely nothing about what it is transla
ing" (1997, 502). At the other end of the translating spectrum is the individu
hoping to render Dante into English. Here the full, ambiguous, complexity

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50 Raymond D. Boisvert

the original cannot be purified, and the risks taken by the translator increase
exponentially.
A similar situation holds in the sciences and in other inquiries. Precision will
be higher and risk lower in those fields most amenable to purification, context
stripping, and experimental control. In turn, the proportion of precision and risk
will shift where such purification, context stripping, and experimental control
are less possible. One would expect less certainty in primatology and meteorol
ogy than in chemistry and physics. This is not to say that primatology and me
teorology are less valid than chemistry and physics, but only that levels of pre
cision must be considered in relation to the type of study undertaken.
A recent book on the contemporary status of science suggests that even phys
ics, traditionally considered to be among the areas most secure with regard to
conclusions, may be entering a new phase. It may be coming full circle, from
theories requiring minimal acts of trust, because of ample evidential coales
cence, to the present fascination with superstring theory, which even its sup
porters concede may not admit of testability. The result is a higher level of risk
in assenting to hypotheses. David Lindley, a physicist turned science writer, is
willing to risk overstatement in making an important point. Physics, he says, is
transforming itself into aesthetics: "Physicists working on superstring theory,
Lindley contended, were no longer doing physics because their theories could
never be validated by experiments, but only by subjective criteria, such as el
egance and beauty. Particle physics, Lindley concluded, was in danger of be
coming a branch of esthetics" (Horgan 1996, 70). Even if we grant the hyper
bolic nature of this utterance, it is still significant in pointing to the importance
of trust as commitment to certain conjectures over others, even in physics.
The philosophical anthropology described and explained by pragmatism is
one in which humans must recognize and accept their role as arbiters, as indi
viduals who have to judge based on the best evidence as determined by the
nature, aims, and methods of the various inquiries. Absolute certitude, based on
some sort of foundation that provides apodicticity is a limited ideal in episte
mology and a dangerous one in politics. This inescapable condition of being
arbiters can, it is true, be mistaken for arbitrariness or "construction" guided
solely by interests and cultural conditioning. Stephen Jay Gould has exposed
one such area, that of intelligence measurement, in his The Mismeasure of Man
(1981). Even the presence of arbitrariness, though, does not necessitate blanket
condemnations based on a supposed direct one-to-one correspondence between
things and theories. A more ample reaction, as is the case with Gould, will make
allowances for real change resulting from the back-and-forth activities between
researchers and their subject matters.
The third and final ramification I wish to discuss is a corollary of the previous
one: All inquiries have a singular aim, the production of belief We no longer
need to understand the field of knowing as divided between necessary truths and
mere opinion, as suggested by the epistemological construal. In place of this

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Sokal's Hoax 51

dualism, pragmatism follows Peirce's enunciation, in "How to Make our Ideas


Clear," that science directs itself at nothing else than the "production of belief
(1955, 28). When this claim is taken seriously, it means, in turn, that there is no
sharp separation in kind between the production of belief in the sciences, history,
archaeology, linguistics, or literary criticism. Instead of the rigid bifurcation be
tween knowing as absolute and opinion as mere speculation, the interpretive
construal emphasizes varying contexts for justifying acceptance of belief.
All inquiries, if we take the interpretive construal and the dialogical turn seri
ously, involve risk, choice, commitment. Absolute certainty is the exception, if it
is possible at all. The steadfastness of our commitments depends on diverse fac
tors that lead us to posit "beliefs" as the results of mediational activities. Long
before E. O. Wilson used the word as the title of a book, Stephen Jay Gould had
retrieved consilience and used it to defend the validity of research in paleontol
ogy. The term, which means "jumping together," designates "the confidence gained
when many independent sources 'conspire' to indicate a particular historical pat
tern" (Gould 1989, 282). Gould's use of the word confidence is especially signifi
cant here. After awhile, the evidence is such that we have good reason to trust in
its validity. We have, in other words, engaged in the production of belief.
"Good reasoning," Peirce asserts, does not resemble a chain, but rather a
cable "whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently nu
merous and intimately connected" (1955, 58-59). Gould puts it this way: "We
search for repeated pattern, shown by evidence so abundant and so diverse that
no other coordinating interpretation could stand, even though any item, taken
separately, would not provide conclusive proof (Gould 1989, 282). Adding
strands to the cable is the way to strengthen the hypothesis, whether it is in
chemistry, astronomy, archaeology, or history. What inquirers seek to produce
in each case is warranted belief. The historian, the sociologist, the linguist, and
the entomologist must all make their cases based on their mediational environ
ments. Epistemologically, the interesting difference is not that some follow a
"scientific method" that gives rigid certainties while others do not. Each study
seeks to produce beliefs by weaving together a strong cable of consilient evi
dence. The important differences involve the degree of context stripping and
experimental control available within the various subject areas.

4. The Rhymes of the Universe

The dialogical turn, with its emphasis on listening and translation, has been pe
ripheral but present in the history of thought. If we consider Plato as the father of
optical metaphors, and the Sophists as ancestors of the rhetorical turn, we might
consider Socrates as the consummate listener in the tradition. Scientists, too,
have availed themselves of metaphors indicating that the world speaks. The math

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52 Raymond D. Boisvert

ematician Robert Osserman entitled a book The Poetry of the Universe. Trinh
Xuan Thuan, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, called his similar ex
ploration The Secret Melody.16 Barbara McClintock ascribes her success to hav
ing the patience to "hear what the material has to say" (Keller 1983, 198).
It is with a poet, though, that I would like to conclude. To celebrate the fiftieth
birthday of Louis Agassiz, the Swiss born Harvard naturalist, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow produced a work that included the following two stanzas:

And he wandered away and away


with Nature, the dear old nurse,
who sang to him night and day
the rhymes of the universe.

And whenever the way seemed long,


or his heart began to fail,
she would sing a more wonderful song,
Or tell a more marvellous tale.
(Longfellow 1882, 199)

Longfellow is overly sanguine about the common language shared by Nature


and Agassiz. He pays too little attention to the need for translating what are
always foreign languages spoken by nature. But his tribute does at least situate
him firmly within the dialogical turn. The world, pace Rorty, does speak. We
gain from our dialogues with it by translating its rhymes and transcribing its
songs.

Notes
1. "Alas, that Derrida should hear his name used as a sign of non-sense and resistance to
gravity! Alas, that something as serious as 'deconstruction' would come to do service for such
silliness!" (Caputo 1997, 73).
2. Norman Levitt, a mathematician and co-author of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left
and its Quarrel with Science.
3. "Are there balls and strikes in the world? Yes. Are there balls and strikes in nature (if by
nature you understand physical reality independent of human actors)? No. Are balls and strikes
socially constructed? Yes" (Fish 1996). A co-editor of Social Text, Andrew Ross offered in his
defense a considerably mitigated version of social construction. It would be a shame, he asserted,
if the controversy over Sokal's essay distracted from the wider intellectual position of his journal,
"that scientific knowledge is affected by social and cultural conditions and is not a version of some
universal truth that is the same in all times and places" (Scott 1996, 22).
4. Fish's example did not impress Jack Caputo from the hermeneutic camp either: "The
disanalogy, if I may weigh in on this dispute, between the rules of baseball and the law of gravity
seems to me to outweigh the analogy" (Caputo 1997, 72-73, n. 2). However, several scientists
have voiced views that can provide support for the Fish-type position. Steven J. Gould, for ex
ample, returns over and over again to the theme that social considerations affect the way in which
scientists view data, most prominently in his The Mismeasure of Man (1981). It could be argued,
though, that in this book, Gould is dealing with an inherently "soft" area especially prone to ideo
logical distortion, intelligence testing. But there is testimony from the "harder" sciences as well.
Niels Bohr believed that we could not provide, in human language, the descriptions of quantum

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Sokal's Hoax 53

processes as they really are: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum de
scription" (in Coveney 1990, 125). In other words, the efficacy of quantum calculations is ac
cepted while leaving in suspense whether our formulations mirror what objective reality is actually
like. Steven Hawking simply dismisses concerns about whether scientific theories have a one-to
one correspondence with reality: "If you take a positivist position, as I do, questions about reality
do not have any meaning" (in Coveney 1990, 145).
5. Richard Bernstein, drawing on several of these strands, has provided important clues for
moving beyond the traditional opposition of objectivism and relativism. See Beyond Objectivism
and Relativism (1988).
6. After much success in the early decades of this century, pragmatism fell into disfavor after
the Second World War. The emigrant population finding refuge in the United States brought with it
Vienna Circle positivism, German phenomenology, and French existentialism. The vigor with which
these were embraced was directly proportional to the speed with which American pragmatism was
abandoned. Since the 1970s, though, there have been signs of a revival. Richard Rorty and Hilary
Putnam have lent their considerable prestige to the pragmatist effort. A number of important stud
ies of American pragmatists, especially Dewey, have appeared in the last decade. Pragmatism is
even beginning to have an impact abroad. In 1997, three books appeared in Italian: Rosa Calcaterra's
// Pragmatismo Americano, Nadia Urbinati's Individualismo democratico. Emerson, Dewey e la
cultura politica democratica, and Mario Alcaro's John Dewey: Scienza, prassi, democrazia. From
scholars in Great Britain have come Kathleen Wheeler's Romanticism, Pragmatism, and
Deconstruction (1993) and Matthew Festenstein's Pragmatism and Political Theory (1997).
7. A related pathology, the "Cartesian anxiety" has been identified by Richard Bernstein (1988,
16-20).
8. "In those accounts usually referred to as the 'strong program' in the sociology of science,
science is understood as little more than rhetoric. The acceptance of a truth by scientists is not the
result of a clever experiment or the marshaling of convincing data; instead, it is the end product of
an inexhaustible rhetorical campaign, in which the winners use every available strategy to brow
beat the losers.. . . What is coming to be called the 'rhetorical turn' uses the techniques of rhetoric
to understand social phenomena, just as a previous generation of sociologists used the techniques
of science" (Wolfe 1993, 138).
9. Cp. "But I shall end this first chapter by going back to the claim, which has been central to
what I have been saying, that the world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between
alternative metaphors, that we can only compare languages or metaphors with one another, not
with something beyond language called 'fact.'" Dropping the idea of languages as representations
leads in a particular direction for Rorty: "Only if we do that can we fully accept the argument I
offered earlier?the argument that since truth is a property of sentences, since vocabularies are
made by human beings, so are truths. For as long as we think that 'the world' names something we
ought to respect as well as cope with, something personlike in that it has a preferred description of
itself, we shall insist that any philosophical account of truth save the 'intuition' that truth is 'out
there'" (Rorty 1989, 20, 21).
10. See two books in particular on this "interpretive" move in contemporary philosophy, those
by Hiley (1991) and Rabinow and Sullivan (1979).
11. The convergence between Dewey and Heidegger has been signaled by William Barrett in a
text explaining Heidegger's philosophy: "Man is thus not fundamentally a consciousness aware of
objects. Before this, deeper than this, he is a being enmeshed in the world with its multiple possi
bilities in the total context of which he forges ideas as projects for administering things and shap
ing his own life. (The similarity here to certain strains in the pragmatism of William James and
John Dewey is striking; the eventual differences, however, between Heidegger and these two great
pragmatists are just as striking and perhaps even more significant)" (1964, 150). On Dewey and
Wittgenstein, Ralph Sleeper had the following to say: "Moreover, like Wittgenstein, Dewey is not
rejecting what can be learned from the isomorphism, or operational correspondence, between the
procedures of pure mathematics and those of the natural sciences. Indeed, what both Wittgenstein
and Dewey are after is a clearer conception of the relation between purely symbolic uninterpreted
systems of reasoning and the interpreted systems of the experimental sciences" (1986, 157).

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54 Raymond D. Boisvert

12. This formulation is taken from Descartes (see the Meditations, par. 63). William James
typifies the pragmatist alternative with his emphasis on the purposive nature of human experience
in the Principles of Psychology: "This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to
meanings, has no significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with partial
purposes and private ends" (James [1890] 1950, 482).
13. "Philosophy, like all forms of reflective analysis, takes us away, for the time being, from
the things had in primary experience as they directly act and are acted upon, used and enjoyed"
(Dewey [1925] 1981,26).
14. The art of translation, its wonders, techniques, difficulties, and frustrations are beautifully
described in Douglas Hofstadter's new book, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of
Language (1997).
15. On the most basic level, the very gathering of data requires carefully constructed mediating
instrumentalities. Stewart describes one such mediating device associated with an experiment to
determine whether mathematically predicted strange attractors are actually present in the Taylor
Couette flow: "First, the cylinders must be precision-machined to very fine tolerances, and the
motor and bearings that rotate them must be as vibration-free as possible. Otherwise the vibrations
can show up in the observations, be processed by the computer along with the real signal, and spoil
the resulting phase portrait. Then both cylinder and laser must be mounted on an optical bench?a
slab of marble about two metres long by half a metre wide, and five centimetres thick. This makes
sure the laser beam is accurately aligned, and stays aligned throughout the experiment. Tempera
ture variations can change the flow of the fluid sufficiently to destroy any chance of finding a
strange attractor in the phase space reconstruction. To prevent this, the cylinders are encased in a
glass-sided box, and the temperature within the box is kept constant to within a hundredth of a
degree. The apparatus is sensitive to small changes in fluid velocity, which unfortunately means
that it's also sensitive to tiny vibrations?the tea lady walking past with her trolley, a car parking
outside. So the whole thing, marble slab and all, sits on a block of foam rubber half a metre thick,
to damp out any vibrations caused by outside agencies. Finally the data must be recorded and
processed. Electronic equipment detects the frequency changes in the laser beam, converts them to
digital form, and sends them to the computer" (1990, 310-11).
16. "Nature is by no means silent. Like some distant orchestra, it tantalizes us with individual
notes and fragments of music. But it is not willing to hand everything to us on a plate. The melody
linking the individual fragments of music is missing. The overall theme is hidden. Somehow we
have to unravel the secrets of that hidden melody, so that we can listen to the composition in all its
glory" (Thuan 1995, 6). The science writer Natalie Angier employs the metaphor of a world that
speaks in the introduction to her The Beauty of the Beastly : "Every single story that nature tells is
gorgeous. She is the original Scheherazade, always with one more surprise to shake from her
sleeve" (1995, xi).

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