Received: from mx05.globecomm.net (mx05.globecomm.net [206.253.129.28]) by email.mcmail.com (9.9.9/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA06159 for ; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 00:58:16 +0100 (BST) Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu (maelstrom.stjohns.edu [149.68.1.24]) by mx05.globecomm.net (8.8.8/8.8.0) with ESMTP id TAA29398 for ; Wed, 5 Aug 1998 19:58:23 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199808052358.TAA29398@mx05.globecomm.net> Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu by maelstrom.stjohns.edu (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <0.3389B889@maelstrom.stjohns.edu>; Wed, 5 Aug 1998 17:30:28 -1300 Date: Wed, 5 Aug 1998 17:30:27 -0400 From: "L-Soft list server at St. John's University (1.8c)" Subject: File: "SCI-CULT LOG9807" To: Ian Pitchford X-UIDL: 2ebe63ac3d597826bf709f7b148a51b9 X-PMFLAGS: 33554560 0 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 00:33:28 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Review of "Impostures Intellectuelles" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE =20 BOOK REVIEW =20 _________________________________________________________________ =20 IMPOSTURES INTELLECTUELLES by Alain Sokal and Jean Bricmont Available to purchase from Amazon.com Jacob, Paris, 1998, 276 pages, 140fr., ISBN 2 7381 0503 3 _________________________________________________________________ =20 Reviewed by Kevin Mulligan, Geneva, Switzerland _________________________________________________________________ =20 Encouraged by the success of Sokal's masterly and now notorious experiment, the publication in Social Text of a parody of postmodern thought (see Paul Boghossian's description and discussion in TLS 13/12/96), Sokal and Bricmont have undertaken a much more thorough exercise in intellectual and moral hygiene. Dismayed by postmodernism's popularity, especially in North America, they concentrate on two aspects of the phenomenon: first, the extraordinary level of misuse of science and scientific terminology in recent Parisian thought; second, relativistic currents in analytic philosophy. Their nosology of Parisian thought addresses a bewildering variety of symptoms: Lacan's claim that elementary topological structures explain the structure of mental illness; Irigaray's suggestion that the equation E =3D mc2 might be sexed ("sexu=E9e"); Baudrillard's assertion that In the Euclidean space of history, the quickest path from one point to another is a straight line, that of Progress and Democracy. But this holds only of the linear space of the Enlightenment. In ours, the non-Euclidean space of the end of the century, an evil curvature invincibly diverts all trajectories. =20 Then there is Deleuze and Guattari on the nature of philosophy. They write that the first difference between philosophy and science is to be found in their respective attitudes towards chaos. Chaos ...is defined less by its disorder than by the infinite speed with which every form which opens up in it is dissipated. It is an emptiness which is not a nothingness but something virtual, containing all possible particles and extracting all possible forms which arise and immediately disappear, without consistency, without reference, without repercussions. It is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance. Philosophy asks how to maintain infinite speeds whilst gaining in consistency by giving a knowledge which is peculiar to the virtual. =20 R=E9gis Debray on the nature of society: The statement of the "secret" of collective misfortunes, that is to say, of the a priori condition of all political history, past, present and to come, is to be found in a few words, simple and childish...This secret has the form of a logical law, a generalization of G=F6del's theorem: there is no organized system without closure, and no system can be closed with the help only of the elements belonging to the system... =20 And then, in his discussion of what he generously calls the "principle of G=F6del-Debray," there is Michel Serres' claim that R=E9gis Debray applies to social groups or finds in them the theorem of incompleteness, which holds for formal systems, and shows that societies only organize themselves on the express condition that they are founded on something other than themselves, external to their definition or boundary. They cannot be self-sufficient. He calls this foundation religious. By way of G=F6del he completes Bergson. =20 Sokal and Bricmont quote a large number of claims in this vein--by Kristeva, Latour and Virilio in addition to Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray and many others who are discussed in a more cursory fashion. They describe their contexts, document their view that the passages they quote are not atypical and show how the different claims fit into their wide-ranging taxonomy of cavalier approaches to science. This involves giving rapid and lucid explanations of what a number of different expressions in physics and mathematics actually mean, thus enabling the reader to make up his own mind about where the texts dealt with belong on the continuum between honest attempts to further knowledge and culpable conceptual insouciance. When Lacan confuses irrational and imaginary numbers, when Kristeva misunderstands the axiom of choice, we are not, the argument goes, to think that the confusions are isolated; nor that there are an awful lot of them. Rather, the claim is that the confusions and parade of ill-understood scientific terminology or superficial erudition are designed to impress, and are part and parcel of an enterprise which is indifferent to the real content of the concepts employed. To use a phrase due to Debray, in a text subsequent to that quoted above, "G=F6delity is an illness that has become widespread." And, one might add, the family of illnesses to which G=F6delity or G=F6del-mania belong= s has also grown. To many a topic in physics, logic and mathematics there now corresponds a distinct Parisian illness which is parasitic on the terminology peculiar to the topic. Its main symptom is the tendency to regurgitate portions of the relevant jargon in more or less random ways. =20 Well aware that postmodernism in the US also often draws on what are felt to be congenial developments within analytic philosophy of science, Sokal and Bricmont interrupt their sottisier to provide a long critique of the cognitive relativisms encouraged by Kuhn and Feyerabend, of their roots in Popper's (non-relativistic) philosophy of science and of the relativisms they detect in recent sociology of science. Their own epistemology is refreshingly old-fashioned, although by no means popular today with most of their philosophical allies. We are, they hold, directly aware only of our own sensations and infer from these to the existence of an external world which explains better than anything else the regularities of our experience. Similarly, the main reason for believing in the truth of science is that it explains the coherence of our experience. Rationality in science and in everyday life are of the same general type; the scientist functions like a detective and there is as little reason to be a relativist about the results in one case as in the other. They note that philosophical relativism about factual propositions--the view that the validity of such propositions is relative to an individual or group--contradicts the conception scientists have of their activities. One philosophical response to this is to question the relevance of this or any other philosophical conviction to scientific activity. But Sokal and Bricmont provide a number of telling anecdotes about the extent to which relativistic platitudes have now seeped into the culture at large which suggest that the stock philosophical views about the relations between science, common sense and philosophy, in particular about the continuities and discontinuities between these, need rethinking. =20 What is the relation between Parisian abuses of science and the relativisms defended by analytic philosophers? As far as I can tell, they merely coexist in the "discourses" of contemporary postmodernism. Indeed Sokal and Bricmont stress that their criticisms of the abuses are independent of their critique of relativism. They also mention a fundamental difference between these two components of postmodernism. Relativism has been defended within analytic philosophy, but a recurring feature of the pseudo-scientific verbiage they quote is that it occurs in contexts (and, it is worth adding, in traditions) in which no attempt is made to defend what seems to be said. They note, too, some intermediate cases between these two extremes, such as "subtle" misunderstandings of chaos theory. =20 Sokal and Bricmont do not investigate in any systematic way the relations between the two components of postmodernism on which they concentrate. But they provide a French translation of Sokal's original parody and a commentary thereon which together go some way towards documenting their view of how postmodernism's parts hang together in contemporary thought in the US. In an epilogue they provide some conjectures about how these aspects of postmodernism came about: the failure to distinguish between empiricism and the empirical attitude and between scientism and science; the role of traditional philosophico-literary education; the assumption that only postmodernism can provide a philosophical basis for "the politics of difference;" the possibility that philosophical consumerism and hostility to science have come to be seen in some milieux as easy alternatives to politics. =20 Are their Parisian targets intellectual impostors? Sokal and Bricmont tend to assume that this is at least in part always the case. They attribute to their targets a number of intellectual vices. When they mention the choice between the two hypotheses of conscious fraud and self-deception they claim to be not particularly interested in settling the question. They assume, too, that in one way or another the texts they discuss are supposed to belong to some sort of identifiable theoretical enterprise. Although I think they are right about this, it is by no means obvious that this is so. In their most explicit discussion of this question, their account of Lacan, they point out that admirers of Lacan and of other Parisian thinkers often claim that their texts are contributions neither to science, nor to philosophy nor to literature. In the case of Lacan, Sokal and Bricmont conclude that the genre in question is that of a "secular mysticism" designed to evoke a religious response and, of course, reverent exegesis. =20 The philosophical background to the Parisian texts is what is often called, except on the Continent, Continental Philosophy. If one thing stands out in this large and varied tradition, from its German beginnings in the writings of Dilthey, the later Husserl and Heidegger to its later Gallic transmogrifications, it is the turn away from the conception of philosophy as a theoretical enterprise. The most obvious symptom of this is the relative absence in Continental Philosophy of the traditional theoretical apparatus of elucidations, distinctions, justifications and objections, an absence that also characterizes anglophone "Theory." Furthermore, Continental Philosophy is marked not so much by relativism as by one or another form of hostility to realism. Relativism, after all, is a view about the truth of propositions or theories. But, for those who take Heidegger seriously, whether pure or jumbled together with Freud, semiology or mathematics, the primary locus of truth is not propositions and their ilk at all. I say "hostility" to realism since "antirealism" and idealisms of different stripes, like any philosophical position, can be and have been defended in a properly theoretical fashion. But in Continental Philosophy atheoretical or anti-theoretical modes of writing--in all their unsurveyable variety, writing which is, through and through, expressive, declamatory, allusive, hagiographic, programmatic, metaphorical etc.--are the norm. =20 The institutional background of Continental Philosophy throws some light on the way it is done. The philosophers and thinkers dealt with by Sokal and Bricmont form--together with the small embattled band of French analytic philosophers--almost the whole of contemporary philosophy in France. For by far the greater part of what is called philosophy there is in fact not philosophy at all but rather the history of philosophy. This is in turn connected with the close links in French universities between philosophy and the humanities and thus with the fact that there is so little philosophy of hard science in these and other French institutions. (Of all the French thinkers criticized by Sokal and Bricmont perhaps only Michel Serres and Alan Badiou, who are discussed only in passing, would claim to be philosophers of mathematics.) Even in 1944, Julien Benda noted the widespread French preference for a philosophical method, which is that of literature where it is not that of music. =20 Sokal and Bricmont wisely do not attempt to delve into the background of the abuses they bring into such sharp focus, with one exception. They trace the sad story of Bergson's persistence in misunderstanding the theory of relativity and the continued failure of French and Belgian philosophers to appreciate just how sad a story this is. Bergson was not, they note, a postmodern philosopher. But if Benda is right, Bergson played an important role in teaching French philosophers to do philosophy as if it were literature. =20 Sokal and Bricmont have some predecessors--Julien Benda, Louis Rougier, Jean-Fran=E7ois Revel and Jacques Bouveresse. But their detailed focus on just one aspect of recent French thought is new and has, I suspect, provoked more and more violent reactions than other contributions to the genre. Unsurprisingly, one feature of French responses to their book has been to suggest that they are francophobes. This is particularly cruel since, in spite of their pronounced political correctness, Sokal and Bricmont persist in writing "anglo-saxon" instead of, say, "anglophone," like good francophiles. =20 A more distant predecessor is the Austrian novelist-philosopher Robert Musil who, in 1921, carefully dissected Spengler's casual approach to mathematics and physics in order to lay bare some of the key features of the irrationalisms prominent in German thought at that time. Musil reflected at length on the relations between philosophy as a theoretical enterprise and as a nontheoretical enterprise and often argued that, although the latter is as necessary as the former, it should not fall theoretically short of the former. Where Sokal and Bricmont betray their exasperation with writers who simply could not be bothered even to consult scientific popularizations, Musil suggests that the important thing is to "go to the end of the trampoline of science before jumping off." =20 Sokal and Bricmont are distressed by the popularity of postmodernism on the left in the US. They might take comfort from the fact that when Musil noted the connections before the Second World War between irrationalist philosophies and their attitude towards science, on the one hand, and politics and styles of life, on the other hand, the irrationalisms he attacked, such as that of Spengler, were more often to be found on the right than on the left. =20 Sokal and Bricmont are, by and large, content to accuse most of their Parisian targets of impostures and deliberate obscurantism. They do not consider the more severe verdict envisaged by Russell in a passage they quote in which Russell predicted that to give up the conception of truth as something which depends on facts largely beyond our control would be to take a step down the road which leads to a sort of madness. Nor the only slightly less severe diagnosis that Musil might well have envisaged. Of the "higher, pretentious form of stupidity," Musil said in 1937 that it ...is not so much lack of intelligence as failure of intelligence for the reason that it presumes to accomplishments to which it has no right... This higher stupidity is the real disease of culture... and to describe it is an almost infinite task. It reaches into the highest intellectual sphere [Geistigkeit]... Years ago I wrote about this form of stupidity that "there is absolutely no significant idea that stupidity would not know how to apply; stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage." The stupidity this addresses is... a dangerous disease of the mind. _________________________________________________________________ =20 Copyright =A9 1998, Kevin Mulligan Kevin Mulligan is Professor of Analytic Philosophy in the University of Geneva. =20 This review was first published in the Times Literary Supplement on May 1, 1998. It was reproduced in naturalSCIENCE on May 23, 1998. =20 ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 00:35:28 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: "Left Conservatism" conference (part 1) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Left Conservatism: A Conference Report =20 Matt Wray =20 Bad Subjects, Issue #37 March 1998 =20 Copyright (c) 1998 by Matt Wray. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of Bad Subjects. ___________________________________ =20 Left Conservatism: A Workshop Saturday, January 31, 1998 Panelists: Jonathan Arac, Paul Bov=E9, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Joseph Buttigieg. Moderator & Convenor: Chris Connery =20 Stepping into the Ring =20 "'Left Conservatism' or Left Factionalism? Who invented this strange and wondrous new term, 'Left Conservatism'? And why have they done so?" So the flyer began. Black ink on glowing neon red paper, it had been thrust into my path by a bespectacled graduate student just as I crossed into the lecture hall where the Left Conservatism conference was getting underway. "Counterprogram?" he offered, although his hushed voice carried none of the usual rising intonations which signal a question--it was more of a flat statement of fact, a noncommittal if slightly conspiratorial declaration. (Suddenly, I felt like I was being offered drugs by some suspicious looking dude in the park. I hesitated, but only for a split second. This shit looked too good to pass up!) =20 Despite the bloody hue of the paper and the shrill tenor of alarm carried by its headline, the flyer began innocently and calmly enough. I was happy to see the questions stated plainly and pointedly, for they seemed to cut directly to the issues at hand. The "counterprogram," the two-page, single-spaced document I now held in my hand, was written, produced and signed by sixteen graduate students drawn from UC Santa Cruz's (UCSC) History of Consciousness, Sociology and Anthropology departments. It seemed well thought out, if somewhat hastily written. But it did ask the important questions: Where had this term come from and why was it circulating now? In large part, these were the very questions which impelled me to make the short drive from San Francisco down to UCSC that morning. The email and snail mail flyers which had advertised the conference had also been, it seemed to me, somewhat alarmist and openly aggressive: =20 "A specter is haunting U.S. intellectual life: the specter of Left Conservatism. Within academia and without, in events such as the Sokal affair, in the anti-theory polemics in The Nation and the Socialist Review, in work by authors such as Katha Pollit, Alan Sokal, and Barbara Ehrenreich, there is evidence of a phenomenon that might properly be labeled Left Conservativism: that is, an attack by "real" leftists on those portrayed as theory-mongering, hyper-professional, obscurantist pseudo-leftists. Left Conservatism's hostility to the anti-foundationalist theoretical work of the 1980s and 1990s shares features with left opposition to the radical anti-rationalist politics of the 1960s. The current polemics bring to the fore long unresolved questions about how the left conceives the nature and stakes of critical work, over the past fifty years and into the future." =20 This really did seem a bit over the top--hyperbolic to the point of parody. But maybe it was just good advertising copy, designed to spark interest in the event. Maybe Chris Connery, the moderator and convenor who, through his tenure as director of the Center for Cultural Studies at UCSC (arguably the most internationally famous and widely known and respected center for Cultural Studies in the US) had invited the panelists, wrote the flyer that way because he wanted to fill the hall. Maybe he felt he needed to provoke his readers a bit, since most of us are by now are quite bored with the tedious aftermath of the Science Wars, the Sokal affair, and the evolutionary biology vs. cultural studies debacle. How else to breath life into a tired, jejune and sterile debate, except by raising the specter of "haunting specters"? =20 But of course the point of the conference and of both the program and the counterprogram was that the debate was far from tired and worn out--it has, it seems, only just begun. Or better, it has just rekindled itself. It is impossible to say definitively when this latest battle began--does it date back to the raging debates of British Marxist historiographers of the old New Left, when, in the pages of The History Workshop Journal, historian E.P. Thompson slammed the new cultural theorists for "overtheoreticism?" Or did Alan Sokal fire the first shot? Or was it the Critics of Science and Empiricism like Donna Haraway and some of the editors of Social Text? Regardless, there seems to be agreement on both sides that this is turning out to be another episode in the periodic internecine war that the Left has always had with itself. =20 So where exactly did this latest specter of 'Left Conservatism' come from? In his opening remarks, Chris Connery credited Paul Bov=E9 with inventing the term a few years ago. Bov=E9, a professor of English from University of Pittsburgh, had apparently dropped the phrase in reference to liberal philosopher Richard Rorty, cultural studies assassin Alan Sokal, and the poetry editor of The Nation. Connery, overhearing the remark, went on to use the phrase and expand and extend the reference to include other writers at The Nation, including left feminist critics Katha Pollit and Barbara Ehrenreich (a usage of the term both Butler and Wendy Brown took exception to in their remarks) and even to Michael Moore. Left Conservatism, in Connery's formulation, is supposedly marked by a belief (always unspoken) in unmediated access to reality (empiricism); a pragmatic belief in the transparency of language, and a desire for some kind of foundational truth(s) upon which to build political identities, broad-based social movements, and to reinvigorate public, democratic discourse. Opposed to Left Conservatism, Connery argues, is the anti-foundationalism of poststructuralist intellectuals, who, like Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, reject all claims to philosophical essences and who are primarily concerned to interrogate the linguistic and epistemological preconditions under which certain political ideas and political identities come to be regarded as "true," "necessary, " or even as "useful." =20 In some ways, this seems like a fair characterization of the debate, since it is equally unfair to both sides. The Left Conservatist types are not as anti-theoretical as Connery would have us believe, nor are the forces of poststructuralism unconcerned or ignorant of immediate political contexts and issues. =20 In what follows I want to offer a brief summary of the remarks offered by each of the panelists (excepting for the moment the brief but interesting remarks of Joseph Buttigieg, a Gramsci scholar who seemed oddly out of place and out of step with the rest of the panelists). It is tempting to try to imagine how to incorporate all their remarks into a larger, more coherent anti-Left Conservatist position, but that would, I suppose, be a somewhat too obvious foundationalist move, so I won't make it! Rather than attempt any grand synthesis of their thoughts, I want to move on to a discussion of what wasn't discussed at the conference and what might have been, and why I think that the real casualties of this particular battle in the academic Left will be the younger generation of scholar/activists (myself included) who will be left to reconstruct a notion of Left politics long after the warriors of poststructuralism and Left Conservatism retire to their respective Valhallas of tenured deadwood. =20 Paul Bov=E9 -- Enter the conversation or change the subject? =20 Bov=E9's talk focused on North American philosophers Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor. Both present interesting case studies for the present debate because they are known to be both anti-foundationalist and prominent figures on the liberal Left. And both at times have criticized poststructuralists for their obscure theories and difficult if not impenetrable prose. That is, both Rorty and Taylor would seem to be simultaneously poststructuralist and Left Conservatist. =20 Bov=E9 tackles Rorty and Taylor by arguing that they are not as thoroughly anti-foundationalist as they claim to be. Embedded in their philosophical pragmatism is a narrative of movement towards the types of philosophical language which can create and sustain communities of scientific knowers. This movement, Bov=E9 argues, can only really be understood as a kind of evolutionary development of language, as a kind of progress towards a state where secular knowledges freely compete for truth status in the arena of rationality. Of course, this notion of progress is, in Bov=E9's eyes, a foundationalist myth, a modernist metanarrative that we have believed for far too long. And it undercuts Rorty and Taylor's claims to be anti-foundationalist--their foundation is tied to the disciplinary concerns of an Anglophone philosophical tradition, one which Foucault was implicitly and, at times, explicitly critical of. In Bov=E9's punning phrase, Foucault was interested not so much in entering that particular philosophical conversation--instead, he wanted to change the subject (both the subject of the conversation and the notion of subjectivity). =20 With his talk, Bov=E9 tried to open up the fight on the philosophical front, dragging Rorty and Taylor into the ring and subjecting their texts to poststructuralist rigor in the same fashion that they have subjected Foucault to their rigorous analytic pragmatism. Their claims to anti-foundationalism are found wanting and this, Bov=E9 states, undercuts their arguments against poststructuralist theory. Of course, one could argue that Bov=E9's fantasy of a text purged of all foundationalisms is as unattainable as the pragmatist's dream of a philosophical statement purified of all non-analytical categories. Where does this leave us? ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 00:36:27 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: "Left Conservatism" conference II MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE =20 Judith Butler -- Remarx on Engels and Sex =20 Judith Butler, who is a professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and is perhaps best known for her book, Gender Trouble, began her comments by pointing out that anti-foundationalism can neither secure nor destroy politics (or any given political position). This is, in fact, precisely the point of anti-foundationalist critique, that nothing, including anti-foundationalism, can serve as a firm and stable foundation for building politics or political identity. She went on to say that the point of deconstruction (one of the main methodologies of anti-foundationalists) is not to eliminate categories of thought or being, but to interrogate them. When we do so, she argued, paraphrasing from Spivak, we are inquiring about categories we absolutely cannot do without, since the very language of our inquiry depends upon the categories we are attempting to interrogate. =20 Butler went on to identify what she feels are the two complaints most often leveled against postmodernism: =20 1. Marxism has been reduced to cultural politics. This is, in a nutshell, the "Cultural Studies sucks" argument. In this line of complaint, culture has replaced economics (understood here as the struggle over resources and the processes of production) and politics (understood here as the struggle over the control of State power) as the proper realm of struggle. This has led, the plaintiffs say, to excesses of discourse analysis which completely miss the material. =20 2. New social movements have been too concerned with the cultural domain. This has resulted in increased factionalism, seen chiefly in the rise of identity politics and identitarian movements and in the gradual disappearance of the common goals, ideals, and language which once gave (some) unity to the Left. This complaint is usually accompanied by a call to return to a mode of economic and materialist analysis, or as Butler dismissively termed it, "an anachronistic materialism as the basis for a reinvigorated Left orthodoxy." =20 Butler takes up these complaints as they appear in the work of feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser, (who, Butler was at pains to say, is not a Left Conservatist!). While Fraser has written that identity politics and political correctness are little more than derogatory slurs for feminism, anti-racism and anti-heterosexism, she has also located the struggle of gays and lesbians strictly in the realm of a struggle over cultural recognition. That is, Fraser identities gay and lesbian politics not as a struggle for material equality, but as a struggle for full inclusion in a pluralist, democracy. =20 Butler countered Fraser by citing Engels' classic text on the origins of the Family, the State and Private Property, a nineteenth century text which places the heterosexual family at the heart of the system which reproduces (both in the biological and social senses of the word) capitalist labor and capitalist property rights. Butler claims that, contrary to Fraser, Engel's insight places the politics of sexuality directly at the heart of any Left agenda for social change and social and material equity. =20 Butler has managed to take on the "anachronistic materialism" of Fraser et al. But despite the brilliance of her prose and her talent for terse, ironic epigrams ("the critique of cultural iconicity is the means by which cultural iconicity is achieved"), Butler's talk left one wondering how one might test her hypothesis. Will changing family structures really affect the sorts of social change that we on the left would like to see? The work of anthropologist Judith Stacey (see her book, Brave New Worlds) is perhaps an example of a recent effort to place these ideas to the test, but Butler seems reluctant to leave the realm of the purely discursive, to abandon the close textual reading for a moment of participant observation. Does merely citing the authority of Engel's lay the question to rest? =20 Wendy Brown -- Conservative Desires =20 Wendy Brown, professor of Women's Studies at UCSC, offered what was perhaps the most conciliatory approach to addressing the poststructuralist/Left Conservatist split. She positioned herself as someone who was deeply ambivalent about the terms of the debate and as someone who understood not only the intellectual stakes involved, but also the affective and libidinal (i.e. the emotional) stakes as well. She spoke of her own conservatism, explaining that her pedagogy had been described more than once as conservative and traditional. She also spoke of her belief in politics as a semi-autonomous realm, one which cannot simply be reduced to the personal--a belief which has apparently garnered her the label of conservative in some circles. In these meandering opening remarks, Brown almost seemed to be saying "Don't take offense at being called a conservative--all of us on the Left have our conservative impulses. At least have the intellectual honesty to admit these moments when you are confronted with them." =20 Brown then went on to offer a definition of Left Conservatism as essentially a reaction to and a refusal of theory. The theoretical insights of poststructuralists include, among others: the decentering of capitalism (or any single force as determinant of social life); the Foucauldian notion of power as everywhere, rather than the old formula of Who? Whom? (i.e., who wields it, whom does it effect?); the abandonment of revolutionary politics; and the emphasis on language--its priority over deeds, words, or social forces. =20 shiny happy people Left Conservatist rhetoric tends to portray poststructuralist rhetoric as "too hard, too dense, and thus insufficiently political." These complaints, Brown remarked, often take the form of nostalgic desire for something imagined to be lost: for a unified social movement instead of the fractious nature of identity politics and new social movements; for historical materialism instead of discourse analysis; for a clearer account of accountability and human agency instead of the complexities and indecipherabilities of the postmodern subject; and a desire to have real working class heroes instead of the deeply ambiguous and flawed heroes we have now. =20 Brown ended her talk by insisting that it is a mistake to conflate academic and political work. What we do in the academy, she claims, is think. To constrain thought to what has immediate political application, is to constrain our imaginations. =20 Left Out or Left Over? =20 I've offered these synopses from my (admittedly sketchy) notes in order to convey some of the tone and rhetorical strategies of the papers. Given more space and time, I would have liked to comment on the many important and insightful remarks which were made by audience members in response to the panelists. The exchanges were numerous and heated and any attempt on my part to capture them faithfully would fall far short. =20 In my judgment, what was not said at the conference is far more telling than what was. There was no real concern expressed for the effects this may be having on the younger generation of Left intellectuals and academics. Many of us were there at the conference, many of us have been following these debates with interest and with a strong sense of investment in the future of the debates. The "Counterprogram" was an expression of concern and maybe even something like a cry for help. Many of us in the younger generation have enormous respect for the intellectual and political work of combatants on both sides of the current debate. Perhaps as a child of divorce, I personalize this debate too much and project too much of my own complexes on this, but really, how is this situation any different from the child who wants the parents to stop fighting and to take some responsibility for parenting--for raising up the next generation, sharing intellectual skills and political organizing tactics in a spirit of love and affection? (Don't tell me it's different because we're all adults, because it's clear that some of the adults are acting like children). There is a pedagogical and political responsibility here to not only pass on the wisdom and learning of the elders, but to help create the kind of community where that wisdom and learning can take root and flourish. =20 In my view, what is needed if this debate is to move forward is the following: =20 1) Crash courses in the intellectual and political history of the Left that has preceded this moment of struggle within the Left and an analysis of the discourses which make up those traditions. What was distressing about the conference was that for all the poststructuralist talk about self-reflexivity, the participants did little by way of contextualizing their own intellectual claims or positioning themselves in relation to specific intellectual traditions. Bov=E9 came closest to making a contribution in this area when he said, in closing, that "post-structuralism is a technical term" that has a complex intellectual history deriving from the philosophy of Husserl and other Continental philosophers. While Bov=E9 is surely right to insist on this, it seemed that few in the audience, including myself, and even fewer in Left circles at large, really have a clue about what this intellectual history is, how it has changed over the past three decades, and how it relates to and shapes the contemporary debates about politics, identity, and culture. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure how many of my professors and graduate student colleagues are equipped with enough training and pedagogy in philosophy to help themselves or others grasp the philosophical nature of the debate). Interesting starting points for this process might be reviewing the events of May 1968, or the 1970s debates of the British New Left over Althusser and structural Marxism, or the more recent debates over Deconstruction within the North American Left in the late 1970s and 80s. =20 2) A fuller analysis of the ways these intellectual fault lines within the Left are contributing to the ascendancy of the Right and the continued rise of market forces in university life. David Noble's recent article in The Monthly Review on the commodification of education in the university is a perfect example of the kind of analysis that was largely missing from the conference (To be fair, both Chris Connery and Paul Bov=E9 touched briefly on this issue in their remarks). There is a missing institutional context here which is, in large part, going to determine the outcome of these debates over the next decade and into the next millennium. While some of this analysis has been carried out in the "Science Wars" issues of Social Text, it has generally not been centered enough in the debates, which have all too often been personalized and gossipy. Don't these debates enable the Right to succeed in further marketizing and privatizing education, while the Left sidelines itself with more factionalism? =20 I offer these two focus points for further conversation because I believe they offer opportunities for both sides to contribute to the training and development of a new generation of interdisciplinary activist/scholars on the Left. We need intellectual history and conjunctural analysis, not personal vendettas. We're all tired of the "Jerry Springer meets MLA" atmosphere that these acrimonious debates have created. Poststructuralists like Bov=E9, Butler, and Brown, are well positioned to help us understand the intellectual and political history we need to know in order to make sense of the present moment. And so-called "Left Conservatives," a great majority of whom are social scientists, are well suited to engage in the kind of empirically-minded research that we need to make sense of the current workings of capital and capitalist interests in the new educational marketplace. I'm talking about a division of labor which has as its goal the production of a new form of interdisciplinary knowledge, one which is neither rigorously poststructuralist, nor structuralist, neither modern nor postmodern, but simply oppositional. That is, by the way, what we here at Bad Subjects try to do. We often fail, but at least we can still talk to one another. ______________________ =20 Matt Wray is a graduate student in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is co-editor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, forthcoming from Duke University Press in 1999. Reach him at mwray@socrates.berkeley.edu. ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Jul 1998 09:33:42 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Aronowitz and Bohm Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit In a message dated 98-06-28 00:58:23 EDT, Mart Malakoffwrites: >Actually, the 'metaphysics' of Bohm to which I referred was not his Krishnamurti >etc ideas people might know of, but his deterministic interpretation >of QM >referred to in High Super. > I think actually this is tied to the same metaphysics of S Aronowitz > mart I wonder whether Aronowitz even understands Bohm's metaphysics. In his article in the famous Social Text issue that includes Sokal's hoax, Aronowitz claims that Bohm's philosophy is based on that of Kant. this seems bass ackwards. In fact Planck, Heisenberg and especially Bohr were followers of Kant, with Heisenberg and Bohr and one point claiming that we can't think outside of the categories and models of classical physics (while the micro- world doesn't follow these), while Bohm is closer to a realistic view of physical reality as monistic (although he sometimes lapses into an extreme subjectivism, where everyone has their own "paradigm"). Clarification of this by anybody who has read Bohm's later stuff would be appreciated. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 13:22:37 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Bergson and impostures Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit In the thoughtful review by Kevin Mulligan of Sokal and Bricmont, kindly posted by Norman Levitt, it is written: <> Before dismissing Bergson as a complete jerk, one needs to separate several issues. Bergson indeed made some major mistakes (one pointed out by Einstein himself) in arguing about special relativity theory. Do these mistakes mean that Bergson's views ought to be dismissed, or that his philosophical claims about time have no value? Bergson was not, contrary to common opinion, trying to defend Newtonian absolute space, and he accepted the demise of the classical aether, unlike a number of reactionary philosophical holdouts against relativity theory. Several physicists, such as de Broglie, Watanabe and Costa de Beauregard have seen value in some of Bergson's ideas in relation to wave mechanics and thermodynamics, despite his mess-ups on relativity theory. (see Bergson and the Evolution of Physics, ed., Gunther, U of Tenn Press, 1967, for selections of praise of Bergson by these physicists, and including Bergson's exchanges with Einstein about relativity theory.) A number of continental writers including (to choose two who are Polish, and Czech-American respectively, rather than French) have noted that Bergson's tendency to deny multiple time-sequences and the objective reality of external times of other entities are inconsistent with his own earlier philosophical writings. The spirit of his earlier writings contradicts the letter of his unfortunate sally into relativity theory. Sigmund Zawirski in his Evolution de la notion du temps (1937) notes that Bergson's own earlier "Matter and Memory" (a very interesting book) contradicted Bergson's later denial of multiple temporal rhythms in his discussion of relativity theory. Milic Capek points out in Bergson's emphasis on the difference between time and space and his denial of absolutely separate material particles fits well with much of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, but that Bergson's own treatment of time in reaction to Einstein mistakenly treated Minkowski's diagram as a "spatialization of time" similar to that of classical treatments of time as a fourth dimension in d'Alembert and others. (Capek's Bergson and Modern Physics is in Boston Studies in the Philos of Sci vol. 7, and some of Zawirski is in Boston Studies, vol. 157. Also there is Capek's early 60s The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics.) Bergson's claims would have one empirical consequence. Embryological development would not be slowed by high velocity down the same way elementary particle processes are. This would seem a priori false to a reductionist and probably is empirically false, but at least its a testable claim, not a pure "expressive, ...hagiographic, " claim of the sort that Mulligan accuses recent French philosophy, nor is it purely poetic or musical as Mulligan, following Benda, accuses Bergson. Even if Bergson's claims about the twin paradox are messed up, that's not to say that the twin paradox is totally cleared up. On another list the twin paradox was brought up and a number of physicists indignantly claimed the solution was clear and simple, but gave "obvious solutions" inconsistent with one another. Marder edited a whole book ("Time and the Space Traveller") of little "obvious solutions" to the twin paradox some of which are mutually incompatible. Bergson probably suffered from writing too well and deceptively simply. This made him extraordinarily popular, which led to his soon being dismissed by "serious philosophers." Part of Bergson's loss of respect in the English speaking world is due to Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy" which portrays Bergson as a proto-Nazi, when in fact Bergson died from illness contracted while waiting on a bread line in occupied France after he refused the Nazis' offer to give him special treatment as an "honorary Aryan." One thing that has struck me is that in the 1920s general philosophers such as Whitehead, Cassirer, Bergson and George Herbert Mead all at least attempted to grapple with the general philosophical consequences of relativity theory, whatever you think of their particular conclusions. Today in Anglo-American philosophy the philosophers of science discuss such issues, but usually without attempting in any way to discuss their implications for patterns of thought in general, while most general philosophers don't even try to grapple with the consequences of contemporary science and math and often uncritically tacitly presuppose older interpretations (such as Hilbert's formalist program or conventionalism, which have shown many weaknesses and flaws). I might mention in relation to the recent exchange about Bohm, that Bergson's notions that there might be other ways to think about or make models of physical processes other than the classical ones, especially as elaborated on by Capek at the end of Phil Impact, resemble in many respects Bohm's suggestions about trying new imaginary models and rejecting Bohr and Heisenberg's claim that we are trapped conceptually in classical models -- which supposedly prevents us from thinking directly about quantum reality. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 14:30:56 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Left Conservatism Counterdocument Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit This was the student counterdocument distributed at the Left Conservatism workshop" -Val Dusek LEFT CONSERVATISM" OR LEFT FACTIONALISM? Who invented this strange and wondrous new term, "Left Conservatism"? And why have they done so? We will all have to wait to hear what the panelists actually have to say about these matters. However, as UCSC graduate students in the humanities and social sciences committed to left critical thought, we feel the need to respond directly to the publicized workshop description. We are disturbed by the tone of the description, which implicitly mobilizes the familiar language of left factionalism (Out with the Trotskyites! Smash the Petty Bourgeois Revisionists! Down with Feminist Moralists! Out with the Left Conservatives! Etc.). Whether or not this villification of imagined enemies within the left was intended to achieve some parodical effect, it in fact does nothing to serve the organizers' stated interest in furthering "discussion and debate." There is an important difference between honest, if pointed, critique, on the one hand, and attempts to stigmatize those who would dissent from the status quo in theory, on the other. The text announcing the conference turns on the claim that critique of "anti-foundationalism" = "anti-theory" = "conservatism." This equation implies that the test of true radicalism is adherence to "anti- foundationalism." Yet there are many radicals who embrace ideas which often run counter to "anti-foundationalist" claims: e.g., that radical politics does, and should, contain an ethical dimension; that there is an essential, not merely nominal, difference between oppression and liberation; that the natural world, and the beings who inhabit it, cannot be reduced to the discursive constructions and meanings that humans beings attach to them; that patriarchy, capitalism and racism are determinate historical systems which can and should be abolished rather than simply resisted, and so on. Such statements are surely open to debate and revision. Are they, however, "conservative" or "anti-theoretical"? If so, in what way? We would honestly like to know. We would also like to know whether the organizers consider "anti- foundationalism" (or any other theoretical tendency with which they identify) to be above skepticism or revision. Do they believe that they have stumbled upon the "correct" path of analysis and critique--the one that decisively answers the contradictions and mistakes of left-feminist praxis over the course of the last century? One immune, presumably, to new criticism or interrogation? Is the mere questioning of the emergent poststructuralist orthodoxy in the humanities itself a kind of class treason--de facto proof of one's reactionary politics? If the organizers had their way, would those who remain disinclined to be incorporated within the postmodernist paradigm be excommunicated from the left? (Or would they just be denied tenure?) What does it mean when scholars who claim (in their published works) to embrace "difference" and radical democracy resort to name-calling as a form of discourse? When scholars who reputedly oppose "binary" and dualistic thinking feel the need to frame their opponents as a despised "other" (conservatives)? When anti- essentialists invoke a purely essentialist and fictive category--"left conservatism"--to tar their critics? When writers who often express skepticism toward substantive notions of truth, value, agency, and ideology nevertheless arrogate for themselves the terrain of political vanguardism, replete with denunciation and ad hominem attacks? Indeed, on what possible epistemological, ethical, or political foundation do they feel entitled to do so? There is surely some irony in the spectacle of well-compensated and comfortable academic theorists in the humanities declaring, with absolute self-seriousness, that their work represents one of the last redoubts of critical thought in the entire United States. In this regard, it seems to us curious that of the three culprits named in the conference description as engaged in "attacks on critical theory"--Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollit, and Alan Sokal--two are among the nation's most prominent feminist public intellectuals, and the other is a physicist without formal credentials in the humanities. But why name these names and not, say, others who have criticized the postmodern fashion yet are in a better position to defend themselves against the organizers' slings and arrows? Terry Eagleton, Susan Bordo, Barbara Epstein, Sabina Lovibond, Fredric Jameson, Adolf Reed, Alex Callinicos, Ellen Wood, David Harvey, Arif Dirlik, Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, and many others come to mind. There must be something more here than the attempt of certain academic theorists to assert their rhetorical hegemony over the entire left, or a naked appeal to academic professionalism (the idea, recently defended by Stanley Fish, that only professionals ought to comment on other professionals' ideas). Isn't there? We do not believe that being skeptical of poststructuralist claims leads to an anti-theoretical position. On the contrary, we passionately affirm the need for theory as a crucial tool for making sense of the world, and for providing us with the maps necessary for transforming it. For this reason, we find the workshop organizers' conception of theory to be narrow and impoverished, for it seems to offer a basis only for determining "correct" ideology, rather than for changing the world. This does not make the organizers themselves "conservative," however, only (we believe) wrong. Signed,Julie Beck, Soci Ernesto Bustillos, Soc, Mark Cobb, HistCons, Santosh George, HistCons Krista Harper, Anthro., Will Hull, Soc Pamela Kido, HistCons Barbara Ley, HistCons Jason Moore, History Sandra Meucci, Soc Kathy Miriam, History of Cons Justin Paulson, HistCons John Sanbonmatsu, HistCons Sina Saidi, Hist Consc Patrick Sand, Hist Cons Nancy Ziegler, Hist Cons ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Jul 1998 14:30:47 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Left Conservatism Leaflet Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit This is the original Left Conservatism conference announcement -Val Dusek conference bulletin LEFT CONSERVATISM: A Workshop Saturday, January 31 College 8, Room 240 1:00-5:30 PM Jonathan Arac, Paul Bové, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Joseph Buttigieg A specter is haunting U.S. intellectual life: the specter of Left Conservatism. Within academia and without, in events such as the Sokal affair, in the anti-theory polemics in The Nation and the Socialist Review, in work by authors such as Katha Pollit, Alan Sokal, and Barbara Ehrenreich, there is evidence of a phenomenon that might properly be labeled Left Conservativism: that is, an attack by "real" leftists on those portrayed as theory-mongering, hyper-professional, obscurantist pseudo-leftists. Left Conservatism's hostility to the anti-foundationalist theoretical work of the 1980s and 1990s shares features with left opposition to the radical anti- rationalist politics of the 1960s. The current polemics bring to the fore long unresolved questions about how the left conceives the nature and stakes of critical work, over the past fifty years and into the future. There seems to be at present an attempt at consensus-building among Left Conservatives that is founded on notions of the real, and of the appropriate language with which to analyze it. We can see, in the work of some of the writers listed above and in other work, claims for a certain kind of empiricism, for common sense, for linguistic transparency. Post-structuralist thought, often lumped together in all its varieties, is in the Left Conservative view guilty not only of its own intellectual failings, but of taking a wrong turn for left analysis in general. Left Conservativism challenges post-structuralists' left credentials on a variety of fronts, but a recurrent position is the claim for the incompatibility between anti-foundationalism and a political agenda predicated on real claims for social justice. If everything-class, race, gender, poverty, alienation- is "constructed," what is the real basis for political activism? This attack on anti-foundationalism and what is perceived as a disabling relativism, however, often brings Left Conservativism toward an uneasy convergence with anti-relativists on the right. What does it mean, then, when Barbara Ehrenreich and Roger Kimball (author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education) make similar critiques? What does it mean when Alan Sokal, an avowed leftist, finds inspiration in Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's Higher Superstition : The Academic Left And Its Quarrels With Science, an openly anti-left polemic? A discussion of the stakes in this division is important and timely. U.S. university humanities depart- ments are among the few locations in this country where critical analysis of society, culture, thought, and ideology takes place, and the attacks on critical theory are not without effect. Identifying Left Conserv-atism, and discussing its historical, political, ideological, and theoretical character, is the focus of this one-day workshop at UC Santa Cruz. The workshop is structured to encourage discussion and debate. There will be considerable time for discussion following the participants' presentations. Participants: Jonathan Arac is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and writes on problems in the historical and comparative study of culture, literature and criticism. He has edited or co-edited several books, including Postmodernism and Politics, and Consequences of Theory. He is author of Critical Genealogies : Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies and the recently published Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target : The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Paul A. Bové is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and Editor of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture. The author of several books on culture, modernity, poetry, and the intellectual, including Destructive Poetics : Heidegger and Modern American Poetry; Intellectuals in Power : A Genealogy of Critical Humanism, and Mastering Discourse : The Politics of Intellectual Culture, Professor Bové is now completing a book on Henry Adams as well as a collection of essays called The End of Thinking. Wendy Brown is Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Visting Professor of Political Science at the Uof C, Berkeley, and has published widely on feminist political theory, masculinity, identity politics, and power. Her publications include States Of Injury : Power And Freedom In Late Modernity and Manhood And Politics : A Fem-inist Reading In Political Theory. Judith Butler is Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the U of Cal, Berkeley, and is a theorist of power, gender, sexuality, and identity. Her books include Bodies That Matter : On The Discursive Limits Of "Sex"; Excitable Speech : A Politics Of The Performative; Gender Trouble : Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity, and The Psychic Life Of Power : Theories In Subjection. Joseph Buttigieg is Professor of English at Notre Dame, and writes on the intersections of culture and politics in Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present time. His books include A Portrait Of The Artist In Different Perspective, on James Joyce, and Criticism Without Boundaries : Directions And Crosscurrents In Postmodern Critical Theory. A prominent Gramsci scholar, he has edited and translated the first complete critical edition of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 17:12:11 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Conference: Medicine and the Public Sphere Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Apologies for cross-postings. MEDICINE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT Places are still available for the 1998 Annual Conference of the Society for Social History of Medicine, to be held in Edinburgh University, 17-19 July 1998. Anyone wishing to attend should complete the attached booking form as soon as possible and forward it, with the requisite payment, to Steve Sturdy at the address below. PROGRAMME: Friday 17 July 2.00 - 3.30 pm Margaret Pelling (University of Oxford): The College of Physicians in early modern London: private ethics and public responsibility David Harley (University of Oxford): Early modern childbirth and the shifting boundary between private and public 4.00 - 5.30 pm Adrian Wilson (University of Leeds): The peace of the town: the Birmingham General Hospital and its public 1766-1791 Mark Jenner (University of York): Political economy, public interest and the politics of London water, c. 1790-1830 Saturday 18 July 9.00 - 10.30 am Logie Barrow (University of Bremen): `So vast and so minute': vaccination, the state and the public sphere in mid-nineteenth-century England Pamela K Gilbert (University of Florida): Producing the public: public medicine in private spaces in the 1860s 11.00 - 12.30 pm Christopher Hamlin (University of Notre Dame): Dung and the public domain, 1840-1865 Deborah Brunton (University of Huddersfield): Evil necessaries and abominable erections: dirt, disease the morality of the public privy in the Scottish city 2.00 - 3.30 pm Bill Luckin (Bolton Institute): The great London fogs of the nineteenth century: the `public', the `private' and the `indeterminate' in environmental history Elaine Thomson (University of Edinburgh): Between separate spheres: women, hospitals and public health in Edinburgh, 1880-1920 4.00 - 5.30 pm Martin Gorsky (University of Portsmouth) and Martin Powell (University of Bath): British hospitals and the public sphere, c. 1900-1947 Kim Pelis (Wellcome Institute): Coaxing life's blood into the heart of the nation: persuading citizens to donate blood for the public good in interwar Britain 5.30 - 6.30 SSHM Presidential Address: Prof Jerry Morris (London School of Hygiene) Sunday 19 July 9.00 - 10.30 am David Cantor (Manchester Metropolitan University): Constructing `the public': medicine, science and charity in twentieth-century Britain Timothy Boon (Science Museum, London): Recruiting the mass public for public health intervention: Britain in the 1940s 11.00 - 12.30 pm John Mohan (University of Portsmouth): Regionalism, regulation and rationality: hospital policy and the public sphere in the British health services Naomi Pfeffer (University of North London): From intervention to regulation: reproduction in Britain 1960-1990 To register for this conference, please print out and complete the booking form below, and return it, with the requisite payment, to Steve Sturdy, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, 21 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LN, Scotland. Email: s.sturdy@ed.ac.uk METHODS OF PAYMENT: You can pay by cheque or money order, drawn against a UK bank, or by a bank draft payable in Pounds Sterling. Cheques must be made payable to The University of Edinburgh. You can also pay by credit card, but please note that you must then pay a 2% administration fee to cover the charge levied by the banks. BURSARIES: Please note that the SSHM makes available a number of bursaries, on a first-come-first-served basis, to help students and others on low incomes to meet the costs of attending conferences. If you would like to be considered for one of these, you should send a breakdown of your costs, plus a letter of recommendation from you supervisor or some other competent referee, to Dr David Wright, SSHM Treasurer, University of Nottingham, Department of History, Lenton Grove, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, Great Britain. The maximum amount payable is stlg100. * * * BOOKING FORM I wish to register for the SSHM conference on "Medicine and the Public Sphere", 17-19 July 1998 Name: ___________________________________________________ Address: ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Email: ___________________ Phone: ________________________ REGISTRATION FEE (includes morning coffee and afternoon tea): SSHM members (stlg26) stlg_______ Non-members (stlg31) stlg_______ Student/unwaged (stlg17) stlg_______ ACCOMMODATION (bed and breakfast at Pollock Halls of Residence): Nights required: Friday 17 / Saturday 18 (Delete as appropriate) En suite (stlg34.50 per night) stlg_______ Shared facilities (stlg20.35 per night) stlg_______ Do you require information about hotel accommodation in Edinburgh? Yes / No MEALS (vegetarian options will be available): Buffet lunch, Saturday 18 (stlg7.50) stlg_______ Conference dinner, Sat 18 (stlg15.00) stlg_______ TOTAL PAYABLE stlg_______ (Cheques payable to University of Edinburgh) (Credit card payment form below) Do you require a receipt? Yes / No * * * CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS Name: ___________________________________________________ Address: ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Type of card: VISA / ACCESS / MASTERCARD (Delete as appropriate) Card number: :__:__:__:__: :__:__:__:__: :__:__:__:__: :__:__:__:__: Card valid from: __/__/__ To: __/__/__ Amount to be charged: stlg___________ Administration fee (2%): stlg___________ Total to be paid: stlg___________ Cardholder's signature: __________________________ Date: __/__/__ __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 4 Jul 1998 17:49:23 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Course vacancies at Shefield Centre for Psychotherapetic Studies, including research in history & philosophy of the biomedical and human sciences Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD F A C U L T Y O F M E D I C I N E CENTRE FOR PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC STUDIES A Postgraduate Centre for Training, Practice and Research The Centre is the largest and most diverse institution of its kind, offering a wide variety of academic, clinical and research programmes. It is unique in offering some of them by distance learning. Applications for Autumn 1998 are still being considered for the following academic courses. Please note that a number of them are available BY DISTANCE LEARNING. MA/DIPLOMA in PSYCHIATRY, PHILOSOPHY & SOCIETY (1 year full, 2/3 years part-time, 2 years distance learning) A programme which clarifies the problems of the mentally ill and their treatment, enabling practitioners and academics to become more adept at analysing and understanding this complex field from a number of different perspectives. This course is recognised by the ESRC with speciality status and a quota award. MA/DIPLOMA in DISABILITY STUDIES (1 year full, 2 years part-time, 2 years distance learning) An innovative course, equally concerned with the experience of disability and the improvement of practice. A wide range of disciplines and methodologies are called upon to explore disability within a social context. This course is recognised by the ESRC with speciality status and a quota award. Persons with severe disabliity and/or mobility problems may be able to obtain special consideration for their fees. MA/DIPLOMA in PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES (1 year full, 2 years part-time, 2 years distance learning) A pluralistic course exploring a range of psychoanalytic theories and practices, addressing key debates and controversies, and examining contemporary issues of psychoanalysis and cultural theory including post-structuralism, feminism, film, literary and social theory. Students are eligible to apply for British Academy funding. POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH (full-time, part-time and by distance learning) The Centre offers postgraduate research in the Faculty of Medicine, including MPhil, MD and PhD degrees. As an interdisciplinary Centre, there is a great diversity of research interests amongst the 30 academic staff. The Graduate School offers a range of scholarships and bursaries. Applications are also still being considered for Autumn 1998 for the following clinical training courses:- GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY POSTGRADUATE CERTIFICATE AND MSc IN GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY (1 and 4 years part-time) Training in Group Psychotherapy involving intensive clinical experience and academic training is available from an introductory Certificate programme up to a full accreditable MSc programme. UKCP accrediation anticipated in Spring 1998. Contact: Kathryn Murray (0114 222 2979); k.m.murray@shef.ac.uk INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY MA/POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA IN PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY UKCP/UPA Accredited Training (4 years part-time) This Masters course involves a rigorous academic and clinical training, supervision and personal therapy and is the first course to be jointly accredited by the UKCP and the Universities Psychotherapy Association. Contact: Trudy Coldwell (0114 222 2961); t.coldwell@shef.ac.uk ART PSYCHOTHERAPY POSTGRADUATE DIPLOMA IN ART PSYCHOTHERAPY (2 years full, 3 years part-time) This course is accredited by the British Association of Art Therapists and the Department of Health for the training of art therapists. Students engage in extensive academic work and supervised clinical practice. Opportunities for further study to MA and PhD are available. Contact: Indira Samaraweera (0114 222 2964); i.samaraweera@shef.ac.uk COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL PSYCHOTHERAPY CERTIFICATE/DIPLOMA/MSc IN PSYCHOSOCIAL INTERVENTIONS (1-3 years part-time) The Centre offers multidisciplinary training from purpose-designed brief courses up to MSc level in CBT in a range of disorders, primarily focused on the treatment of the severely mentally ill. Contact: Helen Davies (0114 222 2978); h.g.davies@shef.ac.uk A range of short courses and conferences are arranged by the Centre, most of which have a clinical focus. It is intended that over the next two years the Centre will develop a doctoral programme in psychotherapy trainings that will take students to the highest level of training available in the UK. For further information contact Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, 16 Claremont Crescent, Sheffield S10 2TA (Tel: 0114 222 2961/2/3/4; Fax: 0114 270 0619; Email: d.winfield@shef.ac.uk). Extensive information about the Centre is available on the Internet at http://www.shef.ac.uk~psysc/ __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1998 10:26:22 +0200 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "DEVRIESE, Didier" Subject: TR: ICA/SUV seminar in Stockholm MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable ~~~~~~~@~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~=20 Didier Devriese=20 Unit=E9 "Histoire des sciences et des id=E9es" - D=E9partement des = Archives=20 Universit=E9 libre de Bruxelles 5O, av. F.D. Roosevelt - B-1050 Bruxelles=20 t=E9l.: 32. (0)2.650.35.68 - fax: 32.(0)2.650.53.67 - email:ddevriese@admin.ulb.ac.be http://www.ulb.ac.be/ >---------- >De : Christina Jonsson[SMTP:chris@admin.kth.se] >Date : mardi 7 juillet 1998 9:50 >A : ICA-L@MAJORDOMO.SRV.UALBERTA.CA >Objet : ICA/SUV seminar in Stockholm > >International Council on Archives=20 > >Section of University and Research Institution Archives > >Stockholm-ICA 1998 Seminar > >The Impact of Information Technology on Academic Archives > >- How are we as university archivists affected by information >technology?" > > >International Council on Archives=20 > >Section of University and Research Institution Archives > >and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm > > >Invites you to a seminar in Stockholm, Sweden.=20 > >September 3 and 4 1998. > > >You can still register to the ICA/SUV seminar in Stockholm 3- 4 = september >and if we have your registration before the 17 of july we can book = hotel >room for you > >Welcome to Stockholm, more information on the web > >http://www-personal.usyd.edu.au/~trobinso/stock_reg.html > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Christina Jonsson, IT revisor tfn +46(0)8 790 7990 >Kungl Tekniska h=F6gskolan fax +46(0)8 790 = 9822 >Royal Institute of Technology >Central adm, IT-avdelningen email = Christina.Jonsson@admin.kth.se >100 44 STOCKHOLM >SWEDEN >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Obs! email till och fr=E5n en myndighet =E4r en allm=E4n handling som >registreras enligt myndighetens rutiner >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 07:47:53 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: page of html links to 44 journals in history, philos, social studies of sci, technol, med, etc. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Page of html links to 44 journals for history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, history of technology, history of medicine etc etc etc. http://www.man.ac.uk/Science_Engineering/CHSTM/journals.htm Ambix Annals of Science Archaeoastronomy Archaeometry Archive for History of Exact Sciences Biology and Philosophy British Journal for the History of Science British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society Bulletin of the History of Medicine Centaurus Configurations Historia Mathematica Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences History and Technology History of Science History of the Human Sciences Hyle: an International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry IEEE Annals of the History of Computing Isis Journal for the History of Astronomy Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Medical History Metascience Minerva Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London Osiris Perspectives on Science Research Policy Revue d'Histoire des Sciences Science and Public Policy Science as Culture Science in Context Science, Technology and Human Values Social Epistemology Social History of Medicine Social Studies of Science Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Synthese Technology and Culture Technology Analysis & Strategic Management Technoscience Tekhnema: The Journal of Philosophy and Technology The Information Society Transactions of the Newcomen Society The CHSTM homepage is maintained by Jon Agar, email:agar@fs4.ma.man.ac.uk __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 08:09:17 -0400 Reply-To: Norman Levitt Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Dawkins on Sokal and Bricmont, I MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Thanks to Ian Pitchford for passing this on. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Intellectual Impostures=20 by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont=20 Profile: 1998. Pp. 274. =A39.99 To be published in the USA by Picador as Fashionable Nonsense in November 1998=20 Reviewed by Richard Dawkins Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following: We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst F=E9lix Guattari, one of many fashionable French 'intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, previously published in French and now released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition. Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant m=E9lange of scientific, pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever encountered". Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze, had a similar talent for writing: In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed... In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. This calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterization of a certain type of French intellectual style (note, in passing, the contrast offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose): Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality of modern thought... Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says: I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who, when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being funny on purpose. This is from Medawar's 1968 lecture on "Science and Literature", reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice. Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and Bricmont, however, think otherwise: "These texts contain a handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous -- and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge." But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how shall we know whether the modish French 'philosophy', whose disciples and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans? Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively, New York University and the University of Louvain in Belgium. They have limited their critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about, and their verdict is unequivocal. On Jacques Lacan, for example, whose name is revered by many in humanities departments throughout US and British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound understanding of mathematics: =2E..although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the slightest regard for their meaning. His 'definition' of compactness is not just false: it is gibberish. They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by Lacan: Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic method used here, namely: You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous. It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a further piece of reasoning that is entirely typical of the genre, Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ =2E..is equivalent to the of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1). We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about. The feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who gets whole-chapter treatment from Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a "rape manual"), Irigaray argues that E=3Dmc2 is a "sexed equation". Why? Because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us" (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is an 'in' word). Just as typical of this school of thought is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see, have been unfairly neglected. "Masculine physics" privileges rigid, solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the emperor and, yes, he has no clothes: The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders. You do not have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar), but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem: the Navier-Stokes equations are difficult to solve. (cont'd) ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 08:10:00 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Dawkins on Sokal and Bricmont, II MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion of relativity with relativism, Jean-Fran=E7ois Lyotard's 'post-modern science', and the widespread and predictable misuses of G=F6del's Theorem, quantum theory and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again, Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology, is meaningless from a scientific point of view": Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as such turbulence distances effects from their causes. I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense". They again call attention to "the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific terminology -- inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make out, devoid of meaning". Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand for any of the authors criticized here and lionized throughout America: In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were stripped away. But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, and no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around with word games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring. Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking, why do they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at their expense? The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant hoax perpetrated by Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when someone punctures the established bag of wind. As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the US journal Social Text a paper called "Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity". From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Normal Levitt's Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), an important book that deserves to become as well known in Britain as it is in the United States. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it. In the words of the journalist Gary Kamiya: Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist, jargon-filled cant that now passes for 'advanced' thought in the humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords ('hermeneutics,' 'transgressive,' 'Lacanian,' 'hegemony', to name but a few) would write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal, and have it accepted... Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the 'real world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy)... And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit -- a fact that somehow escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into their city. Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear, attacking the 'post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel prize for literature. Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic establishment. Ross has the boorish, tenured confidence to say things like, "I am glad to be rid of English departments. I hate literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a book on 'science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them." He and his fellow 'cultural studies' and 'science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third-rate state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of the best universities in the United States. Men of this kind sit on appointment committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say, anthropology. I know -- because many of them have told me -- that there are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but who are intimidated into silence. To them, Sokal will appear as a hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant, that his own left-wing credentials are impeccable. In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes that, in addition to numerous half-truths, falsehoods and non sequiturs, his original article contained some "syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever". He regrets that there were not more of these: "I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack." If he were writing his parody today, he would surely be helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of Melbourne, Australia: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it, at http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/postmodern, it will spontaneously generate for you, using faultless grammatical principles, a spanking new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there, and it produced for me a 6,000-word article called "Capitalist theory and the subtextual paradigm of context" by "David I. L.Werther and Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge University" (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge that saw fit to give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here is a typical passage from this impressively erudite work: If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the collective unconscious. Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source of randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be submitted to the 'Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced and in triplicate. As for the harder task of reclaiming US literary departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of science. We must hope that it will be followed. Richard Dawkins is at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PW, UK. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 08:11:09 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Frederick Crews's THE MEMORY WARS MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Frederick Crews's THE MEMORY WARS: "Crews is the ultimate scholar: he knows his facts, he presents his conclusions clearly, and he answers every criticism brought forward by those who read his seminal essays on Freud. He carefully documents his argument, which is that 'Freud's scientific and ethical standards were abysmally low and...his brainchild was, and still is, a pseudoscience.' This book should be read by the public, psychotherapists and anyone who wants to get a carefully documented, clearly reasoned picture of what Freud did and what he wrote. With this book we also learn about the ends to which a cultlike following will go to defend a series of myths. Crews has made a truly monumental contribution to rational thought." -- Margaret Singer "Freud's reputation continues its rapid downward slide, and Frederick Crews has been one of its most effective pushers. Few can read his slashing attack...without realizing that for almost a century psychiatrists, thinkers, and writers have been bamboozled by a pseudoscience as devoid of empirical evidence as the fantasies of Karl Marx." -- Martin Gardner "Fred Crews's deft and literate polemic deserves serious attention. It's time to admit that the psychoanalytic scenery is crashing to the stage floor." -- Hugh Kenner "Anyone who still believes that Freud was a genius on a par with Einstein and Galileo... must read this dazzling book. Crews brilliantly marshals the damning new scholarship on Freud the man and on analytic theory, showing why the Freudian edifice is deteriorating and why its foundations were built on sand." -- Carol Tavris, Ph.D., author of The Mismeasure of Woman "In the two essays that form the core of this book, Frederick Crews convincingly dismantles the entire Freudian enterprise, from beginning to end." --JOHN F. KIHLSTROM, Department of Psychology, Yale University "Frederick Crews's voice of common sense has cut through the mass hysteria about repressed memory syndrome. Always fearless and provocative, he has fin ally exposed a fashionable fad which has ruined many innocent people." --PHYLLIS GROSSKURTH ------------------------- Frederick Crews >From the Inside Cover of " The Memory Wars" In 1993 and 1994, The New York Review of Books published two tenaciously argued essays by Frederick Crews attacking Freudian psychoanalysis and its aftermath in the so-called recovered memory movement. The first reviewed a growing body of evidence indicating that Freud doctored his data and manipulated his colleagues in an effort to consolidate a cult-like following that would neither defy nor upstage him. The second, published in two parts, challenged the scientific and therapeutic claims of the rapidly growing recovered memory movement, maintaining that its social effects have been devastating. Crews traced that movement to Freudian precedent--not just to Freud's abandoned "seduction theory" but also to the most essential assumptions of psychoanalysis itself. The response was tremendous: issues flew off the stands, and therapists, patients, scholars, philosophers, and others whose lives had been touched by Freud's ideas responded in one of the largest waves of letters the Review had ever seen. Twenty-five of these were published, with Crews's deft and forceful replies. Most are gathered here, together with Crews's original essays, a new introduction describing the genesis of his pieces, and an epilogue considering the debate and its reverberations. The result is a fierce, contentious, and startling book that rocks the foundations of one of the century's governing ideas. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 09:51:43 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Kolata and Jasanoff on implants MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII O'm forwarding the article by Gina Kolata in today's (July 11) NY Times concerning the role of biomedical science in the massive lawsuits over the supposed damage wrought by silicone breast implants. For my part, I found this article sound, accurate, and as complete as it can be given the obvious restrictions on length. I bring it up because of the recent discussions concerning H. Dowie's critique of Kolata in the "Nation". I suppose that this article is typical of the sort of thing that provokes Dowie's wrath. If so, the onus falls on Dowie. For contrast, I forward as well, recent comments by Sheial Jasanoff and a colleague on the selfsame controversy. I suppose they would please Dowie. To me, they constitute one more example of the kind of self-evident absurdity that can only be taken seriously by academics intellectually malformed by decades of postmodern babble. I note that Jasanoff represents Harvard University's latest attempt to embarass itself profoundly. N. Levitt Harvard '63. -------------------------------- July 11, 1998 ANALYSIS When Scientific Controversies Land in the Courts ______________________________________________________________ Related Articles $3.2 Billion Settlement in Silicone-Implants Dispute (July 9) --------------------------- By GINA KOLATA A fter 16 years of litigation and more than a dozen major scientific studies, the longstanding controversy over the safety of breast implants reached a milestone of sorts Wednesday, when Dow Corning Corp. agreed to pay $3.2 billion to settle the claims of tens of thousands of women who said they had become ill from their implants. The tentative agreement did not end the conflict over implants; more chapters may be written in the months ahead as panels of judicially appointed scientists review what the science inspired by the lawsuits has wrought. But the long-running battle has illuminated the issues and forces at work when scientific controversies land in the courts or legal ones wind up in the laboratory. Indeed, experts say the litigation is providing a laboratory for judges to decide how to deal with scientific controversy and questions of what evidence to admit in court. Women suing the makers of implants have charged that their implants gave them a variety of illnesses, including well-established diseases like arthritis, cancer, lupus and multiple sclerosis, as well as what their attorneys have called "atypical diseases" with symptoms including fatigue and muscle pain. The implant makers, buttressed by statements from several medical associations and the governments of Britain, Germany and Australia, insist that science has not found a link between the devices and disease, despite years of looking. The settlement, Dow Corning said, was a business decision. The company has approximately 19,000 cases pending that could go to court, said Douglas Schoettinger, a company lawyer, and each case would cost about $1 million to win. The trouble began on Aug. 1, 1982, when Maria Stern of Boise, Idaho, sued Dow Corning. Ms. Stern said that she had become seriously ill after her implants leaked silicone throughout her body. She won a seven-figure settlement. At that time, there was virtually no scientific evidence that silicone implants did -- or did not -- cause disease. A wave of lawsuits followed. In 1992, Dr. David Kessler, who was then commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, imposed a moratorium on the sale of silicone breast implants while scientific studies were conducted. A class-action suit was filed, drawing in tens of thousands of women. On May 15, 1995, faced with 177,000 breast implant claimants, Dow Corning filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By the mid-1990s, however, several large studies were failing to find a link between implants and the illnesses ascribed to them. In 1996, the American College of Rheumatology issued a statement saying the evidence was "compelling" that implants did not cause systemic disease. That same year, the Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association wrote that "to date, there is no conclusive or compelling evidence that relates silicone breast implants to human autoimmune disease." In 1997, the American Academy of Neurology wrote that "existing research shows no link between silicone breast implants and neurological disorders." Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine and author of a book on breast implants ("Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case," Norton, 1997), said in an interview that there are now about 15 well-designed epidemiological studies of implants and various diseases. "Not one has found diseases are more common in women with implants, which leaves us with the high likelihood that systemic diseases are coincidental," she said. Kessler, who is now dean of Yale University's medical school, said in an interview that the science shows that "there were problems with these devices -- they broke, they leaked at a higher rate than anyone reported." But, he added, although the devices cause "local complications" like scarring and hardening of tissue, "there's no evidence that they cause systemic disease." Those who say that the implants cause disease cite evidence of a different sort. Fenton Communications, a public relations company hired by lawyers for many of the plaintiffs to communicate the risks of implants, lists studies in which doctors cite their own experience seeing women who have had implants and subsequently contracted various diseases. It also lists studies concluding that silicone can provoke immune responses and that implants can rupture and spill silicone throughout the body. Frederick Ellis, a Boston lawyer who represents women with implants, said that the latest studies show that silicone can cause illnesses in animals and that silicone degrades in the body into silica, a hard, glassy mineral, which can provoke autoimmune responses. Nonetheless, he said, "the science is still developing." Ellis explained that lawyers had little choice but to jump into the litigation before a scientific consensus had time to form. The problem, he said, is the statute of limitations. The law in most states says that plaintiffs have three years to file a suit after "they reasonably should have known" that implants caused disease, Ellis explained. In California, he added, they have only one year. "Plaintiffs are in a bind," he said. "A bunch of tort-reform advocates say, 'Wait until the science is really there."' But, Ellis added, "that's not the standard that applies in law." Bert Black, a Dallas lawyer who is an expert on product liability involving scientific questions but who has no connection to the implant litigation, said there are other factors that push lawsuits forward in advance of science. One, he said, is that "if you wait until the scientific evidence comes in, some other lawyer is likely to corner the market." "Here you'll be with all this evidence," he said, "but someone else has all the clients." Then there is what Black calls the "plaintiffs' lawyers asbestos syndrome," referring to the multibillion-dollar asbestos litigation of some years ago that made some lawyers in the product liability field both rich and legendary. Those lawyers got into the litigation early -- long before the science was there to show that exposure to asbestos could cause serious lung disease. Then the science came along and proved them right, Black said, and "every young lawyer said, 'I've got to find the next asbestos."' As the implant litigation reveals, one of the thorniest questions for the courts once lawsuits are filed is what sort of scientific evidence should be admitted, and who should decide. A recent Supreme Court decision involving lawsuits charging that the morning-sickness drug Bendectin caused birth defects addressed this question. The court concluded that judges are supposed to control what sort of scientific evidence is allowed and to screen out ill-founded or speculative scientific theories. But, said Edward Sherman, the dean of Tulane University's law school, who has no connection with the implant litigation, "Cases have shown how difficult it is to determine who is a legitimate expert witness, what is within the range of acceptable range of scientific knowledge and what is outside." He added: "I'd like to think that there are some certainties that science can give us, but in a lot of product liability cases it's very elusive to tie it down." Nonetheless, several courts and scientific panels are attempting to do just that. In Oregon, implants made women ill. But he said he would defer the effective date of his decision until an expert panel appointed by Sam C. Pointer Jr., a U.S. district judge in Alabama, issued its report on the science. Pointer, who is coordinating all the breast implant cases in federal courts, including Dow Corning's, convened a panel of three disinterested scientists to advise him on the evidence tying implants to disease. Their report is expected in September. In the meantime, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences has also appointed a panel of scientists to assess the implant evidence. Their report is expected in about a year. Daniel Quinn, a spokesman for the institute, said it has asked these scientists not to comment until then. And the British government, which issued a report in 1994, is scheduled to release another one on Tuesday summarizing the most recent evidence. Dow Corning says it remains interested in what it calls a causation trial, in which a jury would decide whether scientific evidence supports the notion that implants cause disease. If the jury were to decide that the science did not support it, the company would not have to compensate women who said their implants made them ill. Schoettinger, the Dow Corning lawyer, said he cannot say whether such a request is part of the proposed new settlement, since the details of that agreement must remain secret until it is approved by the plaintiffs. But, Schoettinger said, the company is also pursuing another avenue. It has filed motions before a bankruptcy judge in Michigan and also before Pointer in Alabama asking that all the implant claims be dismissed. "This takes it a step further and says the science is so clear that a causation trial isn't necessary," he said. He added that these judges are waiting for the report by Pointer's panel before they decide what to do. _________________________________________________________________ *************************************************************** CU Logo Department of Science & Technology Studies _________________________________________________________________ Making People: The Normal and Abnormal in Constructions of Personhood Xandra Rarden and Sheila Jasanoff, Cornell University "An Atypical Complaint: Science v. Subjectivity in Breast Implant Litigation" Abstract Competing scientific accounts have emerged in the debate over whether silicone gel breast implants cause autoimmune disorders. The mainstream story, told principally by epidemiological researchers at leading medical institutions, denies any causal connection between the devices and traditional forms of the disease. The alternative story, told by plaintiffs and their treating physicians, posits the existence of an "atypical" disease, whose symptoms are fully understandable only to those willing to heed the plaintiffs' subjective experiences. In this paper, we examine the scientific contestation around the attempted construction of an "atypical" disease entity. We ask how the cultural context of litigation molded and shaped the mainstream and alternative scientific stories, influencing the production of different forms of collective knowledge. Interactions among judges, lawyers, scientists, doctors, the media, and social activists all contributed to this process. We show how mainstream science eventually ratified the safety of the implants, while discarding or setting aside the alternative hypothesis. Although a powerful social movement coalesced around the "atypical" disease claims, knowledge derived from personal and group experiences failed to make headway against the claims of objective science. Yet, allowing orthodox scientific practice systematically to dominate over other types of meaningful knowledge production may not be the best the way to bring closure to such controversies. Instead, we need to search for mechanisms that strike a better balance between scientific and subjective knowledge in toxic tort litigation. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 10:33:00 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Ross Rides Again MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Andrew Ross's piece on the OJ case, mentioned below, originally appeared in the bizarre compilation "Birth of a Nation'hood" edited by Toni Morrison and her Princeton colleague C.B. Lacour. In that piece, Ross cites Sheila Jasanoff as one of his Eminent Authorities on how science should impinge on legal proceedings. Figures. NL ---------- Forwarded message ---------- July 12, 1998 By BROOKE ALLEN ______________________________________________________________ REAL LOVE In Pursuit of Cultural Justice. By Andrew Ross. New York University, cloth, $55; paper, $17.95. ______________________________________________________________ Andrew Ross, the director of the graduate program in American studies at New York University, is the dean of the fashionable academic discipline called cultural studies, an all-inclusive field that blends literary theory with sociology and left-wing political grandstanding. ''Real Love'' brings together nine previously published essays on a variety of subjects, including reggae music and the way it reflects the Jamaican political scene, jobs in cyberspace, gangsta rap and, inevitably, the one subject every 1990's intellectual feels compelled to weigh in on, the O. J. Simpson trials. In his introduction, Ross rather mystifyingly states that the pieces are united by their passion for ''cultural justice'': ''doing justice to culture, pursuing justice through cultural means and seeking justice for cultural claims.'' The reader is never too sure just what cultural justice is supposed to be, or what kind of justice Ross advocates. He pleads, for instance, against bringing scientific evidence, particularly DNA testing, into courtrooms because ''the quantitative reasoning of science is not well suited to taking . . . values or rights into account.'' But isn't that just the point? Ross derides statistics and polls when their conclusions are not to his liking, but does not hesitate to marshal them when they suit his purpose. He is as quick to spot barbarians at the gate as his enemies on the right, but they are different barbarians -- privatization and corporate sponsorship, among others -- and while the right makes a bugbear of Big Government, Ross does precisely the same with ''the state.'' Again and again, ''Real Love'' proves that the objectivity, and hence the value, of social science is fatally compromised when it is tailored to fit a political agenda. ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 17:07:36 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: review of Impostures Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit It is to be noted that Mulligan's review of Sokal and Bricmont, like Bogosian's article about Sokal's hoax adds another dimension to the divisions in the Science Wars. Besides conservatives like Roger Kimball vs. multi- culturalists and feminists; scientists vs. humanists; we have analytical philosophers using the Sokal attacks to bash continental philosophy, an agenda, like the the neo-conservatives' one, that was around long before the Sokal affair. Mulligan in his review of Sokal and Bricmont writes: <. This is partly misleading. Hermeneutics (Dilthey and Heidegger) and phenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger) are claimed not be be theoretical. In one sense, insofar as they claim either to be describing the direct deliverences of experience, or interpreting meanings but not making up an external theory about them, this is true. But insofar as hermeneutics and phenomenology have approaches and claims, they could be said to have a theory. Hermeneutics denies that it is a "method" in the mechanical sense that Descartes and Bacon thought they had. It is "against method." But so are many scientists skeptical of philosophical theories of the "scientific method." With respect to justifications and counterexamples Mulligan has more of a point. The claim of phenomenology to involve description of experience, not a theory about experience, and of hermeneutics to be interpretation of meanings, not theories about the theory in the text does mean that they reject some of the usual means of argument in analytic philosophy. On the other hand analytic philosophy (as some of its devotees now admit) makes use of rudimentary phenomenology or hermeneutics in that it appeals to often supposedly unquestionable descriptions of common-sense experience or situations. My own position would be that both phenomenology and argument are needed. Just as observations can be theory-laden, so phenomenological reports can be doubted as misconstrued or misdescribed. SImilarly, the purely argumentative philosophy in its often uncritical appeals to common sense or what is "obvious" or what "everyone believes" assumes phenomenological descriptions and needs to pay attention to them. It certainly is false that Husserl, for instance, lacks distinctions. He's got so many that other analytic philosophers denounce him for being too theoretical and present themselves as "just folks" common sense philosophers, but this is equally false, as the person in the street wouldn't understand their use of terms such as "reference," "ethics vs. morals" and much else where everyday terms are used in special ways. Similarly Heidegger has distinctions. His terminology is often denounced for its peculiarities but clearly distinctions, such as between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand are made. (Some claim much of Heidegger's terminology plays on German colloquialisms and sounds less obtuse in German). Mulligan continues << The philosophers and thinkers dealt with by Sokal and Bricmont form--together with the small embattled band of French analytic philosophers--almost the whole of contemporary philosophy in France. For by far the greater part of what is called philosophy there is in fact not philosophy at all but rather the history of philosophy.>> This is true. There is often too much historical recounting and not enough critical evaluation. But philosophy has a closer and more evident relation to the history of philosophy than does science to its own history (and of course the latter is becoming more recognized today). Often philosophy done as if from scratch recapitulates old positions without recognizing them or their faults, this is true of some of the work in artificial intelligence which recapitulates seventeenth and eighteenth century theories whose problems were subsequently recognized. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 14:22:38 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: from London Review of Books (16 July) I MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE From=20LRB Volume 20, Number 14 Le pauvre Sokal John Sturrock Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. Profile, 274 pp., =A39.99, 2 July, 1 86197 074 9 Way back in the pre-theoretical Fifties, a journalist called Ivor Brown used to have elementary fun at the expense of a serial intruder on our insular peace of mind, a bacillus known as the LFF, or Latest Foreign Fraud. By this he meant any thinker from abroad (Paris, nine times out of ten) whose alembicated ideas were being taken up with more excitement than he thought they =96 or, I daresay, any ideas =96 were worth. Brown's catchpenny campaign in defence of our mental virginity was brought fleetingly back to memory by the title of Intellectual Impostures, a similarly prophylactic exercise which has it in for the French thinkers who have come among us since the late Sixties, bearing what Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont would like to see ostracised as fatuous, if not actually nonsensical ideas. The authors are both professors of physics, Sokal in New York, Bricmont in Belgium, and it's as hard scientists that they make their complaint against the intellectual charmers they have singled out, who have all of them at one time or another introduced concepts drawn from physics or the higher mathematics into their work without showing, we now learn, more than the skimpiest understanding of their true formulation or the place they occupy in the body of scientific knowledge from which they have been so recklessly abducted. The thinkers pressed shoulder to shoulder in the dock here =96 Lacan, Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Deleuze/Guattari and one or two lesser figures =96 turn out not to know their mathematical arse from their physical elbow when they choose to steal food from Sokal and Bricmont's professional larder, and start citing G=F6del or Quantum Mechanics or Chaos Theory to lend a false weight, and the glamour that goes with appearing to be scientifically up to the mark, to the non-scientific arguments they are advancing. This point is well enough made in Intellectual Impostures, if also to excess, as Sokal and Bricmont go the rounds of their deluded authors, quoting them in their folly at a length that was hardly called for: as a sottisier, the book is a success, since we're bound =96 happy, indeed =96 to agree that, so far as the purportedly scientific metaphors or extended analogies in Lacan and Co. are concerned, Sokal and Bricmont are right, and that the impostors are abusing concepts that they don't know enough about to call acceptably in evidence. The same scientific ignorance which means that we can't call Lacan or Deleuze's bluff for ourselves, obliges us to concede the authoritativeness of its exposure here. Were this the only point that Intellectual Impostures was making, it wouldn't have required a whole book: fifty dismissive pages would have done the job. A whole book we have, however, and an unwontedly priggish one, written by two scientists able to read all manner of disastrous implications into the intellectual misdemeanours that they list, even though these loom pretty small in the work of the various authors they object to, only one of whom, Bruno Latour, might want to claim any scientific credentials. For this two-man vigilante patrol has something bigger in mind than simply to catch out a few LFFs in acts of lese-science. It has set out from the lab with the aim of discrediting those intellectual aspects of Post-Modernism that have had an impact on the humanities and social sciences: a fascination with obscure discourses; an epistemic relativism linked to a generalised scepticism toward modern science; an excessive interest in subjective beliefs independently of their truth value; and an emphasis on discourse and language as opposed to the facts to which those discourses refer (or worse, the rejection of the very idea that facts exist or that one may refer to them). This is quite a programme, and undertaken here in an oddly roundabout way, since Sokal and Bricmont have chosen to take on the influential Parisians they regard as a prime source of the infection, rather than their infatuated surrogates on the campuses of the US, where the influence of these particular intellectual exports has been noticeably greater than in France itself. The French, however, were the first to have the benefit of this book, which appeared there a year ago, before being translated into English by the authors themselves and published in the language community which they knew from the start had the greater need of it. You don't get to hear or even to read much about Post-Modernism in Paris, where the original Impostures intellectuelles was understandably received by one of its most prominent targets, Julia Kristeva, as 'an anti-French intellectual escapade', while Jacques Derrida, on whom the authors could for once find nothing to pin, responded with a seen-it-all-before sigh, 'le pauvre Sokal'. Poor Sokal and poor Bricmont believe that the garlanded French thinkers who have been leading the American young (and some of the not-so-young) intellectually astray don't deserve to have any influence at all, that someone capable, as is Lacan, of playing fast and loose with ideas taken over from topology in what is at best semi- ignorance of the facts of the matter should be cast into the oubliette as an all-weather charlatan. A local outbreak of nonsense in his oeuvre may be assumed to be a symptom of a more general condition: if the maths is wonky, the chances are that everything else that Lacan has written is wonky, and that his psychoanalytical doctrines are no sounder or of any more practical service than his algebra. Here, however, the scientists play professionally cautious, for fear of going beyond what they can know for sure and thus letting the empirical side down: 'We make no claim that this invalidates the rest of [his] work, on which we suspend judgment.' They make no such claim because they know they don't need to, so ready will those of like mind with themselves be to leap to the conclusion that they smugly withhold, and those who are already of like mind will be the only obvious beneficiaries of this book. In a less disingenuous vein, they quote from Bertrand Russell, explaining how he lost faith in Hegel as a thinker after discovering how bad he was at maths. Having myself only ever come across admirers of Lacan who were either entertained, bored or baffled by his topological and other mathematical conceits, as bravura moments in an unusually conceited floor-show, without seeing any need to determine their truth value, I find all this weirdly heavy-handed and alarmist. Sokal and Bricmont have gone about damming the tidal flow of irrationality into intellectual life in an all-or-nothing manner sure to go down well with those theory-haters who long to hear bad things about such as Lacan or Kristeva, but it will be counter-productive among the broader-minded, who believe that the more styles of intellectual discourse cultures find the room and time for the healthier. There is an instructive symmetry between Sokal and Bricmont's way of proceeding and the one they so much object to: where the impostors like to inlay bits and pieces from the discourse of science in writings that no one would think of calling 'scientific' in the strict sense in which Sokal and Bricmont are using the word, the latter apply criteria of rigour and univocity fundamental to their own practice which are beside the point once transferred to this alien context. I've read only a little of the work of the feminist writer, Luce Irigaray, but I was delighted to learn, from the few briskly contemptuous pages devoted to her here, that, in arguing for the masculinist bias of science, she has had the estimable insolence to suggest that the 20th century's most resonant (and sinister) equation, E =3D MC2, may be sexist for having 'privileged the speed of light' or 'what goes fastest' over other velocities, and that if the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed, then that is because it is a quintessentially feminine topic. Irigaray's invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont. The inappropriateness enters the moment hard scientists like these two start asking that the work of writers and intellectuals such as Irigaray be written to the same specifications of clarity and univocity as are required in the discourse of their own disciplines, formal and stunted as this is called on to be, by comparison with the endlessly and happily expansive discourse of thought in general. To appreciate the category mistake on which this book hinges, it helps to go back to what was in effect its prototype, to Sokal's well publicised 'hoax' of two years ago, when he submitted an article intended as a joke to an American academic journal called Social Text. This Duke University periodical likes, by the sound of it, to give air-space to the arguments of the epistemic relativists and other anti-foundationalists. Sokal knew the sort of thing the editors favoured, and he sent them a 'parody', as he puts it, entitled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity'. The text of this reappears as an Appendix in Intellectual Impostures, though by the time you get to it, whatever life might have been left in the joke has been well and truly eroded by the content of the earlier chapters. The 'parody' makes relativist claims =96 for, to take an example more glaring than most, a 'relational and contextual concept of geometry' =96 so far out, as Sokal sees it, for the editors of Social Text to have realised that they were being had and to have turned it down. Except that they had excellent reasons to go ahead and publish it. The hoax article appeared in a special issue of the journal devoted to the 'Science Wars', and something of this sort, putting a jauntily extreme case, is just what sensible editors, very much in the business of intellectual provocation as they know themselves to be, would hope to have to hand on such an occasion. The article, moreover, is crammed with references to, and quotations from, the supporting literature, all the way from the scientific to the New Age, and would strike most lay readers as a spirited and informative summary of a certain, by this time familiar case against the uniquely respectable 'meta-narrative' of science; and as quite a nifty piece of polemic. ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 14:23:35 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: from London Review of Books (16 July) II MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Sokal says that he badgered the editors of Social Text to try and find out what they thought of his spoof before they published it, but that they wouldn't be drawn. And why on earth should they? His implication is that they should have spiked it as so much rubbish, containing as it does a lot of half-baked science. That, however, is to look on Social Text as though it were a journal belonging to the same discursive field as Nature, which presumably sends everything it publishes of substance out to scientific referees beforehand, and whose editors might well have to commit hara-kiri were they to find themselves hoaxed. The case of a journal like Social Text is opposite: it has every reason to encourage adventurism in ideas as the way to keep the intellectual pot boiling. Sokal and Bricmont would like to see the Science Wars ended (in their favour), as much as anything because of the threat to the funding of physical science potentially inscribed in any undermining of its authority. Many of us will be content and reassured, on the other hand, to see the wars go on, since that way we're exposed to more arguments, good as well as bad, and can feel that the science we barely understand is being forced to be as explicit as is feasible in making its own social, political and, indeed, scientific case. Given, moreover, that Sokal knew perfectly well what line the editors of Social Text habitually take, to write something in the chummiest accordance with that line and then reckon you've scored when you find it being printed, is hardly a reason to crow. His was a hoax barely worth the perpetration. Like some other scientists, Sokal and Bricmont appear to regret that science has any need of natural language to make itself known, that scientific facts can't be implanted directly in our brains without resort to verbal mediation. When you complain, as they do, about Post-Modernism's 'emphasis on discourse and language as opposed to the facts to which those discourses refer', a pause for reflection is in order, on whether it is legitimate to oppose the facts to the discourse when facts that are not contained in a discourse cannot be known. Sokal and Bricmont's Platonic realm is one in which facts are mysteriously dissociated from the forms of words or strings of symbols of which they (in fact) consist. This comes out especially clearly in the least effective chapter of their book, that on Bruno Latour, the sociologist of science, whom they accuse, for example, of being guilty, when writing about relativity, of falling victim to a 'fundamental confusion between Einstein's pedagogy and the theory of relativity itself'. If I've got this right, they're saying that the theory of relativity as propounded by Einstein, and the theory in its ideal, unpropounded state are not identical, because the act of propounding introduces an agent who is necessarily a reference-point in space-time that the 'theory itself' can do without; in which event, it beats me how we can ever have access to the theory except through 'pedagogy', which I take to be the sum of those real-life moments when the theory is communicated by one person to others. In the old and valuable Structuralist terminology, Sokal and Bricmont want their science to be all langue and no parole, its theoretical purity guaranteed by never being exposed to the risks of expression. After which, it's no surprise to discover that Sokal and Bricmont are especially unforgiving of ambiguity. This they look on, not as a characteristic of natural language which we can none of us avoid, given the glorious economy of linguistic forms compared with the infinitely much there is to be written or said, but as a 'subterfuge', the all too convenient and dishonourable resource of the impostor, enabling as it does the sentences they write to be interpreted in 'two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false'. When one reminds oneself that the history of thought as a whole has been one of assertions being made that have been proved, if not at the time then subsequently, to bear more than one meaning and to be open to literally interminable re-interpretation, it becomes obvious that the notion of natural language underpinning a book like Intellectual Impostures is alarmingly impoverished. These authors are linguistically reductionist, holding to a view that inside every 'assertion' there is an unequivocal kernel which Parisian obfuscators will be doing their devious best to dress up in some fancy and misleading way. I carry no torch for Jean Baudrillard, but will defend him on principle when his 'verbal veneer' is held to account, as it is here: in the marginal lands between the literary and the sociological that Baudrillard inhabits, the 'verbal veneer' is the very thing, so that to read it as a disguise rather than a display is to misread it in a particularly philistine and irrelevant way. Where language is concerned, Sokal and Bricmont, bigots to the last, lose the plot altogether, and sink to the low point of declaring that their gallery of impostors have no title to any 'poetic licence' (a concept I was startled to discover was still in the land of the living), for their intention is clearly to produce theory, and . . . their style is usually heavy and pompous, so it is highly unlikely that their goal is principally literary or poetic.' The noise you hear, reading an insultingly simplistic sentence like that, is of the ocean rushing hungrily back to fill the channel dividing those time-honoured adversaries, the Two Cultures. Beneath or beyond its purgative intellectual agenda, Intellectual Impostures has also, unexpectedly, a political one, which comes to the fore in the book's Epilogue, where Sokal and Bricmont declare that 'Post-Modernism' has had three principal 'negative effects: a waste of time in the human sciences, a cultural confusion that favours obscurantism, and a weakening of the political Left.' The political argument is that epistemic relativism and all the rest of it is the new opium of the radicals, a disease of the university campuses unhappily expressive of the disengagement of academic leftists from anything resembling practical politics. They quote Chomsky on the frustrating experiences that he had when mingling earlier in the Nineties with the intelligent young in Egypt: 'When I would give talks about current realities . . . participants wanted it to be translated into Post-Modern gibberish.' Sokal and Bricmont believe that the intellectually decadent youth section of the American Left has sold out similarly by withdrawing into a sloppy relativism, if not outright New Age weirdery, and has thereby 'collaborated in driving the last nail in the coffin of the ideals of justice and progress'. They are nostalgic for the days when the Left trusted and promoted hard science, rather than decrying and even regarding it as proto-fascist, though the line that they follow in Intellectual Impostures will do more to bear out this last anxiety than to invalid-ate it. The pessimism of their conclusion is not only extravagant but also patronising, as if our subscription to the ideals of justice and progress, which are not dead, were in the end dependent on our sharing the extraordinarily restrictive attitude towards the life of the mind of the authors of Intellectual Impostures. Having spent a good many tart words attempting to wring the neck of eloquence, they really shouldn't have quit the field, and headed back to the lab letting off clouds of rhetorical vapour of their own. ----------------------------------------------------------------- [ home | current edition | archive | subscriptions | advertising | site index ] ----------------------------------------------------------------- All material copyright =A9 London Review of Books 1997, 1998 editorial: edit@lrb.co.uk | advertising: sarah@lrb.co.uk | subscriptions: subs@lrb.co.uk ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 19:13:59 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: from London Review of Books (16 July) I MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Norman Levitt wrote: > > From=20LRB Volume 20, Number 14 > > Le pauvre Sokal > > John Sturrock > > Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. > Profile, 274 pp., =A39.99, 2 July, 1 86197 074 9 > > Way back in the pre-theoretical Fifties, a journalist called Ivor > Brown used to have elementary fun at the expense of a serial > intruder on our insular peace of mind, a bacillus known as the > LFF, or Latest Foreign Fraud. By this he meant any thinker from > abroad (Paris, nine times out of ten) whose alembicated ideas [snip] *Alembicated* -- I'd never heard or seen that word before, but it strikes me as lovely. I would presume that to "alembicate" means to transmute torough a process of distillation, so that what comes out of the process is both more succinct and more valuable than what went in (I've never heard of *alchemists* trying to turn gold into lead, as many present-day self-called "social scientists" try to turn human existence into material existents...). --Would that more of the things people post to this mailing list were *alembicated* and not just the result of a bulk select-and-paste operation! I bought a little book today, that I'd like to see if the debunkers (many of whose targets I like no better than they do, albeit for different reasons...) can do anything with, or whether any salvos they fire at it might not bounce back and hit *them*: Cornelius Castoriadis, _Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy_, Oxford, 1991. I'd really like someone to explain to me why in this whole "science wars" debate, nobody on either side seems to either deploy or denigrate such authors as Castoriadis (Prof. Levitt! Read the last chapter of the book -- it talks about philosophical implications of mathematical ideas -- surely as risky a thing as any thinker can venture upon...). Or, of course, even better, why they don't "go after" Edmund Husserl, who was anything but quiet about telling scientists what they were doing but didn't *understand* that they were doing! I would propose that _The Crisis of European Sciences..._ is not laid to rest by demonstrating that some currently fashionable writer$ may have accomplished something similar to a savage using a telescope as a scepter. \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 11:27:02 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Castoriadis Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Brad McCormick rightly writes: <> Castoriadis' articles about science are also to be found in "The Crossroads of the Labyrinth" MIT Press. These articles appeared in the Encyclopedia Universalis in France in the 1970s I believe, and discuss technology, twentieth century science, etc. and are well worth reading. Castoriadis could hold his own with Chomsky and with physicists at Boston University when he visited there, even though he was a self-taught UNESCO economist, Lacanian psychoanalyst, is a left skin-head (i.e., has a shaved head like Foucault), and all other bad things, apparently self-taught in particle physics like your typical, scientifically ignorant French intellectual. Castoriadis also (under the pseudonyms Cardan and others because he was a resident alien and didn't want to get deported) was head of Socialism or Barbarism during the 1950s and 1960s an organization which held the state capitalist position with respect to the nature of the USSR and which foresaw much later thought about both the nature of the USSR and the media in advanced industrial countries; and of which many later claimed, falsely retrospectively, to be members. (Apparently Lyotard was really a member for a while.). Of course, as one can tell by his name, Castoriadis was originally Greek, which may explain his relative sanity to Sokal and Bricmont (but many French intellectuals such as Koyre, Kojeve, Kristeva, Minkowski (the psychoanalyst), Gabel (the Lukacsian psychoanalyst), etc., were Eastern European by birth, and Derrida, Althusser and others were born in Algeria.) Anyhow, check out Castoriadis. He's a cool doodster (dudester?). Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 15:39:58 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Truth, Relativism and Rorty, Prt 1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit This seems like a witty, fairly readable treatment of a figure praised and denounced partially for the wrong reasons by postmodernists and by neo- conservatives respectively for his supposed relativism and postmodernism. As I went moose-watching last week in Northern New Hampshire, the opening metaphor perhaps unduly appealed to me -Val Dusek Copyright (c) 1996, The Nation, July 27/August 3, 1998, pp. 25 - 30 Rortyism for Beginners by CARLIN ROMANO (Part 1) --------------------------- TRUTH AND PROGRESS: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. By Richard Rorty. Cambridge. 355 pp. Paper $18.95. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Witnessing the great American philosopher Richard Rorty at his moment of media crossover--the costume change from bookish anchorite to willing soundbite, from Dewey Lite to Clinton adviser on the Zeit--is an instructive experience. Like the lordly male moose one yearns to behold on a Maine back road, Rorty now boasts the characteristic majestic antlers: those appositive phrases in newspaper citations, clauses like "America's most famous academic philosopher" or "the pre-eminent cultural philosopher in the United States today." Part of what makes him ready for prime time, of course, is that he appears, fixed at last in the mass culture's headlights, to be all antlers--a creature entirely crowned by the tags of others. What makes him the awesome figure he is--the command of the deep forest, the nonpareil grasp of the philosophical world--necessarily trails behind as he eyeballs, and is eyeballed by, his new audience. Rorty, it appears, is ready for the close-up American philosophers get--a quick once-over. Thanks to this year's Achieving Our Country (Harvard), the widely reviewed tip of his secular, reformist, anti- epistemological iceberg, he's drawing the usual misreading and distortion from the political right--as if he were William Ginsburg in toga, needing to be shown his place. To Roger Kimball in The American Spectator, America's 66-year-old philosophical maverick is a "happy nihilist" and "the official philosopher of postmodern academic liberals," even though Rorty prominently zapped "postmodernism" last November in the New York Times's "Most Overrated Idea" symposium--he branded it "a word that pretends to stand for an idea," and one "it would be nice to get rid of." According to David Brooks in The Weekly Standard, Rorty predicts in Achieving Our Country that "we are about to become a dictatorship," even though a glance at the text shows that Rorty is extrapolating from Edward Luttwak's suggestion that "fascism may be the American future." To Arnold Beichman in the Washington Times, Rorty seeks "to resuscitate a moribund Marxified radicalism," an odd size-up, given Rorty's statement that "Marxism was not only a catastrophe for all the countries in which Marxists took power, but a disaster for the reformist Left in all the countries in which they did not." The most disingenuous criticism, however, has to be George Will's May 25 Newsweek attack on Rorty's "remarkably bad book." Will charges that Rorty "radiates contempt for the country" and "seems to despise most Americans." Asking, "When was the last time Rorty read a newspaper?" Will declares that Rorty "knows next to nothing" about the "real America." Quite unfair, you might think, to a book that variously touches on the Wagner Act, Stonewall and other non-ivory-tower events. Nowhere does Will advise his Newsweek readers that he's derided by Rorty in Achieving Our Country as one of those "columnists" who base their "know-nothing criticisms of the contemporary American academy" on believing "everything they read in scandalmongering books by Dinesh D'Souza, David Lehman and others. They do not read philosophy, but simply search out titles and sentences to which they can react with indignation." No matter. For those who do read philosophy--and think it behooves critics of the country's most influential philosopher to examine his background beliefs before whacking him--Truth and Progress comes at an apt time. A selection of his philosophical essays from the nineties (along with two earlier pieces), the volume undermines widespread shibboleths about Rorty: that he doesn't argue, that he rejects analytic philosophy, that he thinks philosophy is dead, that he nonetheless celebrates all Continental philosophers from Foucault to Lacan to Derrida, that he doesn't believe in truth. Moreover, the book shows that he's vulnerable to criticism, but hardly on the sloppy grounds advanced by enemies. Helpfully organized into three sections--truth, moral progress and the role of philosophy in human progress--the book enables readers, as Achieving Our Country does not, to trace the full arc of Rorty's beliefs. It permits the media culture now taking stock of Rorty to locate the challenges of his work accurately, to understand the linkage--for there is linkage--between his philosophical beliefs, his intellectual autobiography and his politics. Finally, Truth and Progress exhibits both the dazzle and idiosyncrasy of Rorty's literary style and eristic habits--the sharp insider wit, the hyperactive thumbnailing of other thinkers to hawk fresh images of their thought, the will to eponymy and syncretism, the vote- with-one's-feet reaction to what Imre Lakatos called "degenerate research programs" in philosophy. Both rightists and leftists should agree, though with different looks on their faces, that Truth and Progress offers a liberal education in contemporary philosophy. To understand Rorty's refinements of his views here, consider the most compact version he has given of his own career--the short self-portrait he contributed to the recent Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. In it he describes how in the late seventies he sought to combine insights from analytic philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and W.V.O. Quine "to formulate a generalized criticism of the notion that knowledge was a matter of mental or linguistic representation of reality. This anti- representationalism was the principal thesis of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), a book which went on to argue that the end of representationalism meant the end of epistemologically-centered philosophy (though not of philosophy itself)." He describes his second book, Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) as a collection of essays "elaborating on some of the points made there." Moving on to his next essay collections--Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989); Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991); and Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991)--Rorty writes that "I tried to bring together the anti-representationalist doctrines common to James, Dewey, [Donald] Davidson and Wittgenstein with some similar doctrines shared by Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. The main argument is that once one puts aside foundationalism, representationalism and the sterile quarrels between 'realists' and 'anti-realists,' one comes to see philosophy as continuous with science on one side and with literature on the other. I have also argued that the traditional tasks of moral philosophy should be taken over by literature and political experimentation." "Although frequently accused," Rorty drily sums up, "of raving irrationalism and unconscionable frivolity by the political right, and of insufficient radicalism, as well as premature anti-communism, by the political left, I think of myself as sharing John Dewey's political attitudes and hopes, as well as his pragmatism. In my most recent work, I have been trying to distinguish what is living from what is dead in Dewey's thought." Rorty keeps to his program in Truth and Progress, making clear that the pragmatist conception of truth anchors all else. What American pragmatists from Peirce, Dewey and James to Sellars, Quine and Davidson established, in Rorty's view, is that we understand truth better when we abandon such notions as "the intrinsic nature of reality" and "correspondence to reality" for something like James's famous phrase that "the true is the good in the way of belief." We must, however, understand James to be saying that "we have no criterion of truth other than justification," and that justification will always be relative to audiences. While Rorty accepts (pace his caricaturists) that "true" is semantically "an absolute term," he notes that "its conditions of application will always be relative." For complex reasons whose articulation Rorty credits, as he does much of his epistemological perspective, to Davidson (a magisterial analytic philosopher now retired from Berkeley), Rorty believes pragmatists cannot sensibly attempt "to specify the nature of truth" because its very absoluteness makes it indefinable. In practice, it, like "objectivity," amounts to intersubjective agreement within a particular community. Rorty sees the substitution of "objectivity-as-intersubjectivity" for "objectivity as accurate representation" as "the key pragmatic move." The link between independent reality and thinking is causal, not rational. Rorty's first section of eight essays explores nuances in his views on truth by grappling with those very epistemologists he describes as engaged in "sterile quarrels." The greatest canard about Rorty is that he's intellectually lazy in a way peculiar to so-called relativists. On the contrary, no modern philosopher has read a wider range of both Anglo-American and Continental peers--and commented on them more indefatigably--than Rorty. Whatever one thinks of Rorty's emerging rules of thumb, it's a sociological fact of recent American philosophy that his once-eccentric practice of reading (and urging students to read) both Quine and Heidegger, both Davidson and Foucault, helped to wear down (if not tear down) the Heavy-Meta Curtain that made reading both analytic and Continental philosophy until the seventies as weird as practicing two religions simultaneously. In these essays Rorty takes on the work of Davidson, Crispin Wright (a realist completely at odds with Rorty's views), Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Charles Taylor, Daniel Dennett, Thomas Nagel, Robert Brandom, John McDowell and Michael Williams. He acknowledges that the tone is "dismissive," that his aim is "discouraging further attention" to the topic. Yet sentence by sentence, he argues--that is, he presents complex theoretical considerations, richly footnoted, meant to persuade us to abandon realism. In "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?" for instance, Rorty answers no, because pragmatism doesn't permit the notion that we ever get closer to a capital-T truth that trumps all others for all times and communities. But not before he enters the nomenclature of his opponent, Wright, and explores the possibilities. Similarly, in "Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace," Rorty painstakingly seeks to identify the differences between their pragmatist positions, and accepts some rebukes. He agrees, for instance, that for pragmatists, "the question should always be 'What use is it?' rather than 'Is it real?'" Throughout the essays, whether he's pondering everyday phrases like "representing accurately" or manipulating such peculiar notions as P.F. Strawson's that facts are "sentence-shaped objects," or training intense attention on the signature phrases favored by lead actors in the realist/anti-realist follies--McDowell's "answerability to the world," Bernard Williams's "how things are anyway," Taylor's "in virtue of the way things are"--Rorty does his homework. Along the way, he also explains the philosophical hats he is and isn't willing to wear (since you ask, he's a naturalist, holist and psychological nominalist, but not a reductivist). Andwilling to wear (since you ask, he's a naturalist, holist and psychological nominalist, but not a reductivist). And always and ever he elaborates, coloring in his big picture. The pragmatist conception of truth, Rorty admits, should not claim to be "commonsensical," because most people hold on to "realist" and "representationalist" intuitions. Rather, pragmatists must be, like Dewey, reformers "involved in a long-term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common sense, and the self-image of their community." He also airs the Darwinism that structures most of his other beliefs. By Darwinism, Rorty means the vrepresentational relation to the intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the bowerbird's skill at weaving." Those who charge Rorty with simplistic relativism might consult this and other parts of Truth and Progress to confirm that he knows the traditional argument that relativism is self- contradictory and easily slips it. He agrees, in fact, with Putnam: "Like Relativism... Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from Nowhere." Rorty says his "strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which 'the Relativist' keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics to cultural politics, from claims about knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 15:40:09 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Truth, Relativism and Rorty, Part 2 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit "Rortyism for Beginners" Carlin Romano review of Richard Rorty, "Truth and Progress." The Nation July 27/August 3 1998 pp. 25- 30. (Part 2) It is in such observations that Rorty indicates that big, nonepistemological choices--linkages--follow from the knowledge situation he describes: "Once one gives up the appearance- reality distinction, and the attempt to relate such things as predictive success and diminished cruelty to the intrinsic nature of reality, one has to give separate accounts of progress in science and in morals." Pragmatist accounts, that is, which require that the answers reflect our interests as problem-solving organisms and that the distinctions they utilize make a difference in ordinary practice. Scientific progress becomes "an increased ability to make predictions." Moral progress turns into "becoming like ourselves at our best." Philosophical progress occurs when we "find a way of integrating the worldviews and the moral intuitions we inherited from our ancestors with new scientific theories or new sociopolitical institutions and theories or other novelties." In his second section of essays, on moral progress, Rorty similarly eschews representation for creativity. We should, he suggests, stop asking, "What is our nature?" and ask instead, "What can we make of ourselves?" He rejects foundationalism in human rights as in epistemology. The "question of whether human beings really have the rights enumerated in the Helsinki Declaration," he remarks, "is not worth raising." While strongly supportive of feminism, he wishes certain feminist writers would abandon realist "rhetoric" that suggests women have a "nature" or oppression needs a "theory." Stories, not principles or definitions, lead to moral progress, so "the difference between the moral realist and the moral antirealist seems to pragmatists a difference that makes no practical difference." Instead of theories, we need "sentimental education" of the sort movies, journalism and novels provide, which will expand the set of "people like us." In morality, as elsewhere, we make progress, Rorty insists, by becoming bold narrators and Romantic inventors of better vocabularies. In his final section, Rorty drives home a related point about philosophy. For him, "philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative." Geniuses like "Frege and Mill, Russell and Heidegger, Dewey and Habermas, Davidson and Derrida" spark this kind of progress, not "underlaborers" like himself, who do the useful "dirty work" of clearing philosophical rubbish and "drum-beating" for new narratives and vocabularies. Geniuses induce "Gestalt- switches," which no method can guarantee. Because "the history of philosophy is the history of Gestalt-switches, not of the painstaking carrying-out of research programs," Rorty denies he has "any views about what form philosophy ought to take." Philosophy should have the freedom we offer, at our most liberal, to art. He concludes that to "give up on the idea that philosophy gets nearer to truth, and to interpret it as Dewey did, is to concede primacy to the imagination over the argumentative intellect, and to genius over professionalism." Which narrative shifts appeal to Rorty? Here, unlike in Achieving Our Country, with its moralizing story of political activism and hope, Rorty does not offer a full-scale vision. But in assessing candidates, he favors Sartre's view that we should "attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheist position." At various points in his essays, Rorty returns to a dark notion that draws his epistemology and ethics together in a surprising way. Throughout history, Rorty believes, man has evinced a "desperate hope for a noncontingent and powerful ally"--God, Reason, Truth, Name Your Poison. In his essay on McDowell, Rorty puts it bluntly: "I agree with Heidegger that there is a straight line between the Cartesian quest for certainty and the Nietzschean will to power." In Rorty's view, our traditional seeking of "authoritative guidance"--from God, Reason, "the fierce father," "a nonhuman authority to whom we owe some sort of respect"--debilitates us as free agents. He opposes the "ambition of transcendence" that Thomas Nagel sees as crucial to philosophy. We should drop all that. Rorty knows that the subtleties of his debates with Nagel and other peers are "as baffling to nonpeers are "as baffling to nonspecialists as are those among theologians who debate transubstantiation or who ask whether it is worse to be reincarnated as a hermaphrodite or as a beast." Yet his larger themes make clear that both the right's objection to Rorty as a wishy-washy, postmodernist believer in nothing and the left's gentler charge that he devalues cultural analysis misconstrue the challenge Rorty poses to all intellectual "stories." His vision of philosophy and art is nakedly Darwinian: Let a thousand narratives bloom, and those that survive will survive (not necessarily the fittest, since there's nothing to fit What, then, are the most appropriate criticisms of Rorty? Those that hold him to his pragmatist standards, then evaluate his narratives by how well they persuade us. While Rorty's thought is far too complex to permit a comprehensive catalogue of vulnerabilities here, three main angles suggest themselves: stylistic, rhetorical and moral. Rorty is unquestionably the best philosophical writer since Russell, gifted at lacing details and abstractions together with a punch few can rival. Yet his most famous stylistic signature is his runaway eponymy--he's the biggest philosophical namedropper, the most inveterate cartographer, in the history of the field. "Brandom is, in this respect, to Davidson," he writes in his essay on the first thinker, "as McDowell is to Sellars." He begins a sentence in his essay on McDowell, "From a Sellarsian, Davidsonian, Brandomian, or Hegelian viewpoint..." Pedantry? Mastery? Regardless, one only has to ponder the adjective "Rortyan" to fathom that adjectives aimed at capturing entire webs of belief are like webs themselves--full of holes. Can Rorty's narratives, fastened together at so many knots by these eponymous adjectives, win a long- range battle of persuasion? It's doubtful. In another doozy of a sentence, Rorty writes about the imagined conversations of great philosophers across time: "The Fregean, the Kripkean, the Popperian, the Whiteheadian, and the Heidegerrian will each reeducate Plato in a different way before starting to argue with him." Whether anyone will be able to speak Rorty after its head griot passes on remains to be seen. Forensically, Rorty also practices a kind of therapeutic proselytization, a blend of Wittgenstein and Nancy Reagan. His most common argumentative move is to urge the reader to "Just Say No!" to concepts he dislikes. In Truth and Progress Rorty says we should "rid ourselves" of the notion of intelligibility. We should notice that talking about the "real" has been "more trouble than it was worth." We should "dissolve rather than solve the problem of freedom and determinism." We should dump such mental faculties as "thought" and "sensation." We should "just stop trying to write books called A History of Philosophy." We should know that "the time has come to drop the terms 'capitalism' and 'socialism' from the political vocabulary of the Left." And we know from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature what he thinks about Descartes, representation and realism. We should do all this, he adds, in Humean good spirits, to achieve a Wittgensteinian peace. Rorty is, for better or worse, the Rhett Butler of professional American philosophy: a man willing, in the end, to walk away from what's been most important in his life--and discipline--with a fine crusty confidence. The problem is, it's not always clear why others would want to join him in hitting the road. Take realism. For someone hostile to countless old distinctions, Rorty can be awfully binary. In Achieving Our Country he writes that "objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman." Yet most battles about objectivity concern a third category--accurate representation of something human. Recognizing our hand in shaping narrative, we still think some stories more accurate than others. In his zeal to launch a thousand narrative ships, Rorty pays little mind to the journalistic truth that the first step in establishing a new tale may be to discredit the older tale already in place. It's a job he regularly performs--his apostate rendition of modern philosophy as the mirror of nature is a classic--but never overtly honors. On the contrary, he tends to pooh-pooh the enterprise of getting stories right, a possible case of Sartrean self-deception for this fine conceptual reporter (he'd hate to be called a correspondent), who plainly sweats to make his dispatches on other thinkers exact. In Achieving Our Country Rorty asserts that "there is no point in asking whether Lincoln or Whitman or Dewey got America right. Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity." But if we take Rorty at his word in Truth and Progress--that pragmatism requires imaginative stories that solve problems--then there is a point. It's just not an epistemological point. The point is that we want to know which is better for us. Too often, Rorty lets his fear of epistemological echoes lead him into diction that plays into the hands of those who dub him a relativist. It makes him sound as if he thinks that no one story is better than another, which is the opposite of what he believes. Finally, Rorty scants another problem that arises from his belief in nonfoundational ethics propelled by humanizing stories. He almost never acknowledges that clearheaded pragmatism might mandate the use of absolutist, realist speech in a culture where absolute, realist intuitions persist. The only place in Truth and Progress where Rorty partly concedes this is in "Feminism and Pragmatism," where he writes: "Although practical politics will doubtless often require feminists to speak with the universalist vulgar, they might profit from thinking with the pragmatists." But doesn't that introduce a nonpragmatist form of empty mentalism? Rorty remarks in his final essay that his least favorite thought in Foucault is that "to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system." One might just as well say that to ignore the tenacity of the present system is to insure that one's imagined system will not prevail. For all his vaunting of future imaginative labor, Rorty underestimates how current "objectivist" tales are themselves imaginative, exploitable work. Rorty's lack of interest in this "prudential" form of realism is best explained by the starkest lacuna in his philosophical ecumenicism--the absence of any appreciation for the reviving insights of classical rhetoric, the sensible human persuasion of others without bowing to eternal verities. One would expect greater affection from Rorty toward figures from Protagoras and Isocrates down to Gramsci (who knew that cultural battles matter) and Chaim Perelman, the Belgian philosopher and leader of the Belgian resistance, who abandoned analytic philosophy once he studied how lawyers actually argue cases in real life. Rorty often gives the impression that any attempt to persuade beyond simply standing up and reciting one's story or screening one's film or offering a fresh vocabulary smacks of surrender to old- fashioned realism. It is yet another irony of Rorty's ironism that this steadfast foe of realism is so insistent that people talk a correct meta-language. Other openings in the Rortyan front line suggest themselves--his distinct lack of interest in the role of evil in moral responsibility, for instance, and his deafness to the jurisprudential overtones of "justification" that render it, in the public ear, a more realist notion than he thinks. Truth and Progress, nonetheless, demonstrates that Richard Rorty remains not only the master philosophical expositor of his era but a thinker who has raised (some would say lowered) philosophical historiography to an art form. Early on, Rorty shares an anecdote. "When I was a thrusting young academic philosopher," he recalls, "I heard an admired senior colleague, Stuart Hampshire, describe a starstudded international conference on some vast and pretentious topic." Hampshire, who'd attended, had been asked to sum up the results. "'No trick at all,' Hampshire explained, 'for an old syncretist hack like me.' At that moment, I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up." As it turns out, Rorty overachieved. He long ago won a promotion, like it or not, to syncretic downsizer and designated Gestalt-switch-hitter. Just don't look for those tags in the newspaper articles. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Carlin Romano, literary critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy at Bennington College. Copyright (c) 1996, The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Electronic redistribution for nonprofit purposes is permitted, provided this notice is attached in its entirety. Unauthorized, for-profit redistribution is prohibited. For further information regarding reprinting and syndication, please call The Nation at (212) 242-8400, ext. 226 or send e-mail to Max Block. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 16:42:51 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Greg Ransom Subject: Re: Truth, Relativism and Rorty, Prt 1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit One of the weirder facts about Rorty is that he seems to pretend that two of the more significant and influential social theorists & philosophers of the 20th century -- Hayek & Popper -- simply don't exist. This is particularly strange in that both are seminal anti-foundationalists -- and both include important social dimensions to their work in many ways not so different from Oakeshott, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn, writers championed by Rorty. Even Foucault recommended that his students read Hayek. It's hard to identify two more important or prominent critics of the sort of cultural relativism, historicism, & leftism with which Rorty is associated than Hayek and Popper (who by no accident work in the tradition of Carl Menger, perhaps the most important of the anti-historicists of the 19th century, and the founder of the leading anti-leftist school in the social sciences). Yet Rorty, the voracious reader and polymath seems either not to know much in this area , or finds it in his best interest not to -- or at least perhaps finds it in his interest not to critically engage alternatives to his own conception of this fundamental kind. Greg Ransom MiraCosta College gbransom@aol.com The Hayek Page: http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekpage.htm In a message dated 7/14/98 Valdusek@AOL.COM writes: << The greatest canard about Rorty is that he's intellectually lazy in a way peculiar to so-called relativists. On the contrary, no modern philosopher has read a wider range of both Anglo-American and Continental peers--and commented on them more indefatigably--than Rorty. Whatever one thinks of Rorty's emerging rules of thumb, it's a sociological fact of recent American philosophy that his once-eccentric practice of reading (and urging students to read) both Quine and Heidegger, both Davidson and Foucault, >> ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 23:27:10 -0700 Reply-To: wderzko@pathcom.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Walter Derzko Subject: Intelligent agents may cause economic chaos ? X-To: List KM X-cc: List CPSI-L , List -Creativity , List COMPLEX-M digests , List Learnng-Org MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit An interesting and thought-provoking story from the New Scientist (see below) about Intelligent agents causing potential economic chaos and deflation. Any thoughts ? Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com ========================================================== Brain Space File 98-612 WHY THE WIRED ECONOMY IS DOOMED --agents without a conscience [From New Scientist, 4 July 1998--Walter Derzko] Intelligent software agents that don't care about the consequences of their actions will subject the world to frequent and severe bouts of boom and bust, according to two research groups in the US. As we use the Internet more and more for home shopping and banking, the use of agents to get us the best prices will lead to economic turmoil. >From New Scientist, 4 July 1998 Wired for mayhem by Mark Ward Economic booms and busts will become more frequent and more severe if programs called software agents control electronic commerce. Agents tend to exaggerate the worst market swings and create disastrous price wars, say two research groups in the US. As more goods and services are bought on the Internet, observers predict that we will need agents to get the best prices. But agents are not subject to the restraints that normally slow economic activity: their transactions take place almost instantaneously, cost next to nothing and distance is irrelevant. Jeffrey Kephart and colleagues at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York have been studying a simple market that uses agents to buy and sell information like stock prices. They created a model with three types of agents: one published the information, another acted as a broker that split the data into saleable chunks, and the third represented consumers. The model used 10 information providers, 10 brokers and 1000 customers. Yet even in this simple model, Kephart found that the swift reactions of broker and consumer agents to price changes meant that devastating price wars raged constantly, and providers' profits varied wildly as they fought for business. Customers were often dropped by brokers when it became unprofitable to supply them with information. Alexander Chislenko of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built another model--and got very similar results. He says that controlling economies with heavy use of agents "would be like trying to control a car that was travelling at 500 miles an hour" because agent economies exhibit behavior that verges on the chaotic. © Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1998 New Scientist July 3, 1998, Page 7 Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 09:29:41 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: nytimes.com is Now Free! X-To: psa-public-sphere@sheffield.ac.uk, hraj@maelstrom.stjohns.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Great News... effective immediately The New York Times on the Web can be accessed free of charge by readers around the world. A newly redesigned home page and the addition of two features, Page One Plus and Quick News make it easier to stay current and find the news you need. Help us spread the great news. Let your friends and colleagues know that they can now enjoy The New York Times's quality news report at no charge. We hope you visit the site soon. http://www.nytimes.com Sincerely, Martin A. Nisenholtz President The New York Times Electronic Media Company Note: Access to the Premium Diversions Service (Crosswords, Bridge, and Chess) requires a fee of US$9.95 per year. You will be asked to subscribe if you try to enter this service. __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 08:05:52 -0600 Reply-To: kwj@4work.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Kevin Johansen Organization: 4Work Subject: Re: Intelligent agents may cause economic chaos ? X-To: wderzko@pathcom.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="------------D79909E646A9D3DECCAA58D2" --------------D79909E646A9D3DECCAA58D2 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Hi Walter, I think that the author of this has some bad combination of technophobia and low self-esteem. Or perhaps he is simply a sensationalist - or maybe just lazy. The recurring use of the word 'simple' is the fatal flaw in this argument. Good agents should dip deeper into the data flow than those described below. But spit the hook on this argument. It's a dead end. No one can yet task an agent - even a good one - to make their buy/sell decisions for them. Simply put, they can't do it, and to my knowledge, one has not yet been invented that claims to. It's still us that writes the checks. For the time being, and for the foreseeable future, 'agents' have no hope of becoming intelligent enough to make better quality decisions for the individual than the individual can for them self. If you think this through, much of any decision making process is dependent upon variables that are next to impossible to quantify. Last night, for instance, I ate sushi. Sushi I could care less for, but my girlfriend likes it. You can imagine the discussion that led us to Sushi, but I defy the programming community to write code that can consistently replicate this process and deliver me a result that satisfies. The best most agents can do is help sort the wheat from the chaff. This leaves us pretty much where we started, with humans making the decisions. And I believe us to be wonderfully more complex than ever can be captured in code. For the record, I know a little about agents. I invented one - Job Alert!, the first personal job search agent. As intelligent agents go, it's not very bright, but I've 140,000+ people that use it and are liking the results. Cheers, Kevin Johansen CEO, 4WORK, Inc. 'Automate Your Job Search @4work.com' http://www.4work.com - Just In Time PS - Those of you that may be interested in a deeper look into this and related issues please feel free to click through to: http://www.4work.com/whitepaper/trends.htm Walter Derzko wrote: > An interesting and thought-provoking story from the New Scientist (see > below) about Intelligent agents causing potential economic chaos > and deflation. > > Any thoughts ? > > Walter Derzko > Director Brain Space > (formerly the Idea Lab at > the Design Exchange) > Toronto > (416) 588-1122 > wderzko@pathcom.com > > ========================================================== > Brain Space File > 98-612 WHY THE WIRED ECONOMY IS DOOMED --agents without a conscience > > [From New Scientist, 4 July 1998--Walter Derzko] > > Intelligent software agents that don't care about the consequences of their > actions will subject the world to frequent and severe bouts of boom and > bust, according to two research groups in the US. As we use the Internet > more and more for home shopping and banking, the use of agents to get > us the best prices will lead to economic turmoil. > > >From New Scientist, 4 July 1998 > > Wired for mayhem by Mark Ward > > Economic booms and busts will become more frequent and more severe if > programs called software agents control electronic commerce. Agents tend to > exaggerate the worst market swings and create disastrous price wars, say > two research groups in the US. > > As more goods and services are bought on the Internet, observers predict > that we will need agents to get the best prices. But agents are not subject > to the restraints that normally slow economic activity: their transactions > take place almost instantaneously, cost next to nothing and distance is > irrelevant. > > Jeffrey Kephart and colleagues at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research > Center in New York have been studying a simple market that uses agents > to buy and sell information like stock prices. They created a model with > three types of agents: one published the information, another acted as > a broker that split the data into saleable chunks, and the third > represented > consumers. The model used 10 information providers, 10 brokers and > 1000 customers. > > Yet even in this simple model, Kephart found that the swift reactions of > broker and consumer agents to price changes meant that devastating > price wars raged constantly, and providers' profits varied wildly as they > fought for business. Customers were often dropped by brokers when it > became unprofitable to supply them with information. > > Alexander Chislenko of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built > another model--and got very similar results. He says that controlling > economies with heavy use of agents "would be like trying to control a > car that was travelling at 500 miles an hour" because agent economies > exhibit behavior that verges on the chaotic. > > © Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1998 > > New Scientist July 3, 1998, Page 7 > > Walter Derzko > Director Brain Space > (formerly the Idea Lab at > the Design Exchange) > Toronto > (416) 588-1122 > wderzko@pathcom.com --------------D79909E646A9D3DECCAA58D2 Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Hi Walter,

I think that the author of this has some bad combination of technophobia and low self-esteem.  Or perhaps he is simply a sensationalist - or maybe just lazy.

The recurring use of the word 'simple' is the fatal flaw in this argument.  Good agents should dip deeper into the data flow than those described below.   But spit the hook on this argument.  It's a dead end.  No one can yet task an agent - even a good one - to make their buy/sell decisions for them.  Simply put, they can't do it, and to my knowledge, one has not yet been invented that claims to.  It's still us that writes the checks.  For the time being, and for the foreseeable future, 'agents' have no hope of becoming intelligent enough to make better quality decisions for the individual than the individual can for them self.

If you think this through, much of any decision making process is dependent upon variables that are next to impossible to quantify.  Last night, for instance, I ate sushi.  Sushi I could care less for, but my girlfriend likes it.  You can imagine the discussion that led us to Sushi, but I defy the programming community to write code that can consistently replicate this process and deliver me a result that satisfies.  The best most agents can do is help sort the wheat from the chaff.   This leaves us pretty much where we started, with humans making the decisions.   And I believe us to be wonderfully more complex than ever can be captured in code.

For the record, I know a little about agents.  I invented one - Job Alert!, the first personal job search agent.  As intelligent agents go, it's not very bright, but I've 140,000+ people that use it and are liking the results.

Cheers,
Kevin Johansen
CEO, 4WORK, Inc.
'Automate Your Job Search @4work.com'
http://www.4work.com - Just In Time

PS - Those of you that may be interested in a deeper look into this and related issues please feel free to click through to:

 

Walter Derzko wrote:

An interesting and thought-provoking story from the New Scientist (see
below)  about Intelligent agents causing potential economic chaos
and deflation.

Any thoughts ?

Walter Derzko
Director Brain Space
(formerly the Idea Lab at
the Design Exchange)
Toronto
(416) 588-1122
wderzko@pathcom.com

==========================================================
Brain Space File
98-612 WHY THE WIRED ECONOMY IS DOOMED --agents without a conscience

[From New Scientist, 4 July 1998--Walter Derzko]

Intelligent software agents that don't care about the consequences of their
actions will subject the world to frequent and severe bouts of boom and
bust,  according to two research groups in the US. As we use the Internet
more and more for home shopping and banking, the use of agents to get
us the best prices  will lead to economic turmoil.

>From New Scientist, 4 July 1998

Wired for mayhem by Mark Ward

Economic booms and busts will become more frequent and more severe if
programs called software agents control electronic commerce. Agents tend to
exaggerate the  worst market swings and create disastrous price wars, say
two research groups in  the US.

As more goods and services are bought on the Internet, observers predict
that we will need agents to get the best prices. But agents are not subject
to the restraints that  normally slow economic activity: their transactions
take place almost instantaneously,  cost next to nothing and distance is
irrelevant.

Jeffrey Kephart and colleagues at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research
Center in New  York have been studying a simple market that uses agents
to buy and sell information  like stock prices. They created a model with
three types of agents: one published the  information, another acted as
a broker that split the data into saleable chunks, and the  third
represented
consumers. The model used 10 information providers, 10 brokers and
1000 customers.

Yet even in this simple model, Kephart found that the swift reactions of
broker and  consumer agents to price changes meant that devastating
price wars raged constantly,  and providers' profits varied wildly as they
fought for business. Customers were often  dropped by brokers when it
became unprofitable to supply them with information.

Alexander Chislenko of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built
another  model--and got very similar results. He says that controlling
economies with heavy  use of agents "would be like trying to control a
car that was travelling at 500 miles  an hour" because agent economies
exhibit behavior that verges on the chaotic.

© Copyright New Scientist, RBI Limited 1998

New Scientist July 3, 1998, Page 7

Walter Derzko
Director Brain Space
(formerly the Idea Lab at
the Design Exchange)
Toronto
(416) 588-1122
wderzko@pathcom.com

  --------------D79909E646A9D3DECCAA58D2-- ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 11:17:45 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Lichnerowicz, Chaos, etc. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Brad McCormick brought up the case of Cornelius Castoriadis, who writes about themes that some of the other French theorists scewered by Sokal and Bricmont (such as fuzzy logic, quantum mechanics, entropy, etc.) but does so with some more seeming attention to actual works in the field. Another case is a work of five French Profs, mostly at the College de France (one at Aix-Marseille) whose book "Chaos and Determinism" is published by Johns Hopkins (perhaps a sign of use by literary theorists). There are chapters on turbulence, groups in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, biology, economics and philosophy. Except for the conclusion by a philosopher the chapters are not given separate authorships by they generally correspond to the fields of the five authors. The Preface is by Julian C. R. Hunt, F.R.S., of Cambridge U. who had reviewed it in the European J. of Mechanics. One of the contributors is Andre Lichnerowicz who can't be said to be ignorant of math, as a expositor and formalizer of various parts of Elie Cartan's work in groups and geometry. Yet said work does discuss Bergson, Tielhard d' Chardin, mentions Foucault and Freud and other bad fellows. One wonders what Sokal, Bricmont, Levitt, et al think of this work. Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 13:36:35 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Chaos, determinism, and all that MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Since I haven't seen the book Val mentions, I can't very well comment on it. Lichnerowicz is a first-rate mathematician by anyone's standards. Still, without prejudice, I note that mathematicians can be as screwy as anyone, and can be perfectly irrational in obedience to ideological or "spiritual" commitments. There's Newton himself, for instance. And I could name all sorts of contemporary examples on all sides of every issue. So there's certainly a possibility that the book in question is quite loony, nothwithstanding the mathematical eminence of some of its endorsers. But I'm not going to prejudge that issue. I will say, however, that any kind of enthusiasm for Freud, let alone Lacan, at this stage of the game, is certainly infra dig. The same pretty much applies to Teilhard. NL ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 20:29:29 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Intelligent agents may cause economic chaos ? X-To: kwj@4work.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Kevin Johansen wrote: > > --------------D79909E646A9D3DECCAA58D2 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit > > Hi Walter, > > I think that the author of this has some bad combination of technophobia and > low self-esteem. Or perhaps he is simply a sensationalist - or maybe just > lazy. > > The recurring use of the word 'simple' is the fatal flaw in this argument. > Good agents should dip deeper into the data flow than those described below. > But spit the hook on this argument. It's a dead end. [snip] I have yet to see an argument that *speeding up* financial transactions *increases* financial *stability* (the NYT Sunday magazine recently had an article that called this issue: the nuke of the 90s). As transaction processing speeds up, not only do workers' lives get more harried (who cares about "them"?), but time for reflection, "slack", etc. diminishes. The limit as the rate of transaction [inter-]processing approaches universal instantaneity is surely a socio-economic "event horizon", i.e., the chain reaction approaches its exponential limit and there will be an implosion (literally: THE END OF TIME). *Now* --> if somebody wants to start building *delay circuits* into these online systems, *then* there may yet be some real *use* in them. Perhaps the French have made a start by trying to outlaw (and really *stop*!) overtime. As Josef Pieper's masterful essay (appositely, out of print!) goes: "Leisure, the basis of cultuer". \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 12:21:10 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: search engines, index of email forums X-To: darwin-and-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk, hraj@maelstrom.stjohns.edu, psychoanalytic-stucies@sheffield.ac.uk, psa-public-sphere@sheffield.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" There is a multimple search engine and very large search engine index at http://www.merrydew.demon.co.uk/search.htm It is called BIG Search Engine Index. You can search many search engines at once from this site. There is, at the other extreme, a search engine called Ask Jeeves which is very parsimonious and gives only a few (usually excellent) results per enquiry: http://www.askjeeves.com/ If you want to find an email discussion list on practically any topic, go to Liszt: http://www.liszt.com/ There are 84,792 lists currently indexed there. Best, Bob Young __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 12:39:01 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Organization: Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies Subject: The coming Global Cognitive Elite race MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Conner, Steve. "Hawking Predicts Birth of Superman." The Sunday Times (March 8, 1998), p. 10. A race of genetically engineered superhumans will pose formidable social problems for future governments, Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge physicist, told a White House gathering this weekend. Human beings would take control of their own evolution during the next millennium to improve their genes and increase their mental and physical abilities, Hawking said. Though biological evolution of man had been slow, with litttle or no change over the past 10,000 years, this would soon alter once humans began to tamper with their DNA. "Now we are at the beginning of an era in which we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA without having to wait for the slow process of biological evolution," Hawking said. He said humans were likely to be able to redesign themselves completely over the next 1,000 years, a situation which would be difficult to outlaw. "Genetic engineering on plants and animals will be alowed for economic reasons and someone is bound to try it on humans. Unless we have a totalitarian world order, someone will design improved humans somewhere," he said. "Clearly, developing improved humans will create great social and political problems with respect to unimproved humans. I'm not advocating human genetic engineering as a good thing, I'm just saying that it is likely to happen in the next millennium, whether we like it or not." Hawking, the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and author of the best-selling A Brief History of Time, was invited by President Bill Clinton to address an audience ranging from students to Nobel laureates on science in the next millennium. He predicted the advent of computers as intelligent as humans. "By the end of the next millennium, if we get there, the change will be fundamental," he said. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 16:21:09 -0700 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Michael Gregory, NEXA/H-NEXA" Subject: The coming Global Cognitive Elite race Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 12:39:01 +0000 From: Ian Pitchford [Ed. Thanks to Ian and Bob for this x-post. I am taking up a collection to buy Hawking a set of all the surviving Greek tragedies, where he may see many demos of the Hubris and Nemesis protocols, presently under option to the firm of Wilson, Barash, Dawkins and Pinker, who may soon present them as an IPO to the beta-theta testers, Demos Ltd. /mg/] Conner, Steve. "Hawking Predicts Birth of Superman." The Sunday Times (March 8, 1998), p. 10. A race of genetically engineered superhumans will pose formidable social problems for future governments, Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge physicist, told a White House gathering this weekend. Human beings would take control of their own evolution during the next millennium to improve their genes and increase their mental and physical abilities, Hawking said. Though biological evolution of man had been slow, with litttle or no change over the past 10,000 years, this would soon alter once humans began to tamper with their DNA. "Now we are at the beginning of an era in which we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA without having to wait for the slow process of biological evolution," Hawking said. He said humans were likely to be able to redesign themselves completely over the next 1,000 years, a situation which would be difficult to outlaw. "Genetic engineering on plants and animals will be alowed for economic reasons and someone is bound to try it on humans. Unless we have a totalitarian world order, someone will design improved humans somewhere," he said. "Clearly, developing improved humans will create great social and political problems with respect to unimproved humans. I'm not advocating human genetic engineering as a good thing, I'm just saying that it is likely to happen in the next millennium, whether we like it or not." Hawking, the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and author of the best-selling A Brief History of Time, was invited by President Bill Clinton to address an audience ranging from students to Nobel laureates on science in the next millennium. He predicted the advent of computers as intelligent as humans. "By the end of the next millennium, if we get there, the change will be fundamental," he said. ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 19:57:01 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Re: The coming Global Cognitive Elite race In-Reply-To: <199807192330.TAA14000@mail-relay3.idt.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sun, 19 Jul 1998, Michael Gregory, NEXA/H-NEXA wrote: > Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 12:39:01 +0000 > From: Ian Pitchford > > [Ed. Thanks to Ian and Bob for this x-post. I am taking up a collection to > buy Hawking a set of all the surviving Greek tragedies, where he may see > many demos of the Hubris and Nemesis protocols, presently under option to > the firm of Wilson, Barash, Dawkins and Pinker, who may soon present them > as an IPO to the beta-theta testers, Demos Ltd. /mg/] > > Conner, Steve. "Hawking Predicts Birth of Superman." The Sunday > Times (March 8, 1998), p. 10. It's rather pointless to lecture the future as to what it should or shouldn't do, especially when the time scale is as long as 1000 years. Consider what the world (the "Western" world, if you like) was like on the eve of the first millennieum, and how little at home an inhabitant of that world would be in ours, how little his assumptions would intersect with out own, and how inadequate his knowledge base would be to comprehending the most ordinary events--a car finding a parking space, for instance. Given that so much of the change betrwween AD 998 and the present occurred in the last 200 years or so, it seems self-evident that, allowing that human society doesn't undergo a massive collapse, the probable rate of change in all our trechnology--and all our reigning social assumptions--will be enormous over the next 1000 years. How likely is it that the"people" (if that's what they turn out to be) of 2998 will share this cultures misgivings about "genetic engineering" (or whatever now-unimaginable technology will have succeeded it)? Imagine a citizen of 998 worrying whether his descendants in 1998 will be doing an adequate job of reliquary building an manuscript illumination. The only thing we know about the future, on that scale, is that it's utterly inaccessible, and that little that concerns us now will concern our own descendants. The only criticism one might make of Hawking's prediction is that the time-scale is out of whack, probably for reasons of tact. The kind of species-level genetic modification he envisions is almost certainly likely to be undertaken well within the next century. But it's probably futile to assume that the current agonizing over the "ethical" questions involved is more than a transient phenomenon--rather like the agoniziing that once went on whether it was moral to provide anesthetics for women in labor, since the Bible enjoined them to bear children in pain. Norm Levitt ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 08:58:55 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: A hero for our time MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII "Against Marxism, parapsychology, Zen, yoga, animal right advocates, alternative medicine, Hindu gods, J.R.R. Tolkien, postgraduate mystics, California philosophers and anyone or anything either premodern or postmodern." You can't have a better epitaph than that. --------------------------------------- July 22, 1998 Miroslav Holub Is Dead at 74; Czech Poet and Immunologist By SARAH BOXER Miroslav Holub, the Czech poet and immunologist known for his ironic wit, his impatience with irrationality and his knifelike poetry full of scientific imagery, died July 14 in Prague, where he lived. He was 74. FILTERED THROUGH A SCIENTIST'S EYE And so it circulates from the San Bernardino Freeway to the Santa Monica Freeway and down to the San Diego Freeway and up to the Golden State Freeway, and so it circulates in the vessels of the marine creature, transparent creature, unbelievable creature in the light of the southern moon like the footprint of the last foot in the world, and so it circulates as if there were no other music except Perpetual Motion, as if there were no conductor directing an orchestra of black angels without a full score: out of the grand piano floats a pink C-sharp in the upper octave, out of the violin blood may trickle at any time, and in the joints of the trombone there swells a fear of the tiniest staccato, as if there were no Dante in a wheelchair, holding a ball of cotton to his mouth, afraid to speak a line lest he perforate the meaning, as if there were no genes except the gene for defects and emergency telephone calls, and so it circulates with the full, velvet hum of the disease, circulates all hours of the day, circulates all hours of the night to the praise of non-clotting, each blood cell carrying four molecules of hope that it might all be something totally different from what it is. "Haemophilia/Los Angeles," from "Vanishing Lung Syndrome," translated by David Young and Dana Habova (Faber & Faber, 1990) One of the major Eastern European poets to emerge after World War II, Holub was celebrated for his surreal mixture of scientific exactitude and absurdist humor. Poet Ted Hughes has called him "one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere." In a book titled "The Government of the Tongue" (1988), Seamus Heaney praised Holub as a poet who could lay things bare, "not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull." Holub's poetry, he wrote, is "too compassionate to be vindictive, too skeptical to be entranced, a poetry in which intelligence and irony make their presence felt without displacing delight and the less acerbic wisdoms." Holub was born in Pilsen, Western Bohemia, on Sept. 23, 1923. His father was a lawyer who worked for the railways and his mother was a language teacher. After World War II, he studied medicine at Charles University in Prague and worked in a psychiatric ward there. He supported himself as an editor of Vesmir, a science magazine. In 1953, Holub earned an M.D. degree and went on to work as an immunologist at the Microbiological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science. In 1958, he received a Ph.D. He later developed a strain of nude, or hairless, mice that were used to study various diseases. He wrote more than 150 scientific papers and a monograph, "Immunology of Nude Mice." But it was for his poetry that Holub was celebrated. His first book of poems, "Day Duty," was published in 1958. And he became known in Europe and the United States when his "Selected Poems" was published in 1967 as part of Penguin's series on modern European poets. Although he never called himself a political dissident and was never jailed as one, he often poked fun at totalitarianism in oblique references in his poetry. "The Corporal Who Killed Archimedes" was a protest against communism's inanities masked as a verse about the death of "the circle, tangent and point of intersection in infinity." Shortly after the Prague Spring of 1968, Holub became a "nonperson" in Czechoslovakia. Any mention of his work was forbidden. And none of his poetry was published there between 1970 and 1980. During that period, Holub continued to work as an immunologist in Prague, but he also wrote poetry "to the table," a Russian phrase meaning for an underground audience. In the 1970s his poetry was published in English and in 37 other languages. But in Czechoslovakia, his poems were not published until the fall of communism. Although Holub was sometimes compared with John Donne and the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, he saw himself as closer to other Eastern European writers, particularly Milan Kundera, Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska. He shared with some of those writers what Heaney called a tough, "truth-telling urge" and a "compulsion to identify with the oppressed." Holub's books include "Although" and "Notes From a Clay Pigeon," a book that punned on the poet's name (Holub means pigeon in Czech). Although he was better known in Europe, he also had an American following. He was a visiting poet at Oberlin College in Ohio and published four books with the Oberlin College Press, "Sagittal Section," "Interferon, or On Theater," "Vanishing Lung Syndrome" and "Intensive Care." He also translated some essays by Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould from English into Czech. Holub included many scientific and medical references in his poems. One titled "The Festival," from the book "Vanishing Lung Syndrome," begins: "At the festival of the patients/with all the known diseases/the crutch choir sings/for the pacemakers./The double astigmatic landscape/gratefully swallows the murmurs of the mitral valve." A poem titled "Spacetime" employs the physicist Theodor F.E. Kaluza's theory of spacetime in which "the fifth dimension/is represented as a circle/associated with every point/in spacetime." He was also an unforgiving rationalist in prose. Holub's "Shedding Life: Disease, Politics and Other Human Conditions," a book of essays published by Milkweed Press earlier this year, showed him to be "a wraith of reason deriding all Dark Age flights of fancy," Richard Shweder said in The New York Times Book Review. He was "against Marxism, parapsychology, Zen, yoga, animal rights advocates, alternative medicine, Hindu gods, J.R.R. Tolkien, postgraduate mystics, California philosophers and anyone or anything either premodern or postmodern," Shweder wrote. David Young, Holub's friend and translator at Oberlin College, said: "He viewed science and reason as antidotes to Communism. He put his faith in facts and was critical of all expressions of irrationality." And he did not find his poetic sensibility at odds with his love of science. "I have a single goal but two ways to reach it," Holub once said. "I apply them both in turn. Poetry and science form the basis of my experience." If something went wrong, Holub would say, "It's a very poetic situation," Young recalled. His view of life was sardonic, ironic and grimly witty. In one of his essays in "Shedding Life," he wrote about a muskrat that had been shot in a swimming pool by a neighbor. As Holub was cleaning it up, "he was thinking that the blood doesn't know about the muskrat's death," said Young. "The blood just does what it does." Holub, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, Jitka, and three children. A restless man with a surreal sense of humor, Holub did not like to talk about his personal life. He noted that his favorite poet was Homer, whose biography is obscure. He admired science because of its anonymity. "There is no personal background given: no age, no numbers of girlfriends or wives or children," he once said. "Nothing." [INLINE] [INLINE] [What's Your Health Concern?] _________________________________________________________________ Home | Site Index | Site Search | Forums | Archives | Marketplace Quick News | Page One Plus | International | National/N.Y. | Business | Technology | Science | Sports | Weather | Editorial | Op-Ed | Arts | Automobiles | Books | Diversions | Job Market | Real Estate | Travel Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 12:51:46 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Joseph Needham's Marxism Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 15:22:21 -0400 (EDT) From: Marvin Gettlem The lead article in the Summer, 1998, issue (Vol. 62, no.2) of SCIENCE & SOCIETY is Gregory Blue's "Joseph Needham, Heterodox Marxism, and Chinese Science." Needham (1900-1995) was the author of the monumental 16-volume SCIENCE & CIVILIZATION IN CHINA. The author, now a member of the history faculty at the University of Victoria, BC Canada, was Needham's research associate in the last period of his life, and has used unpublished materials and personal recollections in his essay. SCIENCE & SOCIETY is an independent scholarly journal of Marxism, published in New York City. Inquiries about purchase of single issues and subscriptions may be addressed to staff@guilford.com __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1998 10:23:11 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Joseph Needham's Marxism MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Robert Maxwell Young wrote: > > Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 15:22:21 -0400 (EDT) > From: Marvin Gettlem > > The lead article in the Summer, 1998, issue (Vol. 62, no.2) of SCIENCE & > SOCIETY is Gregory Blue's "Joseph Needham, Heterodox Marxism, and Chinese > Science." Needham (1900-1995) was the author of the monumental 16-volume > SCIENCE & CIVILIZATION IN CHINA. The author, now a member of the history > faculty at the University of Victoria, BC Canada, was Needham's research > associate in the last period of his life, and has used unpublished > materials and personal recollections in his essay. > > SCIENCE & SOCIETY is an independent scholarly journal of Marxism, > published in New York City. Inquiries about purchase of single issues > and subscriptions may be addressed to staff@guilford.com [snip] I'm a Joseph Needham "fan". I really like him (one item: The Foreword and Postscript he wrote for Jolan Chang's _The Tao of Love and Sex_). I bought the journal, and I've been plugging through the article (got 2 pages to go, so maybe there will be a breakthru, yet...). I've been *really* disappointed in the article. I had expected it would be a personal memoir of Mr./Dr./Prof./? Blue's conversations with "the great man" over several decades. It's not. The "net" of the article seems to be: Needham was not a knee-jerk party-liner. We could have guessed that. Scientific American magazine did a much better job when it ran a 2-page profile on Needham a while back. Speak memory! Is there anyone out there with some "Needham stories" worthy of "himself"? \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 08:46:15 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Organization: Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies Subject: Scientists and God X-cc: darwin-and-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Larson, E.J., & Witham, L. (1998). Leading scientists still reject God. Nature, 394(6691), 313. EXCERPT: Our chosen group of "greater" scientists were members of the National Academy of Scientists (NAS). Our survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0% respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers. We found the highest percentage of belief among NAS mathematicians (14.3% in God, 15.0% in immortality). Biological scientists had the lowest rate of belief (5.5% in God, 7.1% in immortality), with physicists and astronomers slightly higher (7.5% in God, 7.5% in immortality)... As we compiled our findings, the NAS issued a booklet encouraging the teaching of evolution in public schools, an ongoing source of friction between the scientific community and some conservative Christians in the United States. The booklet assures readers, "Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral". NAS president Bruce Alberts said "There are many very outstanding members of the academy who are very religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them biologists." Our survey suggests otherwise. ___ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 08:58:15 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Organization: Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies Subject: Sokal and Charlatans MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Dixon, R. (1998). Sokal and Charlatans [Letter]. Times Higher Education Supplement, July 24, 15. THANK you for airing the Sokal debate (THES, October 10 and July 10), but it is dispiriting to read the rebuffs. The charge of scientific nonsense in the writings of Lacan, Latour, Kristeva, and others is shrugged off without shame, denial or surprise. An academic and publishing growth industry in philosophy and cultural studies has been based on the spread of a reading list shown to be rife with charlatanism. Sokal and Bricmont are careful not to extrapoloate beyond their area of competence - science - but the huge interest they attract stems from a widespread perception that bull-shitting is the name of the game through and through. Piaget can be said to have predicted it years ago when he passionately attacked French philosophy with the observation that it it is a field of unverifiable propositions. Arbitrary and empty verbiage can be expected, conservative in content and exclusive in style. The real scandal here does not hang over the heads of individual writers but over the academic legitimacy of the institutions in which this activity has passed for learning. What do we think we are doing when we appoint professors and certificate students in these skills of talking cleverly about a fashionable literature of impenetrable, unexaminable ideas and irksome vocabulary? Nor is charade in academic philosophy that French. I offer an equally critical study of Anglo-Saxon philosophy in "The Baumgarten Corporation - from Sense to Nonsense in Art and Philosophy". __ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 01:58:49 PDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Edward Remler Subject: Re: Scientists and God Content-Type: text/plain Ian Pitchford quotes as follows: ........ > The >booklet assures readers, "Whether God exists or not is a question >about which science is neutral". NAS president Bruce Alberts said >"There are many very outstanding members of the academy who are very >religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them Their survey 'suggests' nothing of the sort. It *says* that about 10% of NAS scientists believe in God.This does equal "many very outstanding people of the academy". It is a small but finite minority of what I imagine (?) is a substantial number of people. Their survey certainly suggests nothing incorrect about the NAS booklet's correct assurance about science's neutrality towards God in the sense in which neutrality was meant. That sense was intellectual as opposed to statistical. Ed Remler Department of Phyics The College of Wiliiam and Mary Williamsburg VA USA ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 12:31:45 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Organization: Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies Subject: Re: Scientists and God In-Reply-To: <199807270909.FAA08764@mx02.globecomm.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Edward Remler wrote: Their survey 'suggests' nothing of the sort. It *says* that about 10% of NAS scientists believe in God.This does equal "many very outstanding people of the academy" ________ REPLY: I think that, strictly speaking, both the points you make are correct, but I suspect that political speechwriters would have a field day with a formal definition of "many" as 5.5%, as in "many biologists are theists." Best wishes Ian ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 18:40:52 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Scientists and God MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Edward Remler wrote: > > Ian Pitchford quotes as follows: > ........ > > The > >booklet assures readers, "Whether God exists or not is a question > >about which science is neutral". NAS president Bruce Alberts said > >"There are many very outstanding members of the academy who are very > >religious people, people who believe in evolution, many of them > > Their survey 'suggests' nothing of the sort. It *says* that about 10% of > NAS scientists believe in God.This does equal "many very outstanding > people of the academy". It is a small but finite minority of what I > imagine (?) is a substantial number of people. Their survey certainly > suggests nothing incorrect about the NAS booklet's correct assurance > about science's neutrality towards God in the sense in which neutrality > was meant. That sense was intellectual as opposed to statistical. [snip] (Why not put my two cents in?) Truth is not a matter of counting hands (noses, etc.). But to address the substantive issues: (1) "God" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. Just what would one do if one encountered some "presence" (is "numinous" the right word here?) one simply could not satisfactorily categorize as animal, vegetable, mineral, human, UFO, etc.? There seem to be enough reports of such experiences as to suggest one should keep an *open mind*. (2) Immortality. It seems that it is not possible to experience not experiencing. As Sartre (not exactly the most dogmatic Roman Catholic in the history of the Western world!) wrote: "we die only for others." The ending of Hermann Broch's _The Death of Virgil_ describes in a fictional way what may indeed be the case: That the lived-time of the dying person may diverge from the lived-time of persons looking at the dying person, so that, whereas the dying person's demise may "take only a few minutes" on the onlooker's time-frame, for the dying person, the experience may rather be *asymptotic*, so that (s)he always approaches ever closer to but never(sic!) reaches the "event horizon". This hypothesis is, of course, quite different from belief in another life like this one, only in a different place (under the earth, or beyond the moon...). Isn't there a Shakespeare character somewhere who says something like (only much more pithily than:) that there are more strange things in the world than we can imagine? If science is about true "objectivity" (self-critical, disciplined understanding) rather than about the religious belief that everything is *objects* (or the social project of turning everything *into* objects!), then God and Death are not just problematics, but mysteries, and, as Robert Musil wrote: Western civilization long ago took a wrong turn in associating the mystical with fuzzy thinking. It is a great tragedy that more scientists and engineers do not have [better: cultivate] mystical experiences in the very precision of their disciplines. \brad mccormick \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 18:11:55 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Encyclopedia Britannica: editorial positions in the sciences (various) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" The current job guide produced by H-NET (Humanities and Social Sciences Onlin) includes the following position, indexed under History of Science/Medicine/Technology: "The Encyclopaedia Britannica is hiring six (6) editors to revise and maintain our coverage in the sciences. Editors are required for the following fields: physics/astronomy; chemistry/geology; biomedical sciences; biological sciences; anthropology/archaeology; sociology/psychology. "These are full-time positions located in Chicago, Illinois. Review of applications begins immediately, and searches will continue until all positions are filled." See for details. Russell ___________________________________________________ Russell A. Johnson rjohnson@library.ucla.edu Archivist (310) 825-3191 or 206-2753 Neuroscience History Archives Brain Research Institute, UCLA Box 951761 Los Angeles CA 90095-1761 Special Collections Cataloger (310) 825-6940 Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library, UCLA Box 951798 Los Angeles CA 90095-1798 __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 10:34:40 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: 'Sociobiology Sanitized: The Evolutionary Psychology & Genetic Selection Debates' by Val Dusek X-To: darwin-and-darwinism@sheffield.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" I have placed the following essay on the Science as Culture web site http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/sac.html 'Sociobiology Sanitized: The Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Selection Debates' bt Val Dusek comments/discussion very welcome __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 19:14:48 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ian Pitchford Organization: Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies Subject: Sokal and Bricmont MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable From: Norman Levitt Below, the floodtide of letters to the "London Review of Books," concerning J. Sturrock's review of Sokal & Bricmont, "Intellectual Impostures". I daresay you will detect a high degree of unanimity. I also include N. Jardine's letter critical of S. Shapin's review of A. Cook's new biography of Halley. Unfortunately, the review (LRB, 2 July, 1998) doesn't seem to be available on the website, but, IMHO, Jardine's comments hit the mark. NL _________________________________________________________________ Sonic Boom Let's see if we've got this straight. John Sturrock (LRB, 16 July) thinks that clarity and rigour are admirable qualities in the natural sciences, but dispensable or even deleterious in the humanities and the social sciences. And he has the chutzpah to accuse us of insulting our humanist colleagues? Alan Sokal Jean Bricmont London SW7 Louvain-la-Neuve _________________________________________________________________ Hearing one of the visiting hackettes on Radio Four's Start the Week confessing how her young life had been blighted by having to read Derrida is enough to establish that what the world needs now is a negative review of Sokal and Bricmont. But John Sturrock fluffs it. He wants to defend Bruno Latour against the authors' charge that he confuses scientific theory and scientific pedagogy (Einstein's in this case) and, more broadly, that he confuses scientists' theories with how and why they launch them. Sturrock says: 'If I've got this right, they're saying that the theory of relativity as propounded by Einstein, and the theory in its ideal, unpropounded state are not identical, because the act of propounding introduces an agent who is necessarily a reference-point in space-time that the "theory itself" can do without; in which event, it beats me how we can ever have access to the theory except through pedagogy, which I take to be the sum of those real-life moments when the theory is communicated by one person to others.' This is the kind of garbage that a not very bright sixth-former might hope to pass off as a philosophical argument. Sturrock should hang his head in shame. James Russell Department of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge _________________________________________________________________ I was disappointed by John Sturrock's article on Sokal and Bricmont. Despite an attack mounted with passion and peevishness, he doesn't find any clear line of argument. But then a clear line of argument is not the kind of thing with which he'd wish to be associated! One can appreciate his claim that in the humanities the process of carrying out daring intellectual pirouettes is often the heart of the matter, and not a distraction. But this misses the point that the French writers concerned were trying, by the very use of scientific comparisons which is in question, to move beyond that, to suggest that their particular trapeze acts were not only exciting but rooted in a privileged position. Nobody, in Sturrock's view, was ever convinced that these claims constituted a cogent argument: apparently everyone saw them as a 'floorshow, without seeing any need to determine their truth value'. So, that's all right then. His next line is that 'clarity and univocity' are 'inappropriate' except in the discourse of Sokal and Bricmont's own disciplines, 'formal and stunted as this is called on to be'. Well, neither Sokal and Bricmont nor science as a whole have asked for 'univocity' Sturrock clearly has little acquaintance with scientific debate. But to throw away clarity quite so casually is a more damaging concession than he realises. And would he like to specify why he believes a debate concerned with reaching as objective an agreement as we can achieve to be 'stunted'? This is a defence witness who proves more useful to the prosecution. Hugh Macpherson Edinburgh _________________________________________________________________ John Sturrock begins his review of Sokal and Bricmont's book by attempting to incriminate them by association (with that illustre inconnu, Ivor Brown), but not even a bad case of galloping francophilia (of which I was a victim for a number of years) can justify the nonsense being put about by these Parisian intellectuals and their disciples around the world. Those of us who find Kristeva, Lacan and tutti quanti plain silly are not a bunch of anti-theoretical empiricists. Theory may be speculative, but it must contain at least some potential for proof. It ought, moreover, to be expressed in language of some clarity (at least to specialists), rather than being wrapped in clouds of obscurity so thick that no rain can possibly come from them. Jeffry Kaplow London SE3 _________________________________________________________________ There are more than two million known chemical compounds: they are all interconnected and there is no contradiction in the whole edifice. The linguistic confusions that hung about the birth of chemistry such as, what is a truly simple substance? have faded into irrelevance with the appearance of this chemical edifice. The individual refutable proposition is the staple of philosophy and the reason that it never makes any progress: the interlocking web is the staple of science and the reason it does. It may be anathema to John Sturrock but science really is 'all langue and no parole'. Peter Forbes Editor, Poetry Review London N2 _________________________________________________________________ John Sturrock was delighted to discover Luce Irigaray quoted as arguing that 'the 20th century's most resonant (and sinister) equation, E=3DMC2, may be sexist for having "privileged the speed of light" or "what goes fastest" over other velocities.' He then argues that 'in the intellectual world in which Irigaray functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont'. He wants us to be 'exposed to more arguments, good as well as bad', so that 'the science we barely understand is . . . forced to be as explicit' as possible. How saying 'E=3DMC2 is sexist' forces science to be more explicit is beyond me. Perhaps my wits have been made dull by the 'stultifying rigour' of scientific method. If bad arguments are as good as good ones, why not let M stand for Tinkerbell and E stand for jouissance? David Powell Diss, Norfolk _________________________________________________________________ John Sturrock suggests that for the editors of Social Text, Sokal's 'spoof' article was just one more bit of intellectual excitement: its 'truth' or 'correctness' totally irrelevant. That's scary enough. But then why didn't they publish the explanatory piece that Sokal submitted to them? That would have added to the fizzle in their journal. D.R. Hughes Siena _________________________________________________________________ Sokal and Bricmont must have been very gratified to receive a review that so perfectly exemplified their thesis and so amply justified their concerns. And how generous of you to choose as their reviewer someone who is not afraid to declare openly that frank nonsense adds to 'intellectual provocations' and is a legitimate part of lively debate. On the other hand, if John Sturrock really is your consulting editor, what on earth do you consult him on? Hopefully not on whether the articles you print make any sense. Roger Bacon Cambridge Psychotherapy Practice _________________________________________________________________ John Sturrock's fractured, incoherent, pointless, headless piece causes me to suspect that his senses have been assailed by a sonic boom of sorts. Roy Faibish London SW10 _________________________________________________________________ Halley Dry and Halley Moist Semi-popular but 'inexcusably dull' and accessible only to scientific specialists, defiantly 'old-fashioned' in its perfunctory dismissal of social constructivism, the work of a scientist rather than a professional historian: such are the terms in which Steven Shapin (LRB, 2 July) castigates Alan Cook's Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas. Reviewers who pontificate from professional high ground should be a bit more careful. Cook's book addresses the scientifically literate public. Unlike the semi-popular biographies with which Shapin unfavourably compares it, Cook's work presents important archival discoveries which add significantly to our knowledge of Halley's life and social circumstances and his wide-ranging contributions to the sciences. As evidence of inaccessibility to all but 'professional astronomers or geophysicists', Shapin cites Cook's mentions of 'collimation', 'nutation', 'libration' and 'the Coriolis force'. GCSE science students know what the Coriolis force is; and the others, far from being advanced technical terms, were well established in Halley's time and can readily be looked up in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. As for dullness, well, it's a matter of taste. Cook is chary of the fruity tales of low life and high living spread about by Halley's enemies; and his Halley is indeed on the dry side. Shapin is less fastidious, and the Halley he sketches is exceedingly moist. As for Cook's alleged dismissal of social constructivism, Shapin is disingenuous. The issue is not, as he implies, whether 'passions and personality' have a role in the establishment of scientific facts. Shapin is generally acknowledged as an architect of the social constructivist approach to the history of the sciences, and he well knows that this involves more than platitudes about the need for energy, sociability and sound judgment of people in the collaborative enterprises of the sciences. Thus Leviathan and the Air Pump, which he co-authored, concludes that 'as we come to recognise the conventional and artefactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in the position to realise that it is ourselves and not reality that are responsible for what we know.' Such is the provocative claim from which Cook distances himself when he remarks in his preface that 'the "construction" of science is not a subjective undertaking; it must agree with the empirical structure of the world around us.' Shapin counters this moderate empiricism by associating Cook's good-natured and scholarly book with 'the Science Wars that are threatening to poison our cultural conversations'. Insensitivity to the contents of the sciences, macho images of scientists, misplaced professional =E9litism, insolent reviewing these, I think, rank higher among the rea= l enemies of conversation about the sciences. Nicholas Jardine Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge _________________________________________________________________ -- End --