The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox

  But as a young undergraduate publishing his first paper (Gould, 1965), I simply lacked the courage to believe my own discovery. So I kept reading until I found one quotation by a catastrophist that could be read as a theological apology. I cited this single statement and assumed that I must have missed all the others. After all, how could such a venerable and monolithic account from the standard literature be so mistaken? Now I know better; but I wish I had possessed the courage to say so in 1965. Still, the moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. . . .

  I have been led to recall this embarrassment of my fledgling days in science for a largely emotional reason. I watched the development of this fourth and latest episode in dichotomous battle between science and the humanities from the vantage point of a professional life as both a practicing scientist and a literate commentator and general essayist on the history and impact of science—that is, as a decently fledged adult with a reasonable range of foxy skills and a strong brief for the hedgehog’s cause, and not, as for the third episode of Snow’s “Two Cultures,” as an inarticulate beginner. And I watched in sheer frustration (and too much silence, for I should have spoken out far more than I did) as the two perceived sides formed their supposed battle lines in a struggle that soon received an almost “official” designation in pure martial metaphor, as “the science wars.” And yet I had never witnessed a clearer example of the “emperor’s new clothes” fallacy, for no garments of veracity covered this particular invention. I could only recall a sardonic motto from my undergraduate days in the antinuclear movement: “What if they gave a war, and nobody came?”

  In its semiofficial incarnation as a fourth battle in an ancient dichotomy, the “science wars” supposedly pitted a group of radical, self-styled “postmodern” scholars in the humanities and social-science departments of American universities (particularly representing a new field called “science studies”) against researchers in the conventional science departments of the same institutions. The postmodern critics—dubbed “relativists”—had supposedly branded science as just one choice among our infinite and inherently subjective ways of human knowing, with no genuine claim upon methods that could validate nature’s factuality. Rather, and cynically (if perhaps naively and unconsciously in some cases), scientists invoked this rhetoric of a privileged path to objective knowledge, or so the postmodernists claimed, in order to win funding, power, and influence by bluff. The professional scientists on the other side—dubbed “realists”—denied the validity of any social analysis of scientific practice, and would not even admit that unconscious political and psychological preferences might influence scientific belief (except as clear and correctable failures of individual researchers who had not fully appreciated or applied the proper “scientific method” to their own work). Moreover, these realists supposedly maintained that science alone held the methodological key to any form of knowable truth, and that science, at least in its technological manifestations, lay behind all advance and improvement in the dynamics of Western history.

  And so the impression went abroad that scientists themselves, and analysts of science within the humanities, philosophy, and social studies, had locked themselves into an overt struggle—a true “science war”—over any privileged domain of expertise for science, indeed over the very concept of factual truth and scientific progress at all. Extremists on each side presented absurd caricatures of the supposed opposition and, since everyone loves a fight, journalistic commentaries in America’s very few outlets for passably intellectual writing described the “science wars” with such verve that an unsuspecting reader might actually have imagined campuses filled with barricades occupied by professors hurling verbal stink bombs.

  And yes, if one searched the literature, one could find a few commentaries either unwisely exaggerating the supposed conflict, or easily misreadable as so doing—and so the impression of dichotomy only accelerated, at least for a while. For example, from the literary side, consider this sequence of three statements on the development of “science wars” from Stefan Collini’s 1998 introduction to a reprint of Snow’s original “Two Cultures” piece. He begins by accurately describing the quite reasonable critiques of historians and sociologists of science:A broader programme of the social history of science has concentrated attention upon the role of “external” factors, such as the class origins of scientists themselves, the political and cultural forces steering research in some directions rather than others, and the social and psychological needs catered to by ideals of professionalism and disinterestedness.

  Collini then, and still describing rather than judging, continues:More radically still, much recent work has been devoted to showing how the very constitution of scientific knowledge itself is dependent upon culturally variable norms and practices; seen in this way, “science” is merely one set of cultural activities among others, as much an expression of a society’s orientation to the world as its art or religion, and equally inseparable from fundamental issues of politics and morality.

  I don’t object to this more radical claim—and scientists should consider this more subtle and pervasive extent of their social role and embeddedness. After all, Collini isn’t denying that factual truth exists, and that science might accurately locate some of it. But, particularly in sensitive times, one might excuse an overwrought scientist for drawing such an extended, if unstated, inference—especially when Collini then quotes, on the next page, an even more provocative claim from a leading “relativist,” Wolf Lepenies:Science must no longer give the impression it represents a faithful reflection of reality. What it is, rather, is a cultural system, and it exhibits to us an alienated interest-determined image of reality specific to a definite time and place.

  Now, them’s potentially fighting words. Maybe Lepenies (as I actually suspect) only means, in a colorful way, to expose the intrinsic embedding of science, and scientific practice, into the changing norms of surrounding culture—and to expose our willingness to track those norms (whether consciously or not) in attempts to gain political support, as folks do in all fields. Perhaps Lepenies is not denying that, despite these shifting social realities, science can still establish accurate, or at least technologically useful, accounts of the factual world. But one can hardly blame scientists for thinking that Lepenies might be denying any intelligible meaning to the concept of scientific truth at all—hence the epithet “relativist” for this supposed side in a putative fourth episode of dichotomy.

  Counterattacks by scientists have been infrequent (see below for the somewhat surprising and largely unappreciated reason), but interesting and sometimes disconcerting. Some of my colleagues have become legitimately disturbed by a few truly silly and extreme statements from the “relativist” camp, largely made by poseurs rather than genuine scholars, and have mistaken these infrequent sound bites of pure nonsense for the center of a serious and useful critique. Then, falsely believing that the entire field of “science studies” has launched a crazed attack upon science and the concept of truth itself, they fight back by searching out the rare inane statements of a few irresponsible relativists (every field, after all, must bear the burden of its own fringe) and then presenting a polemic defense of science, ultimately helpful to no one—for no serious enemy exists in the form described, and no one appreciates a shrill diatribe against a caricature of one’s more subtle and genuine concerns (see a striking example of such windmill-bashing in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, published in 1994 by P. R. Gross and N. Levitt).

  The most clever of scientific counterattacks filled me with both amusement and disquiet. My friend Alan Sokal, professor of physics at New York University, performed an unusual “experiment” to find out if certain social critics even understood the content of the scientific concepts falling under their supposed scrutiny. So Sokal wrote a delicious, but pretty darned transparent, parody, ostensibly claiming that as a formerly unrepentant realist, he had seen the light of relativism and now accepted the d
efining argument for social construction, rather than objective factual reality, of scientific conclusions.

  I don’t think that Sokal ever expected his effort to go so far—but, hey, once you’re in, you’re in, and it becomes their job to find you out. So Sokal sent his manuscript, laden with enough laughs and clues to identify the article as pure parody to anyone with a modicum of scientific knowledge, to Social Text, a leading journal in the relativist camp of the science wars (by the usual taxonomy of this episode). The editors’ pleasure and ardor at the prospect of such a prominent born-again convert obviously canceled their suspicions and critical faculties—and they published Sokal’s article as a serious piece, expressing the triumph of their point of view among the enemy. Needless to say, when Sokal immediately admitted his content and intent, thus eliciting gleeful reports on the front page of the New York Times and other leading publications throughout the world, the editors of Social Text ate a large murder of crows (far beyond those four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie).

  Fine, Sokal had clearly proved a point—but what point? I confess to very mixed feelings about this incident (and Sokal and I have discussed the issue at length, and without resolution because, frankly, I have never been able to sort out my own complex feelings about the affair). The parody was brilliantly done, and the results as funny as could be—and Sokal does dwell on “my” side. But parody is also a very broad and coarse weapon, and its intentions often backfire in a philistine world. Too many people—and I know that Sokal didn’t intend or desire such a result—read the incident as a full and general indictment of all social criticism of science, and of any studies in the history of science that stress social context over pure logic of argument. But I, as a practicing scientist, happen to regard the vast bulk of scholarly work in the social analysis of science as not only important and respectable, but as immensely salutary for scientists who rarely think enough about the historical background and immediate social context of their research, and who would therefore greatly benefit from better understanding of these nonscientific influences upon their beliefs and practices.

  So had Sokal exposed the entire field of science studies as a bunch of poseurs and braying ignoramuses? I don’t think so. Frankly, I think he only exposed the hubris or laziness of the particular editors of Social Text, who became so beguiled by apparent support from the “other” side that, despite their complete ignorance of the physics discussed in Sokal’s paper, they failed to exercise the standard (and, in most technical journals, formally and absolutely required) procedure of sending the paper to an expert in physics for “peer review.” Any physicist would have immediately recognized the parody (and any careful lay reader, not anesthetized by pleasure at the apparent content, should have been suspicious for a hundred different reasons). So, does the publication of Sokal’s parody condemn an entire field or merely expose the carelessness of a few chagrined and chastened editors? I see no lesson in the incident beyond this second and smaller outcome, with its strictly limited message. And yet, as I said above, parody can be a dangerous weapon—and many observers dismissed the entire field of history and social analysis of science, an important and productive branch of modern scholarship, because a few practitioners, by their own malfeasance, had been embarrassed and exposed.

  Finally, and to prove my point about the nonexistence of these supposed “science wars”—thus exposing the fourth episode of dichotomy as not merely distorted, but truly fictional—let me clinch the argument by revealing a trade secret about my fellow scientists that our little minority with literary pretensions in the business would probably prefer to keep hidden. I do love my colleagues dearly, at least most of them. I stand in awe before their dedication and technical skills. But, to be frank and to put the matter bluntly, the vast majority of scientists are a parochial lot. No one could accuse us of pure one-dimensionality; your average scientist likes to read a diverting book on a long flight, watch the latest movie, and root hard for the home team. Many, perhaps even most, of us are even tolerably intellectual. We will visit a museum or attend a concert without undue protest, and often with pleasure; we may even play a musical instrument with reasonable competence. But the vast majority of us will never—and I mean never—even dream about reading technical academic literature from other fields, particularly literature that claims to present deep, critical, and insightful analysis of science as an institution, to reveal the psychology of scientists as ordinary folks with ordinary drives, or to depict the history of science as a socially embedded institution. I mean, why read about it, as written by outsiders, when we live it every single day?

  I do not defend—indeed I deplore—this “philistinism lite” so prevalent among my colleagues. But, deplore though I may, the existence of this pervasive tendency cannot be denied. Most scientists have never read a technical work in the history or philosophy of science; and most of my colleagues could not identify a single leader in the field—not Thomas Kuhn or Karl Popper from the last generation, and not any lesser light in the supposed “science wars” of our present moment. Thus no “science war” exists for the most obvious and irrefutable of all reasons: the vast majority of scientists have never heard about the supposed altercation and have no interest whatever in considering a claim so utterly incomprehensible to them as the relativist argument for a social construction, rather than a factual basis, of scientific knowledge. Tell most scientists about the “science wars”—and I have tried this experiment at least fifty times—and they will stare back at you in utter disbelief. They have never encountered such a thing, never read anything about it, and don’t care to interrupt their work to find out. Oh yes, the occasional savvy scientist who pals around in urban intellectual circles may engage the “wars” and get pissed off—leading to the expressed anger of Gross and Levitt, or the wry amusement of Sokal. But most of my colleagues know nothing at all about the war supposedly being conducted in (or against) their name. And, as an old motto, previously cited, acknowledges, you can’t have a war if one side declines to show up.

  I particularly deplore this fourth false episode of putative conflict between the sciences and humanities, because the opposing camps were confected of extreme views held by virtually no one on either supposed side—whereas the actual, and more nuanced, opinions of sensible folks in both the “relativist” and “realist” contingents express important insights that could greatly benefit the understanding of practitioners in the other party, if only the two groups would pay attention to each other, recognize the extreme caricatures as harmful fictions, and learn to appreciate the fair and just emphases of each group: (1) the stress that historians and political analysts of science place upon social construction; and (2) the weight that practicing scientists place upon the extraordinary capacity and success of scientific methods in acquiring reliable and technologically useful knowledge about what can only be called (admittedly by inference, but what else could one infer?) the factual structure of material reality.

  In other words,7 we must reject the widespread belief that a science war now defines the public and scholarly analysis of this institution, with this sup-posed struggle depicted as a harsh conflict pitting realists engaged in the practice of science against relativists pursuing the social analysis of science. Most working scientists may be naive about the history of their discipline and therefore overly susceptible to the lure of objectivist mythology. But I have never met a pure scientific realist who views social context as entirely irrelevant, or only as an enemy to be expunged by the twin lights of universal reason and incontrovertible observation. And surely no working scientist can espouse pure relativism at the other pole of the dichotomy. The public, I suspect, misunderstands the basic reason for such exceptionless denial. In numerous letters and queries, sympathetic and interested nonprofessionals have expressed to me their assumption that scientists cannot be relativists because a professional commitment to such a grand and glorious goal as the explanation of our vast and mysterious universe must presuppose a genui
ne reality “out there” to discover. In fact, as all working scientists know in their bones, the incoherence of relativism arises from virtually opposite and entirely quotidian motives. Most daily activity in science can only be described as tedious and boring, not to mention expensive and frustrating. Thomas Edison calculated well in devising his famous formula for invention: 1 percent inspiration mixed with 99 percent perspiration. How could scientists ever muster the energy and stamina to clean cages, run gels, calibrate instruments, and replicate experiments, if they did not believe that such exhausting, exacting, mindless, and repetitious activities could reveal truthful information about a real world? If all science arises as pure social construction, one might as well reside in an armchair and think great thoughts.

  Similarly, and ignoring some self-promoting and cynical rhetoricians, I have never met a serious social critic or historian of science who espoused anything close to a doctrine of pure relativism. The true, insightful, and fundamental statement that science, as a quintessentially human activity, must reflect a surrounding social context does not imply either that no accessible external reality exists, or that science, as a socially constructed institution, cannot achieve progressively more adequate understanding of nature’s facts and mechanisms.