One of the ironies of the Windschuttle kerfuffle is that Alan Sokal has a new book out. Perhaps all those Sokal analogies will help his sales. At any rate, blogger and UPenn cultural studies prof Michael Bérubé has some very interesting things to say in a review of Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture in the American Scientist. Go read!
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And a side stoush with Steve Fuller starts up.
From the review, as an atheist I very much agree with this:
Berube is consistently worth reading on anything from film to, well, this. I consider this an example of good critical reviewing, going straight to the substantive point of disagreement and teasing out its implications, and resisting the temptation (if there was any – for Berube probably not) to get bogged down in the to and fro that tends to emerge over these issues. I don’t know if I share the realist position on science that Berube does but the point about Sokal’s social philosophy stands whether you take a realist or anti-realist position on the question of science.
klaus k, were you hesitant about some science-realism line in the review itself, or in other writings by berube? this is not my world at all, and i don’t know berube, but i liked the review very much. if you can recommend other berube writings (recommendation of course not implying complete agreement), i’d be grateful.
Thanks Kim, that was an excellent review. Like Shaun, I’d be a supporter of secular pluralism. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the secular dogmatists – it’s a kind of fundamentalism in itself.
Marty, Berube only suggests his own positions on the philosophy of science through his discussion of Sokal’s, but I can imagine from what he does say that he accepts some points upon which I am not yet convinced re: realism and the philosophy of science. As I suggested, his substantive point is actually about something else which, while related, doesn’t require one to take a position on the philosophy of science. Shaun’s link to the ‘side stoush’ may provide more on his position, though I don’t have time just now to click through and follow that up.
I don’t take a strong anti-realist position, but some of the issues in that area of inquiry don’t seem to be resolved. However, I’m not an expert. There are others who comment and post on this blog who know more about the philosophy of science, science studies and, obviously, science itself (or sciences themselves). They may have something to say on this.
The Berube work I can recommend wholeheartedly has more to do with my own area of expertise: his interventions on literary and cultural studies are very interesting. ‘Public Access’ and ‘The Employment of English’, as well as the edited collection ‘The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies’ which includes his introduction and a number of challenging papers by other authors.
Yep, I have to read more of him – I’d agree that the intro to the “Aesthetics of Cultural Studies” book is very good stuff.
He used to blog independently (I think there’s still an archive and still contributes to Crooked Timber. Terrific, thoughtful, exciting writer.
Laura, he’s returned.
Also (and at the risk of going too far off topic), further points to Berube for trying to revive Muka?ovský. I’ve got Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts on my reading list for my new project.
klausk k and mark, thanks very much. probably your recommendations are too far away from my interests, but i’ll keep them in mind. from the little i read today, he does seem to be an excellent, thoughtful writer. i did read the stoush stuff, and was informed and amused by it.
His blog is certainly very good stuff, marty, even if you don’t have a chance to chase down his academic work.
Harris sounds a little dogmatic but Sokal and Dawkins need more supporters I think. The sort of pressures being applied to them now remind me of this absurd ‘even-handed’ position we’re supposed to take on Gaza. I’ve never seen Dawkins be unreasonable and even if Sokal is making some sort of ambit-claim here then I say we need people who make ambit claims. Now, more than ever we need them, because religious nuts are distracting us from saving our habitat. And if the State is the weakest and most unpopular link of capitalism then surely religion ( and psuedo-religion like Marxism) is the weakest part of the state. ‘ Throne and altar ‘ are the enemy of all humanity now so we need millions of Dawkins and Sokals. Billions.
The Bérubé piece is a very good/essay review and thanks Kim for linking it. The debates he describe line up with my take on arguments surrounding “scientific proof” and human-induced climate change.
One thing remarkable in the literature on the philosophy of science is that the distinction between discovery and justification is often not made clear – is it because it’s too obvious to mention, or that it was debated for a long time? Certainly much of the literature in the late 19th and 20th century tried to link the two, rather than treat them as complementary but different. Perhaps if more was made of this difference, the waters in which public debates take place (a long way from any scholarship), wouldn’t be so muddy.
There is a serious angle for climate studies in all of this. When integrating physical and social aspects in climate, for example in climate and human responses tied up in adaptation to climate change, the spectrum of justification of relatively solid facts to absolute relatavism in value-based norms can be encountered. What Bérubé (and presumably Sokal but would need to read the book) are offering seems a sensible way to negotiate this (and accords pretty much with my own views but states it much better than I ever could).
Even that little word risk can contain both ends of the spectrum, with some parts that can be rigorously justified and other parts that are totally relative, and need to be elicited from those who are vulnerable with the greatest of skill.
A few things:
1. On Berube’s review itself, yes he’s a fun writer and he’s engaged with these issues for a quite a while. But you have to pay attention to his culture/science warrior status in the US viz. the Religious Right, to understand his writings about (Capital ‘S’) Science and epistemology. This par, speculating about the hostility of ‘postmodern’ humanities scholars to epistemological realism in ‘the context of justification’, shows a very poor engagement with the substance of Science Studies scholarship:
This maintenance of ‘local’ and ‘universal’ knowledge boundaries is at the heart of much discussion about ‘social construction’ that has been going on in the academy for the best part of 4 decades, so if Berube’s ‘best guess’ is simply to reinforce the separation through some ham-fisted Gemeinschaft, I’m afraid he’s either not taking those enormously rich varieties of constructionism seriously or he’s making a play in his own culture wars. Similarly, the squib that Hist and Phil of Science is “conducted by people who are rigorously indifferent to the question of whether a scientific theory is actually true” is a poor caricature.
2. On the pedestal both Berube and Sokal place Meera Nanda’s work, Here’s Sheila Jasanoff from a 1999 review of House Built on Sand in ST&H:
3. On Steve Fuller as a representative for ‘science studies’/'social construction’ etc. As I said on Berube’s blog at the time:
I was hoping you’d have something to say on this, dk.au. Very interesting, thanks!
Cheers Klaus. I highly recommend people read the David Demeritt piece Kath Wilson linked to on the diary site too
dk, i note it’s jasanoff you’re quoting and not yourself, but may i ask, re:
“A culturalist position that prescribes non-Western science for non-Western peoples ..”
Ignoring who is or is not advocating it, I’m not even sure what this means. What is non-Western science? What would be an example?
Had a quick scan of the Demeritt, and it looks interesting. It seems a very useful way of applying Latour – Demeritt has even provided answers to some of the questions I have had about the Latourian approach – especially his parliamentary model – and that’s just on a first read. The conclusion, if justified, is quite a potent intervention, but I need to give it closer attention I think, to be sure.
To return to # 13: Jasanoff correctly identifies something that has always disturbed me, and that is the conflation, in debates of this nature, of the methodological relativism of SSK with all sorts of other things that can be put under the heading ‘relativism’. It’s the kind of slippage and conflation that occurs all over the place (relativism is just one term so altered) refiguring quite reasonable and justifable claims into monstrous epistemological bugbears.
marty@16 – I believe that’s Jasanoff’s reading of Nanda’s interpretation of STS’s work. Fwiw, I don’t recall who Nanda took aim at – I skim-read the chapter many years ago. I’d be doing my advocacy of constructivism a disservice if I encouraged ‘ignorance of who and under what conditions is or is not advocating’ ‘Non-Western Science’!
klaus@17 – Latour’s interventions are interesting – he had a debate with Steve Fuller a while back that’s worth a gander if you want to understand more about their respective approaches. Latour argued that it’s not the job of science studies scholars to tell people how they should live with technology, nature etc but rather to make public the work of their subjects (science and technology, their proponents and historical context). Fuller argued for a maintenance of the nature/culture distinction. Latour countered that ‘going against the flow’ of nature has, historically, been associated with imperialist, colonialist interventions.
thanks, dk. fair enough.
Thanks for the link, dk.au, I’ll check it out.
Way too late to the party, as usual. But thanks for the kind words, everyone, and for reading my little review in the first place. Thanks, dk.au, for your exasperation with Steve Fuller, but rest assured that I do not take him as a representative of science studies. (You’ll note, I hope, that Fuller replied three times to my review at the American Scientist website — and did himself a good deal of damage in the process, I think.) Sorry I couldn’t go into more detail about the Symmetry Principle in that review, but, well, it was a dead-tree publication, and I was given a limit of 2000 words. I have, however, written on the subject on my humble blog. As you’ll see, I’m a bit more friendly to social constructionism than you make me out to be here.