Postmodernism and its problems with science

Postmodernism, a branch of modern philosophy, has put into question the value of science from various angles. Postmodernists "imply that all 'facts' claiming objective existence are simply intellectual constructions. In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction." (Hobsbawm, 1993) As a result science can only be the science of the person that follows it, but there are alternative versions of science. One is as good as the other, because there is no absolute existence; all facts are fiction.

It could be imagined that different people inhabit different worlds and therefore experience nature differently. But the observation that all creatures experience the law of gravity in the same way, use oxygen to breathe and produce carbon dioxide in the process and are all subject to all the other laws of science suggests more than strongly that there is only one reality and that science is studying reality and not fiction.

In 1996 Alan Sokal, Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a parody on postmodernist views on science, which among other things claimed that "the p of Euclid and the [gravitational constant] G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity." (Bricmont, 2002) In Sokal's own words:

"For some years I've been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of intellectual rigor in certain precincts of the American academic humanities. But I'm a mere physicist: if I find myself unable to make head or tail of jouissance and différance, perhaps that just reflects my own inadequacy.

So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try an (admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would the leading North American journal of cultural studies ... publish an article consisting of utter nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editorsÍ ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes. Interested readers can find my article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (!), in the spring 1996 issue of Social Text." (Sokal, 1996b)

The article was peer-reviewed and accepted, not as a parody but as a serious paper. Here is a short extract, in the original underpinned by three references to poststructuralist papers:

"But deep conceptual shifts within twentieth-century science have undermined this Cartesian-Newtonian metaphysics; revisionist studies in the history and philosophy of science have cast further doubt on its credibility; and, most recently, feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of 'objectivity'. It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical 'reality', no less than social 'reality', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific 'knowledge', far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities." (Sokal, 1996a)

The reference to feminism is not just a side-swipe. It is a well known fact that turbulent fluid motion remains one of the problems of physics that resists a full solution because the interaction of forces in turbulence gives rise to nonlinear equations, which mathematicians find difficult to solve. According to the psychoanalyst and feminist thinker Luce Irigaray the difficulty with turbulence is not mathematical nonlinearity but the fact that research in physics is mainly performed by men. (Irigaray, 1985) The American feminist Katherine Hayles, who is generally supportive to Irigaray, summarized her argument as follows:

"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. ... These idealizations are reinscribed in mathematics, which conceives of fluids as laminated planes and other modified solid forms. In the same way that women are erased within masculinist theories and language, existing only as not-men, so fluids have been erased from science, existing only as not-solids." (Hayles, 1992)

References

Bricmont, J. (2002) Postmodernism and its problems with science. Lecture given in Helsinki at the invitation of the Finnish mathematical society. http://dogma.free.fr/txt/JB-Postmodernism.pdf (accessed 7 October 2004)

Hayles, N. K. (1992) Gender encoding in fluid mechanics: masculine channels and feminine flows. Differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies. 4 (2), 16 - 44.

Hobsbawm, E. (1993) The new threat to history. New York Review of Books 16 December 1883, 62 - 64.

Irigaray, L. (1985) La 'Mécanique des Fluides. In: Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. Éditions de Minuit, Paris. English translation by C. Porter and C. Burke: This Sex Which Is Not One. (1985) Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Originally published in L'Arc 58 (1974).

Sokal, A. D. (1996a) Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text 46/47, 217 - 252.

Sokal, A. D. (1996b) A physicist experiments with cultural studies. Lingua Franca 6 (4) (May/June 1996), 62 - 64.

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