Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Credentials

    Philosophers uncover conceptual connections and thus help to make ethical debate better informed.

  • David Lodge thinks

    Which tells us more about consciousness, fiction or cognitive science?

  • Science Studies

    In 1994, Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt published Higher Superstition,
    and the pigeons have still not recovered from the shock of that particular cat.
    Higher Superstition is a funny-painful ‘deconstruction’ or rather demolition
    of an array of trendy anti-science ‘studies’, stances, branches of putative
    scholarship: Postmodern, cultural constructivist, feminist, sociological, environmental.
    Most of these orientations are on the left, although it has been frequently
    pointed out (e.g. by Richard J. Evans in his article on Postmodern history on
    this site) that PoMo is at least as useful to the right as it is to the left
    and that there are indeed right-wing Postmodernists. But the majority of the
    attacks on science come from the left (and could be seen as a kind of displacement
    activity, at a time when the non-theory-driven variety of leftist work seemed
    moribund), which to old-fashioned leftists can be a very puzzling turn. Yes,
    naturally, science can be turned to exploitative or sinister uses, but so can
    many good and useful things; the solution would seem to be to expose and resist
    the misuses, not smash the thing being misused. And frivolously confusing issues
    like the is-ought gap or how evidence is to be evaluated, is a weapon that can
    be very quickly and decisively turned against its user.


    Higher Superstition is not only an eye-opening and hair-raising expose
    of various fatuous anti-science critiques or broadsides, it’s also a very good
    read. There’s a certain pomo-ironic hilarity in the fact that this book by a
    mathematician and a biologist, in addition to flattening the pretensions of
    the anti-science crowd, is witty and eloquent and lucid beyond the wildest dreams
    of their literary opponents. So unlike the old ‘Two Cultures’ debate between
    Snow and Leavis, in which Leavis was able to make much play with Snow’s lack
    of talent in the rhetoric department. No fear of that with Levitt and Gross!
    They escort us, Virgils to our Dante, through the antiscience “arguments” of
    cultural constructivism, postmodernism, feminism (or one branch of feminism–one
    could argue that they paint with too broad a brush there), and ‘radical environmentalism’
    or deep ecology. The first two are the funniest, the most replete with non-sequiturs
    and grandiose claims based on non-understanding of Gödel’s incompleteness
    theorem, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and the like. In the chapter on Cultural
    Constructivism we see Stanley Aronowitz misunderstand the uncertainty principle,
    translating it into “a kind of epistemological and spiritual malaise”. We see
    Bruno Latour leap from observations of laboratory politics to the notion that
    science reaches its conclusions via wheedling and agreement. We learn that Steven
    Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump converts Hobbes’
    mathematical ineptitude into an episode of the class war, and that Wallis’ math
    and Boyle’s physics were not superior knowledge but the unfair privilege of
    an excluding elite. We see Jacques Derrida pontificate about topology under
    the mistaken impression, apparently, that’s it’s just a slightly grander word
    for topography. We see N. Katherine Hayles claim that the Zeitgeist did
    Einstein’s work for him:


    “If we think of these projects as attempts to ground representation in a non-contingent
    metadiscourse, surely it is significant that the most important work on them
    appeared before World War I. Einstein published his papers on the special theory
    of relativity in 1905 and the general theory in 1916; the Principia Mathematica
    volumes appeared from 1910 to 1913; and logical positivism had its heyday
    in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. After World War I, when the
    rhetoric of glorious patriotism sounded very empty, it would have been much
    more difficult to think language could have an absolute ground of meaning.”
    [N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound]


    And Andrew Ross portray scientists as an arbitrary cabal of all-powerful snobbish
    pedants:


    “How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions
    be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called ‘scientists’?”
    [Andrew Ross, Strange Weather]


    In 1995, a year after the publication of Higher Superstition, the New
    York Academy of Sciences held a conference titled ‘The Flight From Science and
    Reason’, and the papers that were read at the conference were collected in a
    book of the same name. It is a rich source of fascinating examinations of the
    subject from participants such as Susan Haack, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Gerald
    Holton, Mary Lefkowitz, James Trefil, Frederick Crews, who discuss history and
    evidence, feminist epistemology, Freud, social construction, education, and
    many more subjects. The book makes it all the clearer that attacks on science
    and reason in one discipline amount to an attack on them in all.


    And at the same time, shocked after reading Higher Superstition, Alan
    Sokal came up with his famous hoax. He read another great pile of books and
    articles (which was a noble sacrifice of time and effort), wrote his article
    ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum
    Gravity’    , and got it published in the 1996 Spring-Summer issue of Social
    Text    –even though the editors, at least so they later claimed, found it
    a tad ‘hokey’. Then he published a follow-up article in Lingua Franca declaring
    the hoax…and the fur flew. Sokal’s article is full of blatant mistakes and
    transparent parody; but not quite blatant or transparent enough to get it rejected.
    The Science Studies crowd has never quite recovered. The editors of Lingua
    Franca     put together an excellent collection of journalism and essays called
    The Sokal Hoax, and Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote the book Fashionable
    Nonsense    [US]/Intellectual Impostures[UK]. Finally the work is continued
    in the 1998 book edited by Noretta Koertge, A House Built on Sand, another
    excellent collection of essays.


    Norman Levitt tells Butterflies and Wheels in his interview with us
    that the situation is a little better in some ways. In particular, “the ultimate
    ambition of many postmodern science-studies enthusiasts–that is, to become
    the primary mediators between science and political institutions (the commissars,
    as it were, of science and technology)–have largely been squelched. Embarrassing
    questions were raised far too early in the game, well before any successful
    infiltration of the corridors of power.” This is good to know. But ill-founded
    nonsense has not by any means been laughed out of town yet, so there is still
    work to be done.

    OB

    External Resources

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  • Truth and lies

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  • One way to introduce the two cultures

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  • Mormon correctness

    Even practicing Mormons can have a hard time conforming to the rules at Brigham Young University.

  • Higher Superstition Revisited: an interview with Norman Levitt

    Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition appeared
    in 1994, rattled a good many cages, and prompted the Sokal Hoax. The book describes
    a bizarre situation in American universities in which academics in various (mostly
    new-minted) fields such as Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Science Studies,
    plus a few more familiar ones such as Sociology, Comparative Literature and
    the like, make a career of writing about science without taking the trouble
    to know anything about it. Gross and Levitt have a good deal of fun exposing
    the absurd mistakes perpetrated by people who rhapsodise about quantum mechanics
    and chaos theory without having the faintest idea what they’re talking about.


    But hilarity aside, there are serious issues involved. The Cultural Studies
    brigade attack not only the misuses to which science can be put, but scientific
    ways of thinking themselves; not only possible inequities in hiring and promotion,
    but logic, truth and the ‘Enlightenment project’. Gross and Levitt did an admirable
    job of sounding the alarm which Butterflies and Wheels plans to go on sounding.
    Norman Levitt very kindly agreed to answer some question for us.


     


    Benson: Do you think the situation has improved since you wrote Higher
    Superstition?     Do people seem any more embarrassed or self-conscious about
    writing ignorant absurdities? Or do they merely congratulate themselves all
    the more on how “transgressive” they are?


    Levitt: This is a complicated question in that it depends on the parameters
    one chooses to measure improvement or deterioration. My main motivation for
    writing HS was to alert scientists to the fact that bizarre views of
    science were being taught and fervently advocated in various enclaves of the
    humanities and social sciences. The main immediate danger, I thought, was that
    "science studies" imperialists were, in many schools, proposing that
    the "science requirement" for non-science students be replaced by
    courses in "science and society" or some such. This was an attractive
    proposition for some of the scientists, who view "Physics for Poets"
    and the like as joyless and time-wasting tasks. But since word has gotten round
    that science studies is a dubious cult and actively hostile to science to boot,
    the prospects for this kind of coup have pretty much crashed. Of course, HS
    can’t by any means claim all the credit. The real shocker was the Sokal Hoax,
    and there were other instructive flaps as well, such as the Science in American
    Life     exhibit at the Smithsonian.


    Another fact worth noting with some satisfaction is that the enthusiasm for
    extreme constructivist claims regarding the nature of scientific knowledge has
    cooled considerably. Constructivist slogans are no longer reflexively adopted
    and mouthed in literature and sociology departments. This doesn’t mean that
    science studies has become any more worthwhile or intellectually responsible,
    or that its hostility toward science has lessened. But a lot of the rebellious
    glee has gone out of it, as has the smug delight in being outrageous.


    Most important, the ultimate ambition of many postmodern science-studies enthusiasts–that
    is, to become the primary mediators between science and political institutions
    (the commissars, as it were, of science and technology)–have largely been squelched.
    Embarrassing questions were raised far too early in the game, well before any
    successful infiltration of the corridors of power.


    On the other hand, alas, few of the more notorious academic anti-science celebrities
    have lost out, career-wise, as a result of being flayed by HS, A House
    Built on Sand    , The Flight from Science and Reason, and so forth.
    There are some partial exceptions to this, most notably the failure of the silly
    attempts to appoint a science studies professor at the Institute for Advanced
    Study. But even the characters gulled by Sokal’s prank remain pretty much immune
    to retribution for their intellectual dereliction. Indeed, being attacked by
    one of those dreaded scientists in warpaint amounts to a crown of martyrdom
    that nicely adorns one’s curriculum vita. Most so attacked have prospered
    quite nicely, thank you. One laments the injustice of it all!


    But then, we’re not talking about child rape or looting employee pension funds.
    It’s just the university culture being its customary silly self, which is hardly
    surprising or curable.


    Finally, something should be said about the leaching of postmodern antiscience
    attitudes into the more general culture. Some real damage has been done. Schools
    of education have picked up a bit of this nonsense, especially in connection
    with "constructivist" theories of pedagogy. Even worse, so have some
    schools of nursing, which invoke shoddy philosophy and pomo slogans to justify
    their flirtation with worthless alternative medicine dogmas and practices. Some
    of the same stuff works its way into environmental activism or into the kind
    of ethnic activism that has set up western science as an ideological enemy.
    Postmodern cant has also softened up many intellectuals for the renewed assaults
    of creationists, now taking form as "Intelligent Design Theory." (An
    example may be found in The Nation, the best-known American leftist journal,
    which recently ran a bizarre, effectively pro-ID review of Stephen Gould’s last
    book. It was written by an au courant literary critic with scant knowledge of
    biology but a thorough grounding in social-constructivist drivel.)


     


    Benson: Are undergraduates aware of the controversies? Do science teachers
    have to waste much energy combatting trendy notions about the situatedness of
    truth, or is that one area where ignorance is an advantage?


    Levitt: Speaking as a mathematics teacher, I waste a lot of energy,
    perhaps, but not in order to combat postmodern attitudinizing. In lower-level
    courses, I talk and I write stuff on the blackboard, the undergraduates listen
    and take notes (or not). Hence, there’s little interchange that isn’t initiated
    by "Is this going to be on the exam?" In upper-level courses, things
    are a bit more relaxed and clubby, but students who get as far as upper-level
    mathematics are hardly the type to pay much attention to the archdruids of deconstruction,
    the pythonesses of feminist theory, or the jongleurs of multiculturalism.


    Nonetheless, one can get a sense of overall undergraduate attitudes toward
    the spectrum of experiences encountered at a university. I’m specifically talking
    about a large, multiplex American state university, which encompasses, academically,
    all sorts of activity, from hard-nosed engineering to the squishiest, touchy-feely
    "oppression studies," and which serves a host of other functions by
    way of baby sitting young people between late adolescence and the grim, inevitable
    day they have to go out and earn a living. Most students invest most of their
    ardor in having a helluva good time-sex, rock ‘n’ roll, and partying down, with
    the occasional foray to the football stadium or the basketball arena for those
    rituals of mass mindlessness. To extent that they take education seriously,
    it’s as a gateway to the possibility of making a decent income-upper middle-class
    or better. So they fight like hell to get into the business and management programs,
    and sometimes do some serious grinding to qualify for law or medical school.
    But the issues that raise tempers in purely academic circles-the culture wars,
    the fights over "diversity," and all that rot-are not undergraduate
    issues, by and large.


    The PC/Pomo faction, to describe it as tersely as possible, certainly has a
    death-grip on a lot of instructional turf. Basic courses like expository writing
    are in their hands, and many students have to go through the mill of a pious
    course on "diversity" or some such. There they get a fairly strong
    whiff of academic-left doxology. But the upshot is not, on the whole, a cohort
    of enthusiastic recruits, but rather a mass of skeptical-to-cynical young people
    who have caught on to the fact that their instructors, or at least, those who
    give pedagogical marching orders to their instructors, can often be prigs, bores,
    and bigots-and none too bright, at that. PC/Pomo preaching far more readily
    generates disdain for itself than hostility toward its declared foes. This is
    even true for black and Hispanic students. It is an obvious corollary that the
    quirky attitudes toward science common amongst the pomo faithful do not diffuse
    very far or very fast into mainstream undergraduate culture.


    This is not to say that undergrads are generally knowledgeable about science
    or that they have a sophisticated grasp of the canons of reliable knowledge.
    Even science majors have a shallow knowledge of science beyond what they’ve
    specifically acquired in courses. The non-science majors know little and care
    little about science and tend to be clueless and inarticulate when scientific
    matters arise at any level. But PC/Pomo demonology, per se, doesn’t seem to
    have been responsible for this.


     


    Benson: Is the issue still alive among the faculty? Are there arguments,
    debates, quarrels? Do you personally have to deal with bristling, indignant
    colleagues from “Cultural Studies” and such who are outraged by your work?


    Levitt: The basic story is this: A certain camp within the PC/Pomo enterprise
    made a fetish of "science criticism" and, at its high water mark 10
    or 12 years ago, even dreamt of becoming a powerful oracular presence on the
    societal scale, a major player in determining science and technology policy.
    However, it couldn’t fly below the radar forever; its vanguard was spotted and
    chased back to the starting line fairly easily. The "science wars"
    have dissolved such susceptibility to its wiles as might have existed among
    scientists and science administrators. But its own turf is pretty secure, thanks
    to the inertia of the academic world. Its members have their little club and
    retain their power to praise and promote each other for as long as the money
    holds out (which it will for some time to come).


    Hurt feelings persist, and folks like Paul Gross and me, not to mention Sokal,
    are still excoriated for our villainy and obtuseness, evoking imprecations from
    many courses and published papers (and a good thing, too, since it keeps our
    books in print!). Yet people in the science-studies racket have also grown more
    prudent; they are chary of making outrageous epistemological claims with flags
    flying and trumpets blaring the way they used to on a daily basis. Their dreams
    of exercising actual political power over science and scientists are on the
    back shelf. But the academic cult as such keeps grinding away on its own narrow
    terms.


    Debates do continue, in some sense, but they have moved to such arenas as schools
    of education and-quite frightening-into medicine, where bits and pieces of the
    radical science-studies litany are now and then recruited to defend quackery.
    But, as I see it, the main thing to keep in mind is that the academic assault
    on science began, when you get down to it, because antiscientific attitudes
    widespread in the general culture penetrated the academy, becoming over time
    increasingly stark and explicit in the thinking of intellectuals who think of
    themselves as radically opposed to middle-class politics, culture, and values.
    In the universities, this antagonism acquired a particular rationale-philosophies
    propounding the situated and socially-constructed character of knowledge claims
    and the malign effects of a Eurocentric episteme. It also acquired a vocabulary
    and a certain characteristic rhetorical style. At that point, it leached back
    into the wider culture, slightly altering the rhetoric, but not necessarily
    the essential substance, of demotic antiscience. But it is well to remember
    that the basic problem is not that of an assault on rationality by a cabal of
    reckless university intellectuals; the assault was going on long before these
    guys came on the scene, and will continue even if each and every poststructuralist
    and feminist-epistemologist were to convert overnight to logical positivism.


    As for my personal experiences; obviously there are people who don’t like me
    at all because of HS et seq. Once in a while I get roundly attacked
    at a conference where I’m speaking. But this is hardly terrifying; superannuated
    as I am, I love being denounced as a dangerous character. In defense of my own
    institution, Rutgers University, I must say that it has treated me rather well
    as a result of my involvement in the science wars (while treating some of my
    local enemies quite well, too!) Post 9/11, we-scientists, intellectuals along
    with all the rest–seem to be headed into "interesting times," which
    takes a lot of the ginger out of academic quarrels. All this science-wars stuff
    may be fading irrelevancy within a few years.


     


    Benson: If some faculty members are indignant, are others as it were
    recruited? Do you find new allies in departments such as History, Sociology,
    Anthropology, where evidence and the validity of evidence are highly relevant?
    If so, could this be a hopeful sign? Could one by-product be a heightened awareness
    in many disciplines of the need to ground truth-claims and knowledge-claims
    with evidence and logic?


    Levitt: Though one could hardly call it a mass movement, there has been
    a recurrent "Rally round the flag, boys!" mood amongst some scholars
    in areas besieged by relativism and anti-rationality, with the serio-comic episode
    of the science wars providing some ground for renewed hope that terminal silliness
    will not prevail. I’ve been in touch with quite a few of these people in areas
    like psychology, anthropology, and even philosophy. It’s no longer quite so
    easy to sneer at words like evidence"" and "objectivity,"
    and, to a certain extent, it’s become possible to sneer at the sneerers. Things
    are changing slowly, but largely they are changing for the good. The project
    of serious inquiry in all kinds of fields is in better shape than it was a few
    years ago, and the intellectual fops are no longer quite so sure of their ground.


     


    Norman Levitt is Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. He is author,
    with Paul R. Gross, of     Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels
    with Science (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Edward O. Wilson
    said about this book that it was "original" and "brilliant".

  • Rorty on Williams on truth

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  • Oh, brilliant, pay the fun teachers more

    Link lecturers’ pay to how popular they are with students? Might there be some drawbacks to that idea?

  • Where groupthink can lead

    The Salem witch trials are interesting not because of the occult aspect but as an example of ‘senseless self-destruction’.

  • Oh, rapture

    Tim LaHaye was on the US public radio show Fresh Air last night. He is a minister, a fundamentalist, a pillar of far-right politics, a former honcho in the Moral Majority, and…a best-selling novelist. To put it mildly. He is the co-author of a series which has sold (I cringe to relate) 50 million copies. The ‘left behind’ series. For those who have the good fortune not to know what on earth that is, the subject matter is ‘the Rapture’. You know. When Jesus shouts in the sky and all the believers are instantly taken up into heaven, to leave the rest of us down here to be tortured for all eternity (after a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing with End Times and tribulations and killing all the Jews and the Anti-christ and never being able to find a parking space).

    I have been aware of this delightful cultural artifact for a long time, but have also been doing my best to ignore it. But I listened last night, and as of course I knew it would be, it’s even worse than I thought. I was repelled but not at all surprised by the obvious relish plus loathing in LaHaye’s voice when he talked about all the people who refused to ‘call on God’ (and thus were doomed doomed doomed), about the way they ree-bell, and their attitude. And the air of faintly surprised generosity with which he said he hoped that as many as a billion people might be saved. And the naive fatuity with which he said that because Jesus said ‘Whosoever believes…’ that means he meant everyone, without stopping to reflect that Jesus didn’t actually speak English or that the translation might possibly not bear out his interpretation. But I was (I shouldn’t have been, but I was) a little surprised to learn that the rapture crowd believe that the Bible predicts that ‘one world government’ and world peace are part of the plan of the Anti-christ. Not figuratively but literally. Now there’s a reassuring thought. And there are 50 million of them sold.

  • Fiction and consciousness studies

    David Lodge, while evading ‘the false intimacies of celebrity,’ discusses his new book of essays on that intersection.

  • Shocking news: teenagers are easily bored

    More teenagers report being bored at school in the UK than in other industrialised nations. Let us hope the response is not to replace teachers with videos.

  • Scientists were unpopular then too

    Even in that supposed heyday of reason, attacks on freethinkers were a favourite sport.

  • Anger is energizing

    Now that’s what I call good news. A piece in yesterday’s New York Times says that, popular wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, pessimism and anger are not necessarily always unhealthy and their opposites not necessarily always therapeutic. Just exactly what I’ve always thought! I’m a basically cheerful sort, I think, but it’s an irritated sort of cheerfulness–the two go together. I get a lot of energy and motivation from my generalised anger. It means there are things to do, mistakes that need pointing out, stupidities that need correcting. One likes to feel useful. Julie K. Norem, a psychologist and author of the book The Power of Negative Thinking, says that anger is an energizing emotion. I feel vindicated, and joyously indignant.

    ‘Barbara S. Held, a psychologist and professor at Bowdoin College, argues that it’s time to end what she calls the “tyranny of the positive attitude in America.”‘ I couldn’t possibly agree more.

  • Misanthropes can stay that way

    Good news: people who urge grouches to ‘cheer up, you’ll live longer’ are wrong.

  • Sexist or witty?

    Is a poster of a shirtless woman at a Motor Show a stupid throwback to the ’50s or an amusingly knowing and harmless bit of fun? What does it mean that a woman designed the poster? And that a government minister (also a woman) is not amused?