A friend recently lent me the proceedings of a social sciences/educational meeting suggesting that I would find it interesting. When I went to read the articles I simply could not understand them.
The language was impenetrable. Sentences were long and convoluted, and no opportunity was lost to call a spade an agricultural instrument. And yet, so far as I could judge, the subject matter being "described" was straightforward stuff.
I have often been struck by this style when reading postmodernist writers who propose that what we take for objective reality is really a social construct. I cannot accept that proposition. Science assumes there is a world of objective reality that works according to natural laws, the nature of which science attempts to discover.
From the end of the 19th century a forward-looking Modernist movement dominated the arts and literature, but it was largely supplanted after the second World War by Postmodernism. Postmodernism originated in intellectual disillusionment with modern technology and despair at the nightmares spawned by totalitarian regimes.
Significant elements of Postmodern thinking claim pessimistically that there is no such thing as certain knowledge. Science is seen as a child of capitalism whose principal function is to maintain the inequalities of the status quo.
This thinking, at its most extreme, claims that there is no yardstick against which the validity of any idea can be tested. This often leads to an uncritical presentation of alternative views, regardless of their coherence or rationality. The reader is left to interpret as best he/she can.
Cultural relativism is a fashionable facet of Postmodern thinking which holds, in its extreme form, that science has no more claim on truth than has tribal myth. Science is just the mythology favoured by our modern Western tribe.
In this view the explanation of the moon favoured by a jungle tribe is as valid as the modern scientific explanation. The tribe might think the moon is a lantern suspended a few hundred feet above the tree tops by the gods. Our scientific understanding of the moon is that it is a satellite of Earth, a quarter the size of Earth, located about a quarter of a million miles away, and we see it in the night sky because it reflects the light of the sun.
Our scientific understanding allows us to land astronauts on the moon. The tribal explanation of the moon is equal to our scientific explanation in one respect only: each explanation satisfies its target audience. But in all other respects the scientific explanation is superior because it aligns with reality.
Anyone who doubts this should try travelling to the moon following tribal directions for the journey. To claim that one explanation is as good as the other is insufferably patronising to one tribe and inexplicably dismissive of the other.
Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist, submitted a sham article in 1994 to the cultural studies journal, Social Text. Sokal reviewed some topics in physics and mathematics and drew cultural, philosophical and political conclusions designed to appeal to fashionable academic commentators who question science's claim to objectivity. The Social Text editors did not spot the hoax and published it in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue.
Sokal immediately revealed the hoax in the journal Lingua Franca (May/June 1996, pages 6264). He explained that his Social Text article had been "liberally salted with nonsense" and was, in his opinion, accepted only because "(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".
Sokal's hoax became a celebrated case. He aimed to demonstrate that much Postmodernist criticism of science is pompous and empty academic babble. Sokal satirised this writing style by quoting from several Postmodern cultural critics. The title of Sokal's article is itself a sterling example of this impenetrable style: Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.
Now, be honest, how many of you have the slightest idea what hermeneutics means, let alone transformative hermeneutics? One memorable heading on a review of the Sokal hoax ran "Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Total Bullshit".
Richard Feynmann, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for physics, told an amusing anecdote about the complex terminology and impenetrable writing style of the Post-modern critics. He was one of several notables invited to a week-long working group to sort out one of the world's problems. A sociologist member of the group pre-circulated a paper among the others so that they would have a clearer grasp of what he wanted to say. I now quote from Feynmann's book (Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann, Unwin, 1985):
I started to read the damn thing and my eyes were coming out. I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I had this uneasy feeling of `I'm not adequate', until I finally said to myself, `I'm gonna stop and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.' So I stopped - at random - and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: `The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.' I went back and forth over it and translated. You know what it means? `People read'.
Why do Postmodernists write in this peculiar way? Perhaps they realise they have little to say so they try to give it an appearance of substance by dressing it up in complex language. Did Sokal's hoax bring about any change of heart? It was a temporary embarrassment but, as far as I know, the impenetrable academic mumbo-jumbo is still being "machine-gunned out" in countless lecture halls and in acres of print, year in, year out.
William Reville is a senior lecturer in biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC