>From the French version of Sokal's and Bricmont's book, I got the same >interpretation than Sabri from the Turkish one. The authors only denounce >abuses committed by some French people labelled as "intellectuals". >Actually, it is not simply matter of mistakes, in using some physics >principles unsufficiently mastered, but indeed hoaxes to hide intellectually >empty discourses. Sokal and Bricmont do not go so far in the criticism. They >are remarkably measured in their judgment, with respect to the dishonesty of >people they criticize. >In my (non humble) opinion, an intellectual is someone who is intested in >UNDERSTANDING the world, not in playing an in-fashion and well paid >character. > >RK
Unfortunately, the "science wars" pits postmodernists against a group whose Marxist credentials are dubious at best. In the initial euphoria over seeing hot-air artists like Stanley Aronowitz and Jacques Derrida getting their comeuppance, it was assumed (including by me) that Sokal was some kind of Marxist. In reality, his understanding of the role of science comes straight out of the liberal "marketplace of ideas" arena. By his own admission, he has never read Gramsci, Richard Lewontin or Richard Levins. Lewontin has a superb essay in the issue of Social Text that contained Sokal's spoof. For those who want to understand how Marxists understand science, I strongly recommend Helena Sheehan's "Marxism and the Philosophy of Science", parts of which are online at: http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/mxphsc.htm. I posted this to Marxmail shortly after the last Socialist Scholars Conference: While strolling through the vendor displays at the Socialist Scholars Conference yesterday, I was pleased to discover that Humanities Press was back in business, under the Prometheus imprint. This is one of the finest publishers of serious Marxist scholarship in the world. Among the titles that will now be available once again are LeBlanc-Wald's "Trotskyism in the USA" and Lowy's "Marxism in Latin America". But I was particularly pleased to see that they have made Helena Sheehan's "Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: a Critical History" available in paperback. This book is an exhaustively researched, but eminently readable, study of how Marxists have tried to apply their method to the natural world, starting with Marx and Engels themselves. Parts of Sheehan's book are online at: http://www.comms.dcu.ie/sheehanh/mxphsc.htm. I have referenced them in the past to demonstrate how the early Soviet Union attempted to integrate scientific research into the overall revolutionary project. Here's a brief excerpt from the introduction to chapter 4, which is online: "Because of his concern for winning over the existing intelligentsia and because of his special interest in the philosophy of science, Lenin was particularly interested in gaining the support of natural scientists. When the distinguished biologist K.A. Timiriazev announced his fervent loyalty to the new regime, Lenin was overjoyed. The bolsheviks received him with open arms and named a research center after him: the State Timiriazev Scientific Research Institute for the Study and Propaganda of Natural Science from Point of View of Dialectical Materialism (mercifully reduced to Timiriazev Institute in all but the most formal references to it). "Another success was the N.I. Vavilov, who was put in charge of a whole network of biological institutions. The physicist A.F. Joffe had actually joined the anti-bolshevik exodus of scholars to the Crimea in 1917, but returned to Petrograd, resolved to connect his fate with that of the land of the Soviets, although it was by any means clear that the civil war would be won. He became a member of the Leningrad soviet and doyen of soviet physicists, although it was not until 1942 that he joined the party. "There was a concerted campaign to win working natural scientists over to a materialist position in the philosophy of science. Through such agencies as Union of Scientific Workers, the All-Union Association of Workers Science and Technology for Assistance to the Construction of Socialism (VARNITSO), and the Central Commission for Improving the Condition of Scholars, various societies for materialist natural scientists corresponding to various scientific disciplines, the bolsheviks fought to win their hearts and minds." While Sheehan's book makes no reference to the Sokal affair, it clearly illustrates that revolutionary socialism has an entirely agenda than Alan Sokal and his tutor Norman Levitt (who organized a "science wars" conference at NYU using Olin Foundation money), and much of the anti-pomo left. For Sokal, science is a kind of ivory tower pursuit that should be protected from meddlers who haven't been initiated into its sacred rites, especially the postmodernists who don't know the difference between a quark and a quirk. For reasons too complicated to go into now, Sokal was assumed to be speaking in the name of socialism or Marxism during this controversy. But his approach has more in common with "freedom of inquiry" liberalism, or even worse, the sort of libertarianism that is promoted by organized skeptic circles. Revolutionary socialism has failed to carve out its own identity successfully during the "science wars", in my opinion. If it will succeed in this mission down the road, having Sheehan's book at its disposal will help. Not only does it provide information available nowhere else, it does so in a compelling fashion. This excerpt from chapter 4, which is not online, deals with Trotsky's views on science, which are unsatisfying in my opinion. It helps to shed light on why Bukharin, rather than Trotsky, pioneered ecological thought in the infant Soviet republic. It also suggests why Trotsky even went so far as to promote "socialist" eugenics in the over-the-top article "If America Should Go Communist": ---- Another politbureau member who turned to philosophy of science and who has been associated with the mechanistic trend, was Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. In his major statement on philosophy of science, his address to the Mendeleyev Congress in 1925, Trotsky unfolded before the assembled chemists a sweeping reductionism: "Psychology is for us in the final analysis reducible to physiology, and the latter to chemistry, mechanics and physics.... Chemistry... reduces chemical processes to the mechanical and physical properties of its components. Biology and physiology stand in a similar relationship to chemistry.... Psychology is similarly related to physiology." Extending this scheme under the influence of Pavlov, Trotsky held that the "so-called soul" was nothing more than a complex system of conditioned reflexes, completely rooted in elementary physiological reflexes that, in turn, through the potent stratum of chemistry, found their root in the subsoil of mechanics and physics. Society was simply a more complex system of conditioned reflexes, in the final analysis, a combination of chemical processes. It was "a product of the development of primary matter, like the earth's crust or the amoeba." Within this framework, the role of philosophy was to systematize the generalized conclusions of all of the positive sciences, linking all phenomena into a single system. To Trotsky's way of thinking, reductionist assumptions were necessary to the achievement of this enterprise. The essence of Marxism, according to Trotsky, consisted in the fact that it examined human history "as one would a colossal laboratory record." There should be no gap between the methods of the natural sciences and those of the social sciences. To be sure, Trotsky did introduce a cautionary note against transplanting the methods and achievements of one science into another. The methods of chemistry or physiology could not simply be applied to human society. Public life was neither a chemical nor a physiological process, but a social process, shaped according to its own, sociological, laws. Each field of complex combinations of elementary phenomena required a special method. Yet it was not always clear whether these special methods were required by the special character of each level of phenomena or by the fact that science had not yet developed far enough to reduce the analysis of all phenomena to a single method. Sometimes it seemed that Trotsky believed the obstacle to a total reductionism to be only one of time. When it came down to it, Trotsky had occasion to say, the final goal of science was the reduction of all phenomena, whether chemical, biological, social, or intellectual, to the ultimate reality of elementary material particles: "Scientific thought with its methods cuts like a diamond drill through the complex phenomena of social ideology to the bedrock of matter, its component elements, its atoms with their physical and mechanical properties." Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
