Sokal replies

[Adam J. Thornton]

Andrew Dinn writes:
> Bonnie Surfus writes:
> Another hint to the Wittly-wise - Sokal is running up against a
> sagen/zeigen distinction here. Why? because he has adopted the picture
> (correspondence) theory of physical science. Unfortunately the picture
> has nothing to correspond to but itself.

I think it is precisely the last assertion that Sokal objects to.

If the picture has nothing to correspond to, then why does that box you're
typing letters into magically send them across the world so that we can
read them?  How come your internal combustion engine combusts?  Why _won't_
you accept Sokal's challenge and step from his twenty-first story window?

> It's not just the trendy field of cultural studies. Philosophers of
> various hues and histories would also find Sokal's arguments
> disagreeable. However much (and for however long) we profit by
> regularities in Nature the notion that the Old Dame is thereby legally
> bound to honour our expectations (Nature imitates Art, official!)
> requires a mighty feat of jurisprudential prestidigitation.

Or a realization that *every single time we've been watching*, Nature has
done thus-and-such, and that it is much more reasonable to believe that
thus-and-such will continue to happen than that it suddenly won't.

The whole business of assigning agency and intentionality to inanimate
actors makes a useful metaphor, but if you feel that {Nature/God/the
Zeitgeist} can suddenly inject anomalous results into your experiment, then
you are not going to be happy as a scientist.  If you're a programmer,
you're probably the kind that blames the C compiler for all bugs.

> What would the status of Sokal's `law of gravity' be if tomorrow
> things started to behave differently.

A theory, that was wrong.  And then the search for a new theory that
explained why things used to fall and now they don't would commence.  You
see, Francis Bacon wasn't a dumbass after all.

> Today, while things drop from
> great heights it's a `law of nature' which we approximate with
> `theories'. Tomorrow, when things start floating gently to the ground,
> or maybe the ceiling, it's a term without a referent. Nature just
> turned out not to have a `law of gravity'. So what then is Sokal
> talking about today? Something which is *real*, inherent in the *real
> world*, unless of course phenomena take a turn for the worse and it
> becomes horse feathers? 

Something which is *real*, inherent in the *real world*, yes.  There *are*
things, and sometimes they fall, and it might be useful to find out how and
why they do so.  Assuming you really believe that there is an out there out
there.  I know I do.  I suspect you do too.

> The point about physical laws is not that they
> denote but that they can be (are) used as a basis for making
> decisions.

People engaged in the business of producing theories which correspond to
these laws--to use Sokal's phrasing--would doubtless disagree with you
strongly.  One consequence of finding theories that are a close
approximation to the way *Nature has always behaved when we've been looking
at it* is that you can make decisions with high confidence based on those
theories.

> Any attempt to make them refer to something `out there'
> falls foul of the possibility that Nature may throw a curve
> ball. Ontology is a red herring.

What possibility?  Are we finally getting down to the fundamental
philosophical disagreement between a mechanistic nature in which the trick
is to figure out, metaphorically, where all the epicycles and equants go,
and a vitalistic nature in which the whole problem of mathematizing
experience is illegitimate?  If so, I shall cast my vote for the former--I
use and enjoy a lot of devices that make the former assumption and which
seem to work quite well for me.

> Sorry if this seems to be off topic but it really is right on topic.

You are an odd one to be slinging around the term "really," don't you
think?

Adam
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