My philosophy: Alan Sokal
Written by: Julian Baggini | Appears in: Issue 41
Posted by: TPM ⋅ November 4, 2009
Filed under science
Julian Baggini meets the man who dropped a bomb on postmodernism
“I hope your interest is not primarily in the whole stuff of about 10 years ago, because that’s so old hat.”
So speaks the physicist Alan Sokal, right at the start of our interview. The “stuff of 10 years ago” is the eponymous Sokal Affair, when he “dropped a bomb” on postmodern literary theory and social science by publishing a parody paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” in the journal Social Text. The paper was, as Sokal sees it, little more than “an annotated bibliography of very sloppy science and philosophy of science”, but it opened up a massive debate about the misuses of science and the alleged absurdity of what Sokal calls the “sloppy relativism” infecting academia.
“It’s inevitable that my obituary will lead with that, no matter what I do, even in the unlikely event that I get a Nobel prize,” says Sokal. However, his dismissal of the affair as “old hat” is somewhat undermined by the publication of his new book, Beyond the Hoax, which includes an annotated version of the hoax paper, as well as updated versions of two chapters previously published in Intellectual Impostures, the book he wrote with Jean Bricmont in the aftermath of the affair (which also republished the parody). Although it does indeed go beyond the hoax, it hardly leaves it behind.
Sokal is right, however, that we’re not talking simply to go over old ground. We covered the hoax in some detail in a 1998 interview for this magazine. Our main interest, as we sipped tea in a café near his temporary office at University College London, was in the wider impact of philosophy on his life.
Sokal’s first real brush with the subject came at university, when, as a physics major, he took a few philosophy courses he can barely remember. “There was one with Bernard Williams – I don’t remember what the course was called, but I think it was in that course that I wrote a paper on the ontological proof of the existence of God, which of course is fallacious and people have written thousands of articles trying to explain exactly why it’s fallacious. I did something with quantified modal logic - I can’t even remember what I did.”
Although that was it with formal philosophy until the Social Text affair, Sokal did have a “philosophically-oriented approach to physics,” which contrasted with the “very pragmatic anti-philosophical point of view” of many of his colleagues, of which “the extreme version is ’shut up and calculate’: physics is about predicting, experiment and that’s all. I was always opposed to that point of view. It seems to me that physics is about trying to understand the world, and experiments are tools for checking whether your theories about the world are possibly right but they’re not an end in themselves. So I always took an attitude towards physics where I was interested in the fundamental conceptual questions, closer to Einstein’s approach than Feynman’s.
“You can even see this shift in the history of physics a little bit, from the generation of Einstein and Bohr and Heisenberg, who spent a lot of time arguing about fundamental conceptual questions, primarily about quantum mechanics; to the generation after, of Feynman and his contemporaries, who said we can argue about conceptual things until hell freezes over, but there are so many new things to explore in elementary particles, in quantum chemistry, let’s do that. That also coincided with a geographical shift from European dominance to American dominance.
“I don’t criticise the newer generation. They were right that there were so many interesting things to learn and maybe the philosophical discussion had stalled. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the conceptual questions are also fundamental. For example, what does quantum mechanics actually mean? I’ve been using quantum mechanics for about 35 years, almost three-quarters of my life, and the more I study it the less I understand it. So I can understand why a whole generation of physicists threw their hands up in despair and said ‘let’s just calculate’, but that’s not to me a satisfactory final answer.”
Many people certainly do have a sense that, if you do physics, you can’t avoid philosophy. But different conclusions are drawn from this. Some dismiss the philosophers, saying it’s the physicists who are the ones really doing the philosophy; while others complain that the problem with physicists is that they’re doing philosophy, but they’re not equipped to do it. How does Sokal see the distinction between his discipline and philosophy?
“I don’t know how you draw the line between clarifying the conceptual foundations of a particular branch of physics and doing philosophy of that particular branch of physics. I’m not sure that there’s really much difference. It can be done by physicists with or without formal training in philosophy, and it can be done by philosophers usually with formal training in physics. The philosophers of physics who I think are the best, the ones I respect the most, very frequently were at the very least physics undergraduates and in some cases got PhDs in physics before switching to philosophy, people like David Albert.
“So going back to your question, I think there’s some truth to the stereotypes on both sides. Physicists, when they do philosophy, often do it badly. They’re often confused about the conceptual foundations of their own physics, because sometimes you can compute and get the right results even if you don’t understand conceptually very well what you’re doing. That’s a criticism that not only philosophers but also mathematicians make of physics. Because I’m half a mathematician I respect that criticism too. So it’s absolutely true that physicists often make a botch of the conceptual foundations of physics, especially when it comes to quantum mechanics, because quantum mechanics is simply much harder than any other physics we know. Everybody makes a botch of it because we don’t really know what’s going on.
“I think there is also something in physicists’ complaints about philosophers that often what they do is so sterile that it’s of virtually no relevance to any working scientist, even at the level of conceptually clarifying important things in their fields.”
Critics of philosophy of science, however, often base their hostility on an assumption of what it should be doing. To simplify somewhat, there are two different ways of seeing it. One is that it has nothing to do with the practice of science whatsoever, it’s just we ask ourselves what this thing called science is, simply because we want to understand it. The other is that it’s there at least partly to help clarify the scientific method in order to get better science. Which view does Sokal take?
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