Today, a disturbing parable about clarity and
falsehood. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Two pieces in Saturday's
New York Times make odd commentary on
our times. One is about a panel of art critics
discussing the state of art criticism. The other's
about a physics professor who perpetrated a hoax.
First the physics professor:
Alan Sokal submitted a paper to a cultural studies
journal. His title was Transgressing the
Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity. After the journal published
it, he announced the paper was a hoax. None of its
impossible English made any sense. The
Times quotes part of one sentence:
... the Pi of Euclid and the G of Newton ... are
now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and
the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered,
disconnected from any epistemic link to a
space-time point ...
First Sokal studied the phraseology of modern
social criticism. Then he stirred in a more
familiar language -- equally hard to understand --
that of quantum physics. Editors (who couldn't've
understood the paper because there was nothing
there to understand) published it.
The other Times article tells how a
panel of art critics met to talk about art
criticism in America. Donald Kuspit described the
problem by saying that art criticism takes two
forms: searching but impenetrable, and readable but
stupid. Another critic shot back that original
ideas have to be expressed in new and difficult
language. Another simply said that most of us find
joy in jargon.
Taken together, these two articles lay out the
emperor's-new-clothes question that surrounds
post-modern, deconstructionist thinking. Behind it
all stalks the idea that reality is meaningless
until we process it subjectively. That much I agree
with.
But what I find abhorrent is the notion that plain
English isn't up to the task of treating art,
literature, or social change. It's usually a safe
bet that writing you can't understand was written
by someone whose thinking was unclear in the first
place.
Sokal made that point dramatically when he conned
editors into publishing his bogus article. And his
trick wasn't original. Years ago, a friend
published a fairly useless article on heat
transfer. He'd used a computer to sum over 700
terms in a mathematical series. When I asked him
about it, he said, Oh, that was just a joke. I
was poking fun at overblown mathematical
analysis.
Three days after the story about Sokal's hoax, a
four-column op-ed article showed up in the
Times. A post-modern scholar tore into
Sokal for soiling the nest. The definition of
fraud, he reminded us, is to go beyond error to
erode the foundation of trust on which science is
built.
But he was skating on hopelessly thin ice. Editors
who publish what they don't understand become
complicit in deception. So do scholars who put up
with it. In the end, the most insidious deception
is pretending to understand what we do not
understand.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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