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Science > Physics |
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28 Aug 2005 08:49:32 PM |
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Richard Dawkins's logic troubles |
In another thread on "the Sokal affair," I have been asking people
to explain to me how Sokal has demonstrated the "charlatanism and
nonsese" of Jaques Derrida and Michel Foucault -- both of whom are
repeatedly said to be among those "exposed" by Sokal's hoax and
subsequent book -- despite the fact that he never discusses them in his
book, nor mounts any kind of argument against them at all.
I was told that all of the answers I needed were in Richard Dawkins's
well-known article on the whole fake "affair," entitled
"Postmodernism Disrobed." After reading the article, one can only
wonder: Are the critical thinking abilities of *all* scientists this
poor when they wander outside their discipline?
In any case, the journal *Nature* appears not to employ their
fact-checkers when they want to publish something polemical.
Dawkins's essay is partially based on at least two outright
falsehoods previously published and exposed in the "work" of
Sokal's partner, Jean Bricmont. You can see Dawkin's article
pasted here:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.skeptic/browse_frm/thread/47c59b7de76ce3bb/0e136c3ebfeafad2#0e136c3ebfeafad2
Please join me in the following romp through Dawkins's bizarre
intellectual dishonesty and astonishing breakdown of logical
progression.
As with Sokal and the rest of his minions who have never read the books
they have strong opinions about, Dawkins discusses none of the writers
(with one exception) that actually constitute the "postmodern"
canon.
(I use the mistaken term "postmodern" because that's what Sokal
and his minions think is the right term; I don't have time to explain
to these people, who don't read the books they critique, that their
targets have never considered themselves "postmodernists." I
don't have time to explain, either, why "poststructuralism" is
the better term, and the one I'll use from now on.)
The only figure whose work he cites that has any real currency among
poststructuralists is Gilles Deleuze. (Felix Guattari's
contributions only tend to be valuable in their contribution to
Deleuze's anti-Freudian analyses). So let's look at the
"meaningless" excerpt Dawkins manages to dig up from one of
Deleuze's minor works.
(It is rather interesting, by the way, that neither Sokal nor any of
his minions have ever chosen excerpts from any of Deleuze's major,
seminal works, i.e., "Difference and Repetition,"
"Anti-Oedipus," or "A Thousand Plateaus." It would be like
"arguing" against Wittgenstein without ever making reference to the
Tracticus, but seeking only some offhand comment he made at a
conference somewhere -- a tactic, by the way, that Sokal did resort to
when pressed to come up with something to say against Derrida. Sokal
managed to find one verbal remark Derrida made in a question-answer
section at a conference that he could argue with; but Sokal never makes
reference to any of the actual philosophical arguments by which Derrida
has come to be known. In any case, the Deleuze excerpt Dawkins
forwards is from a source obscure enough that I can't figure out
where it comes from, so I can only guess at its context or the larger
argument it serves:)
So here's the Deleuze excerpt, taken from the middle of who knows
what argument or discussion, but clearly well *after* the "set-up"
and definition phase Deleuze (and most philosophers) usually write:
"In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous
series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor
unstable, but rather 'metastable', endowed with a potential energy
wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . . In the
second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification,
always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element
traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the
corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the
emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast."
Clearly, Dawkins writes, this is sheer meaningless nonsense.
Now, for comparison's sake, let's look at some equally random
excerpts from some other writers:
"The 'knowledge' of such a program has two aspects. It
resides implicitly in the axioms and rules, and explicitly
in the body of theorems which have so far been produced.
Depending on which way you look at the knowledge, you
will see it either as modular or as spread all around and
completely nonmodular."
As with the Deleuze excerpt, the average intelligent man in the street
would see this as jargon-filled gibberish. This is too bad, since it
was written by Douglas Hofstadter in a book that was specifically meant
to be intelligible by your average intelligent non-specialist.
Fans of Dr. Hofstadter will object: Well, of course the excerpt is
difficult to understand! You have ripped the excerpt out of its
explanatory context. The phrase "such a program" in the first
sentence, for instance, clearly indicates that he had previously
explained what kind of "program" he's talking about; and if we
had known something about that, these lines would be much clearer. In
other words, the excerpt cuts out precisely the "set-up" scenario
that lets us know what he's referring to in the first place.
Now look at the Deleuze excerpt again. As with "such a program" in
Hofstadter's "opening" sentence, the Deleuze excerpt "opens"
with: "In the first place...". Obviously, Deleuze has previously
set up a "case" we're supposed to be thinking about (in regard to
the age-old philosophical question of "singularity," a concept that
Hofstadter is interested in as well) -- but because the excerpt breaks
in *after* the explanation of the "case" under consideration, we
couldn't possibly know the purpose or meaning of the informational
"series" Deleuze is talking about. More about the excerpt in a
moment; but first, here are 3 other excerpts from Hofstader:
"In the development of a system, if the programmer
intuitively conceives of some particular item as
data (or as program), that may have significant
repercussions on the system's structure, because
as one programs one does tend to distinguish between
data-like objects and program-like objects."
"There is 'Hilbert space', where quantum-mechanical
wave functions undulate; there is 'momentum space',
where Fourier components dwell; there is 'reciprocal
space', where wave-vectors cavort; there is 'phase
space', where many-particle configurations swish;
and so on."
"As soon as you try to encode features of sufficient
complexity into data, you are forced into developing
what amounts to a new language, or formalism. So
in effect your data structures become program-like,
with some piece of your program serving as their
interpreter; you might as well represent the same
information directly in procedural form to begin
with, and obviate the extra level of interpretation."
Again, the man in the street will dismiss these as jargon-filled
name-dropping nonsense. If I were to write an article that simply
exhibited these excerpts and claimed that I had thereby demonstrated
that Hofstadter's work was nothing but jargon-filled name-dropping
nonsense, Hofstadter would rightly object.
He would point out, first of all, that many of the difficult concepts
named in the excerpts (such as "momentum space") are not terms that
he has just made up out of whole cloth; they are the result of a
long-standing conversation in his discipline and have long been used by
others in his discipline. If we want to know what they refer to,
we'll have to do a little research in that discipline.
Secondly; he would point out that the other unfamiliar and
non-transparent terms (such as "program-like objects" or
"nonmodular knowledge") had been defined or made clear by the
introductory writing leading up to these excerpts. This is the way
most essays work; they define their terms early on, and then later come
to conclusions based on those definitions.
Now, look at the Deleuze excerpt again -- from a book, by the way, that
is certainly *not* intended for non-specialists, as Hofstadter's book
is. Obviously, terms like "singularity" and "aleatory" (i.e.,
dependent on chance or an uncertain outcome) are terms that have long
been in use in philosophy, and you might have to do a little research
in the discipline to figure out why philosophers have been thinking
about them in relation to one another. And if you want to know why
Deleuze is setting up a figural scheme of "points" in a
"series" in order to say what he wants to say about singularity,
you have to simply look at how that scenario was set up in the first
place in the preceding paragraphs -- just as you would have to look at
the preceding paragraphs to figure out what Hofstadter means by
"program-like objects" and "nonmodular knowledge."
Now, you might be asking: Can I explain why Deleuze is using this
series/point model to talk about singularity? No, I can't, because,
like Dawkins, I haven't read the thesis it is supposed to support,
nor the explanatory "set-up" to the excerpt (because I don't know
where the excerpt comes from, and it doesn't appear in any of the
Deleuze works that I've actually read.) But if anybody wants to talk
about any excerpt from "Difference and Repetition,"
"Anti-Oedipus" or "A Thousand Plateaus" -- i.e., the works by
Deleuze that people interested in poststructuralism actually read --
I'll be happy to oblige.
Now let's get to the inevitable "money shot" in Dawkin's
article. Even he seems to be aware that his argument doesn't have
much punch if it only exhibits random extracts from mostly marginal
figures among the poststructuralists. (Lacan, by the way, is not a
poststructuralist, and if poststructuralism refers to Lacan at all, it
is only to dismiss or argue against him. See Derrida's great essay
"The Purveyor of Truth" in _The Post Card_ for a wonderful critique
of Lacan). Dawkins knows he has to taken down bigger fish if his
article is going to mean anything. As usual, this big fish is either
Derrida or Foucault. This is Dawkins:
"Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books
described by the celebrated Michel Foucault as 'among the greatest of
the great... Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian.' Sokal
and Bricmont, however, think otherwise: 'These texts contain a
handful of intelligible sentences -- sometimes banal, sometimes
erroneous -- and we have commented on some of them in the footnotes.
For the rest, we leave it to the reader to judge.'"
Dawkins, knowing that none of his disciples -- including the
fact-checkers at *Nature* --is going to bother to check on any of the
"facts" he presents, has transcribed here at least two outright
lies.
First, he gets his information here from Jean Bricmont's essay,
"Postmodernism and its Problems with Science." In this essay,
Bricmont chastises Deleuze for referring to something as a mathematical
"function" when it is not, in fact, a function. I'm not a
mathematician, so I'll assume Bricmont is correct about this. But
Bricmont's argument also apparently relies on a certain
guilt-by-association: Deleuze had made passing reference to Hegel in
this discussion, and Bricmont writes: "Of course, the reference to
Hegel itself is amusing. Throughout his 'Greater Logic' [a work of
Hegel's], one finds quite nonsensical remarks about limits,
derivatives, and mathematics in general." The logic is clear:
anybody referring to Hegel in any discussion of mathematics is
necessarily making a "nonsensical remark" because Hegel himself
(according to Bricmont) has been known to make nonsensical remarks
about mathematics. I wonder: Have "scientists" like Bricmont ever
taken a course in basic argumentative logic?
Even more astonishingly, Bricmont's argument against Deleuze goes on
to say that "the English translation [of Deleuze's book]
inadvertently" mis-transcribes the mathematical formula he had
originally written, an "error that thoroughly mangles the logic of
the argument." In other words, Deleuze has written nonsense because
his English translators had written nonsense. Can somebody explain to
my why we are supposed to take Bricmont's argument seriously -- and
why Dawkins is so eager to do so?
But it gets even better.
The very next sentences Bricmont writes are the sentences Dawkins
quotes for his article:
"And, in a comment on two previous books by Deleuze alone, where
similar confusions about mathematics can be found, Michel Foucault
wrote: 'I must speak about two books that are great among the great
ones: _Difference and Repetition_ and _Logique du sens_ . . . But,
maybe, some day, the century will be Deleuzian.'
Thus ends a major section of Bricmont's article. The implication
doesn't even require interpretation: Foucault is clearly a charlatan
because he approves of the "confusions about mathematics" that can
reportedly be found in two *other* books by Deleuze, books which
neither Sokal nor Bricmont have ever discussed. You might wonder why
they never discuss Deleuze's well-known _Difference and Repetition_
to demonstrate the mathematical confusion that permeates the book. The
answer: *Because there is not a single mathematical formula or
discussion of mathematics in _Difference and Repetition_.* (And I am
almost positive there is no such material in _Logique du sens_ either,
but I haven't read that one in a while and don't have a copy.)
The reason Bricmont produced this lie is obvious: Like Sokal and
Dawkins, he is always desperate to draw the "big names" into his
ring to give the impression he has "proven" something about them.
But he can't do his normal "cut and paste" operation because he
knows too many people have read Derrida and Foucault and will easily be
able to call him out if he performs that maneuver. So he creates a
ridiculous ad hominem argument by pointing to Foucault's praise of a
couple of Deleuze's *other* books; And yet he knows that this is not
good enough; he knows it doesn't mean a damn thing if Foucault
praises a couple of books that neither Sokal nor Bricmont nor Dawkins
can find anything wrong with; So he caves into that very common
undergraduate temptation to simply make up a lie to create the
necessary link: He simply makes up the "fact" that these other
books treat mathematical subjects, hoping to God that nobody in his
audience has ever read those books -- just as he has never read them.
This is the Sokal affair in a nutshell. Aside from the "cut and
paste" theater that makes no logical argument of any kind, it is
entirely a matter of "scientists" making up stories about authors
they have never read.
Let us remind ourselves about the only "positive" operation
Sokal/Dawkins/Bricmont have performed throughout this entire debate:
That is, the operation of their "cut and paste" routine that
supposedly demonstrates the meaninglessness of all these "prominent
French intellectuals. Let us apply this operation to one more writer,
who penned the following statement:
"The elementary proposition consists of names.
Since we cannot give the number of names with
different meanings, we cannot give the composition
of the elementary proposition. Our fundamental
principle is that every question which can be decided
at all by logic can be decided off-hand."
This excerpt -- which any man in the street will tell you is just as
nonsensical as the Deleuze excerpt pasted by Dawkins -- was written by
Ludwig Wittgenstein in the _Tracticus Logico-Philosophicus_. According
to the Sokal/Dawkins argument, this proves that the _Tracticus_ it
complete and total nonsense, and that anybody who claims Wittgenstein
writes anything more than meaningless gibberish is simply lying.
It is astonishing to me how quickly the ability to think logically
falls away from these "scientists." It is understandable, however,
if you recall that their project all along in this "affair" was to
arrive at "truths" that they had already predetermined before they
ever began their "investigations" -- truths about a whole range of
authors they continually name, including Foucault and Derrida, whom
they had never actually read.
So my original challenge still stands. I'm waiting for anybody to
debate me about any excerpt or thesis written by the "big two" --
Derrida or Foucault -- so we can finally figure out who, exactly, are
the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen in this entire "affair."
.
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