ABLE: The problem goes back to the question, "What can we know?"
CHARLIE: It is important to note that Weinberg finds fault with Sokal's spoof in one respect. Sokal accused postmodernists of denying the reality of the objective world.
ABLE: The nuttier pronouncements in cultural studies make it easy to make such an accusation.
CHARLIE: Nevertheless, postmodernists cannot generally be so accused. Weinberg tells how he stood corrected on this point by Sandra Harding, a "feminist philosopher of science." However right or wrong they may be about the signficance of the laws of physics in culture, postmodernists, let us agree, do not deny the objective reality of the world. The birth and death of individual organisms, the rise and fall of our own minds, offer necessary and sufficient proof to most postmodernists.
ABLE: Weinberg laments that the "two cultures" of science and non-science appear to be farther apart now than when C.P. Snow made his original observation of them decades ago. That seems to be the significance of the Sokal affair to him. The two cultures talk past one another, he thinks. That may be one problem. A larger problem is that postmodern cultural students appropriate the terms of discourse of science in order to discuss culture, and they usually use those terms of discourse inaccurately. That is what offended Sokal. That is why Weinberg defends Sokal.
CHARLIE: Is this mere territoriality? Are the kids from science telling the kids from cultural studies to stay out of their playground, to keep the paws off their toys? "Go back to your own neighborhood and play with your own toys. We aren't bothering you. Don't bother us."
ABLE: The scientists are saying that. They believe that the cultural students do not know how to operate the scientists' toys. They take a sand shovel and use it as an airplane. Just dumb.
BAKER: Here's an attempt at a resolution of this: "The Physics-Postmodern Manifesto of Accord." (Let biologists and chemists and others come along later.) The physicists and the po-mos agree that the world has an objective existence. They agree that human consciousness can devise descriptions of that world. The medium of human consciousness is organically based in the bodily processes of human beings. Language is the instrument of consciousness. It is the making of words, sybmols, and syntactic relations that seek to manifest the consciousness we have of the objective world. The language of modern physics is grounded in this linguistic process no less and no more than all other modes of describing and reflecting consciousness of experience in the real world. Human consciousness is limited by the perspective of individual human beings. It is impossible for all human beings at a given moment to be where all other human beings are or to describe the real world in identical terms. That is impossible because all human beings cannot be coterminous. Additionally, all human beings cannot make the outcome of their linguistic exercise identical, even if they could be coterminous. That impossibility is the result of instabilities that are forever grounded in the organic and ever-evolving character of the human organism: (1) no two humans can have precisely the same perspective or the same genetic or behavioral experience; (2) in particular, no two humans can use language as an instrument of their consciousness in precisely the same way. Within these limitations, human beings seek to survive as a species by creating statements about the way things are with them as a component of a world. These statements run from the highly disciplined mathematical formula to the unrestrained poetic yawp. Modern physicists have developed human language to a point where it can make statements about the world that, for all intents and purposes, nearly everyone on earth can accept as accurate descriptions and dependable predictions. Those few who cannot are probably destined for an early death from jumping off of cliffs or something. Modern physicists should not assert that their descriptions must apply everywhere and always in whatever multiverses we may encounter whenever. If they so assert, they unnecessarily divorce their statements from all other human statements. This confers on their statements an eternal absoluteness which violates their origins in human experience. They ask po-mos to acknowledge the universal applicability of their statements in the world that we know we experience. Po-mos make this acknowledgment, but they ask, in return, that physicists in principle acknowledge that their statements may not be truly universal in worlds beyond the world we know we experience. Accent "in principle" and the opposition between the two diminishes.
ABLE: A noble accord. It does not address two consequences of the statements of physicists about the world. First, their statements about the behavior of the physical world are powerful as metaphorical statements. As metaphors, they are less accurate than they are in their original physical application. Yet they cannot be cooped up and they become terms of discourse about conditions other than the strict behavior of physical reality. Second, the accuracy of the statements allows humans to shape and bend the world for their comfort and survival. Statements of physics lead to techne, to making and mending. Statements of physics stimulate change in the social condition of humans, whether or not the original statements intended such.
CHARLIE: The physicists may tell the po-mos to stay out of their playground and to keep their hands off of their toys. But the po-mos are trying to survive by describing the world too, as well as they can. The technological consequences of the statements of the physicists are everybody's business, whether physicists like it or not. Moreover, the social impact of the physicists' insistence on universal validity--multiversal validity--for their statements has to be acknowledged and processed. The physicists, by their insistence, affirm the possibility of an absoluteness in human affairs. They cannot say that there is a universal law of matter which has no bearing on the way in which humans describe and define their existence in the universe. So, the ASSUMPTION of absoluteness for the statements of physicists has had vast consequences on culture. Physicists need to see that they can forego that assumption for all practical purposes without in any way denying the validity of what they have stated. That is all that a sensible po-mo is asking.
BAKER: Physicists may not be so easily persuaded to forego the assumption of absoluteness. Weinberg's thought on this takes an oddly circuitous path. First, he says that the "direct logical implications of purely scientific discoveries" as such are irrelevant to philosophy and culture. He does acknowledge that discoveries bear upon technology and metaphor; but he separates these results from "pure" logical discovery. This separation seems to mean to him that the "pure" discoveries have an existence outside of the field of experience of humans; and that is precisely a point of difference with the po-mos. He must insist on this purity because of a need for an absoluteness in the universe; that seems to drive him and us back to a Nietzschean logic in search of the need for desiring God--but we will let that strand of thought wait another day.
CHARLIE: Weinberg: "The discoveries of physics may become relevant to philosophy and culture when we learn the origin of the universe or the final laws of nature, but not for the present." (p. 12) He remains persuaded that there can be a point of observation somewhere outside the system that will allow for a total sighting of the system in the form of final laws. The po-mos simply do not share such a persuasion.
BAKER: Weinberg allows for two exceptional implications of modern physics for modern philosophy and culture. First, its discoveries sometimes are so compelling that it properly appropriates issues, such as matter, space, and time, which theretofore belonged to philosophy. Science can do philosophy better, perhaps, in these instances. Second, the Newtonian insight that impersonal mathematical laws govern nature profoundly altered culture and philosophy. Newton and Einstein thus are culturally involved in the same project, however different their expression of the laws may be.
CHARLIE: In the first instance, he is saying that, once appropriated by science, philosophical issues can no longer usefully be examined by non-scientists. Hubris? In the second instance, he is saying that the metaphorical value of the Newtonian insight impacted philosophy and culture. If that is possible with Newtonian insight, why is it not possible with post-Newtonian insights? Why is Newtonian insight so fundamentally powerful and valid as a philosophical/cultural metaphor and all other scientific insights powerless to affect philosophy and culture with any legitimacy?
ABLE: The technological environment we now live in is absolutely a consequence of the validity of the statements of the physicists. Weinberg does not argue against that linkage. The postmodern cultural critics are concerned to (a) describe that environment and (b) figure out from the description some ways of making humans more comfortable, less uncomfortable, within it. Those ways include the changing of attitudes toward the environment, through art, say; and they include the changing of the environment itself to make it more conducive to effective human living.
CHARLIE: These are legitimate concerns. They should be held by physicists as well as po-mos.
BAKER: We need the accord more than ever. The technological fabric of our lives knits apace. The "web" perhaps is aptly named. Webs are made by spiders to catch their prey.
CHARLIE: The "web" is made by technologists who make their electronic things because they understand and act upon the statements of the physicists.
ABLE: Poor po-mos think the "web" is a liberation from territorialization. Their discussion lists are absolutely impossible without the technology provided by the statements of the physicists.
CHARLIE: Be careful of statements of the absolute.
ABLE: In principle, then, a discussion list on the "web" could exist without the technology that now makes it possible. But for all intents and purposes, po-mos should think otherwise.
BAKER: No absolutes for anyone.
CHARLIE: The absolute accord.
[[LATER IN THE AFTERNOON]]--
CHARLIE: Bodgers wrote a poem, Deleuzeland Declaration, that distinguishes between the laws of physics and the concepts of philosophy. The connection he makes between the two may resolve the difference between the Sokal-Weinberg viewpoint on reality and that of the postmoderns.
BAKER: