Diana M. Judd
A Language of Power
39
forth).”
109
Yet around the world, physicists of all races and genders perform physics the
same way and discover the same scientific laws. “Local knowledge,” however, has been
responsible for such views as creationism, that single motherhood destroys the moral
fiber of America, and that spraying more herbicides produces bigger crops. In short,
Sokal announces, “another word for ‘local knowledges’ is prejudice.”
110
Of the
postmodern critiques of science explored in this chapter, physicist Steven Weinberg once
acerbically noted that
much of the commentary on science by the social constructivists and
postmodernists is motivated by the desire to enhance the status of the
commentator—that he be seen not as a hanger-on or adjunct to science, but as an
independent investigator, and perhaps as a superior investigator, by reason of his
greater detachment.
111
Whether or not Weinberg’s statement is accurate, it reflects an important view of several
working scientists towards the recent polemical attacks on science.
In the end, Sokal’s hoax was an effort to counter what has become both
fashionable and hegemonic in philosophical and social science circles: blanket critiques
of Enlightenment thought and values, values which are stripped of their original
emancipatory essence and demoted to the level of repressive ideology. In these critiques,
universalism becomes imperialism. Reason and logic become outmoded and repressive
artifacts of a dominant culture. Freedom becomes relative, and truth becomes
impossible. In such an intellectual milieu, disagreement with and resistance to such
fashionable nonsense is all but futile.
109
Ibid., p. 250.
110
Sokal, “A Plea for Reason, Evidence and Logic”, ed. by Lingua Franca, The Sokal Hoax, p. 250.
111
Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993.), p. 91.
Convention