20 - What's wrong with this reading, October 1997

Summary

Many scientists pride themselves on their ability to read difficult texts in areas of their discipline conceptually or historically remote from their own. It has become evident in the recent “science wars” between scientists and science critics that this ability can diminish rapidly with interdisciplinary distance. (I use the word “critics” in the neutral sense—cf. “theater critics.” I can think of no other term encompassing the full array of practitioners from sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and cultural studies who have turned their attention to the activity of scientists.) Fronts are opening in the science wars on which some scientists are misrepresenting and oversimplifying as egregiously as those at whom they direct their fire.

I shall illustrate this with one of the strangest and most notorious texts on the battlefield, Bruno Latour's “A Relativistic Account of Einstein's Relativity” [1]. This essay has been criticized by physicists for misconstruing the content of relativity and being filled with elementary technical mistakes. It is on display in Alan Sokal's famous spoof [2], one of its “mistakes” showed up in Steven Weinberg's much-cited article in the New York Review [3], and I know of two articles on the “Relativistic Account” scheduled to appear in anthologies devoted to the new and gloomy art of extracting technical errors from the writings of science critics.

I believe such attacks miss the point of Latour's essay. While I have not myself succeeded in making complete sense of it, there are texts by Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kant in which there is virtually nothing I can make sense of. Nevertheless, I have not concluded that they are charlatans. Critics of the science critics ought to exercise similar caution. The straightforward explicit style toward which scientists strive (and pick up any issue of Science to remind yourself how successful we are in achieving it) is inappropriate in disciplines where the objects and aims of inquiry have themselves an ambiguous and uncertain character.

Latour takes an anthropological slant on things. Physicists recently discovering his “relativistic account” are not the only ones he puzzles. Many distinguished British critics of science find him a far-from-easy read, and they have fired more accurate salvos in his direction than some of the interdisciplinary ballistic missiles I have seen launched from the science side.