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O.Marsh 16.5.15

Oxford Internet Institute Talk

(Title: 'On the Constitutive Construction of Perceptability at

Trans-Disciplinary and Meta-Academic Boundaries: Or, Can

Social Scientists Write More Clearly?')

I want to begin with a story from Richard Feynman, the genius physicist

and even more genius self-publicist. In the chapter entitled ‘Is Electricity

Fire’ from his memoirs Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman, Feynman tells of

his attendance as ‘the scientist’ at an interdisciplinary ethics conference.

He writes:

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us

all to read – something he had written ahead of time. I

started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were

coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured

it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that

list. I have this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,”

until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read

one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it

means.” So I stopped – at random – and read the next

sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely,

but it was very close to this: “The individual member of

the social community often receives his information via

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visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it,

and translated. You know what it means? “People read”.

The problems of moving jargon across disciplinary boundaries is a familiar

one in numerous academic debates, from questions around

interdisciplinary research, to teaching students, to engaging the general

public in research. But this particular story is of interest to me for two

reasons. Firstly, because of my own academic interests. As has been

mentioned, I am in a department of Science and Technology Studies, doing

sociology of science – a discipline I arrived at through undergraduate

studies in physical sciences, and a personal interest in science

communication. My actual research is on the use of social media by

science enthusiast groups, but I’m not going to be speaking about that

today. But this means my academic life has been framed by three main

sectors – social sciences, natural sciences, and the public. Those three

sectors frame this story: we have a natural scientist talking about social

sciences in a book which achieved great public popularity. But these three

sectors also frame this talk today. I am going to begin by discussing the

circulation and uptake of certain rhetorical tropes within the social

sciences, drawing on a recent work by the social psychologist Michael Billig.

I’ll then talk about what can happen when such tropes move outside of the

social sciences and into other disciplines – here, the natural sciences – by

reference to the so-called ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s. Finally, I’ll give

some speculations, suggestions, and worries about what can happen when

these tropes encounter the general public. But there’s a second reason

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this story is of interest to me, which will be an important running theme

throughout this talk. [REPEAT EARLIER SENTENCE?]. But this story moves

very quickly from talking about Feynman’s understanding and

comprehension of the jargon, and into his perception of those writing it.

And that’s what I want to focus on today – not the academic information

conveyed by social scientific writing, but rather the images and stereotypes

produced of those writing it.

But before I begin, some caveats. Talking about academic writing to a

group of academics is, I’m aware, fraught with potential issues, particularly

when one isn’t familiar with the particular [SOMETHINGS] of the group

you’re speaking to. In particular, focussing on bad academic writing as I

will today risks one of two extremes. Firstly, you can seem to be preaching

very obvious facts to the converted, like you’re trying to offer some back-

to-basics advice from some presumed stylistic high ground. On the other,

you can look like you’re trying to be deliberately disagreeable by attacking

[what], again from some presumed stylistic or intellectual or even moral

high ground. I can assure you that my aim today is neither of those,

instead I’m trying to offer up some blog-like personal reflections with the

hope they may be corroborated or refined in the discussion. But if I should

fall into either of those extremes I apologise. In particular when I use

terms like ‘social scientists’ – which is an insanely broad label, I know – or

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talk of ‘we’ or ‘us’, I am not necessarily referring to us within this room but

rather the community of writers with which I am familiar.

Anyway, to begin as promised at the interior of the social sciences. I’ll be

drawing mostly on a work published in 2013 by Michael Billig titled Learn

To Write Badly: How To Succeed in the Social Sciences. [JOKE ABOUT

TITLE]. I read this [WHEN] and it remains one of the best books I read that

year. Billig writes as someone who’s been in social sciences, largely social

psychology though he’s written on everything from humour to ideology to

the royal family, for forty years, the last twenty-five of which as professor

of social sciences at Loughborough. So the book isn’t written from a

position of bitterness or outsider position, but rather as someone who in

his own words is coming to the end of his working life. The title seems to

place it in a grand tradition of works saying academics (particularly social

scientists) should learn to write better [EXAMPLES], but it diverts from that

tradition in an interesting way. It’s not an advice manual on writing better,

but rather a social scientific analysis of social scientific writing, particularly

certain recurrent tropes and how they become normalised. Some of this

comes from anecdote, but much comes from close reading of papers,

emails and other communications, tracing back chains of citations, coding

various keywords used in student guidebooks, and so on. And I think it’s

really great. To give a selective summary of Billig’s arguments:

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Firstly, he notes an overwhelming tendency of nouns and noun phrases

instead of verbs. Moreover, he also notes a tendency to turn verbs into

noun phrases, usually recognisable by the addition or ‘-tion’, ‘-ism’, ‘-

ization’, or ‘-ification’. So ‘she repressed’ becomes ‘repression was

observed’ and suchlike. The effect is to move away from descriptions of

people performing actions, and into abstractions where social forces are

discussed in the absence of people. Indeed, Billig suggests some examples,

such as ‘globalization’ and ‘massification’ which are abstractions of

abstractions, such that it is hard to see how anyone ‘globalizes’ or

‘massifies’ anything. The effect is that, even if the social scientist has

observed or described something, the reader can’t really trace back that

description to the original observations of humans doing things – which

makes critical analysis quite a lot harder.

The second tendency Billig notes is a preference for novelty over

consistency. Even for existing and well-used terms, subsequent authors

tend to add their own spin on usage and definition – as a result, in a

process of Chinese Whispers, the same terms come to mean new things in

different papers. However, it seems that only a minority of social scientific

terms, usually those coined by [what], even achieve this level of re-use.

Instead, Billig argues, it has become more common for social scientists to

coin new terms at a rapid rate, to describe all sorts of social forces,

collections of observations, methodological approaches, and so on – even if

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they’re only a slight twist on an old theme. To quote [TOOTHBRUSH

QUOTE].

The third key argument is a relation between these two. The advantage of

using noun phrases, all these –izations and –isms and suchlike, is that they

are easy to coin. If you invent a new verb, you have to describe a specific

and new form of action. Whereas by virtue of being more abstract, noun

phrases can assimilate collections of old ideas under a new umbrella. In

turn, and this is where the meta-social-science thing really kicks in, Billig

relates this [what] to two main features within modern academic culture.

Firstly a publish-or-perish culture which encourages you to continuously

prove novelty and differentiate your work from others. In such a climate,

abstract noun phrases are easier to churn out as academic products.

Secondly, the continuous proliferation of sub-disciplines. If you’re a

sociologist in the 1980s, you’re likely to be citing any number of people.

But nowadays if you’re a critical realist, you’re probably going to pay some

debt to Margaret Archer, if you’re an actor-network theorist you’re likely

to cite Latour, and so forth. In such a climate if you can get your noun

phrase to be used enough that it becomes something worth teaching to

undergraduates and identified with by PhDs and postdocs, the rewards are

high indeed.

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The final argument follows from this. If, Billig argues, these noun phrases

do emerge from a culture of competition, then we should see them being

marketed rather than analysed. [EMAIL EXAMPLE]. p.37

So that, in a selective nutshell, is my reading of Billig. Now obviously in my

rather unsubtle formulations one can question a lot of these. For instance,

Billig’s preference for descriptions of people-doing-things perhaps arguably

makes social sciences look a bit like people-watching; but perhaps

abstraction is necessary to do generalisable theories? On a similar note,

there is also a risk in downplaying the causal powers of abstractions. For

instance in my own field, Science and Technology Studies (henceforth STS),

we unsurprisingly talk a lot about science, how on close inspection it

actually isn’t as concrete as you might think, it has a plethora of meanings

to different groups and so forth. However, the existence of the idea of

‘science’, as something people can align themselves and their work to, is

important in its own right. If we just had biology, chemistry, physics, and

suchlike without any sense of bringing them together under one umbrella

the world would probably look very different. Same can be said of things

like ‘the economy’, or ‘identity’. On the other hand I do share his concerns

about a massive dominance of a writing style which makes abstractions,

rather than people, the main actors; particularly when many of the

abstractions quite possibly don’t have that much causal force.

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However that’s a bit of a sideline, maybe for more discussion later. The

main limitation of Billig’s book that’s of relevance to us today is that he

deliberately and understandably limits his analysis to the interior of the

social sciences. But as I promised in the introduction we’re going to try and

go a bit beyond that, and the first step is to look at the natural sciences. So

let’s keep Billig firmly in mind and go back in time to 1994, and arguably

the beginning of a fairly insular, pretty well-trodden, and fairly navel-gazing

series of academic debates which have become known as the ‘Science

Wars’. 1994 saw the publication of a book by two American academics, the

biologist Paul Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt, called Higher

Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. In it they

argued that a recent surge in academic criticisms of science, inspired by

postmodernism, deconstructionism, feminism, and the like were firstly very

ill informed, secondly putting politics ahead of content, and thirdly were

needlessly damaging science. This sparked such a series of accusations and

counter-accusations that two years later the cultural studies journal Social

Text decided to publish a special issue entitled ‘the Science Wars’. As part

of this, the authors included a submission by the physicist Alan Sokal, in

which he brought his own knowledge of cutting-edge mathematics to bear

on existing postmodernist approaches to science from such luminaries as

Derrida, Lacan, and {WHO ELSE}. The paper was entitled Transgressing the

boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity,

and includes phrase such as:

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In mathematical terms, Derrida’s observation relates to the invariance of

the Einstein field equation … The key point is that this invariance group

“acts transitively”: this means that any space-time point, if it exists at all,

can be transformed into any other. In this way the infinite dimensional

invariance group erodes the distinction between observer and observed;

the n of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and

universal, 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 that can no longer be defined by

geometry alone.

As many of you will know this paper was a hoax, written by Sokal after only

three months of study to see if he could pass deliberately meaningless

arguments through the peer review of Social Text. Now there can be, and

there very much have been, a great many responses to this event. The

editors of Social Text afterwards claimed they had noticed flaws in the

paper, but included it more as an interesting cultural item than as an article

in its own right, coming as it did from a physicist. Others have pointed out

that hoax papers have been successful across a great many disciplines,

including physics. But what I want to draw out here is Sokal’s own

developments of his thoughts on the matter, particularly his books

Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, written

with Jean Bricmont and published in 1998, and Beyond the Hoax, published

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2008 which includes an excellent annotated version of the hoax article.

(Both of these texts are easy to access in illegal online form, a fact I learned

from Sokal himself when he was describing how he made use of this during

last-minute preparation for a talk). These reflections are interesting in that

there are some parallels with Billig, although Sokal is more narrowly

focussed on extreme examples of postmodernist style writing.

Like Billig, Sokal identifies a series of tropes. These include:

Metaphors which don’t, as one usually expects from metaphors, serve

to relate unfamiliar, complicated concepts to more everyday ones – my

emotions are really complicated right now, so I’ll compare them to the

weather – but rather the reverse.

Subtle rhetorical slippage between similar-sounding concepts which

would actually benefit from being treated separately, such as ‘nature’

and ‘representations of nature’.

Arguments which can be read in two forms, either (to quote Sokal and

Bricmont) as “an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one

that is radical but manifestly false”, without giving an indication as to

which the author is advocating.

There are more, but already we can start to see that Sokal’s criticisms are

perhaps more damning than Billig’s. He makes repeated reference to the

story of the Emperor’s New Clothes [tell story if need be]. Sokal’s key

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comparison here is a student of his who spent a great deal of effort reading

and re-reading Giles Deluze in an effort to understand his work – as Sokal

points out, without ever entertaining the question that the lack of

comprehension might be because Deluze wasn’t offering anything that

could be comprehended. And it’s here that, after a bit of time hiding its

head away, our key theme of perception becomes much more relevant.

Because Sokal, like Billig, postulates as to why these tropes exist. He

repeatedly suggests that these tropes are used deliberately by authors, and

again I quote “to impress and, above all, to intimidate”. [LINK]. And this

from an author who, as I’ll discuss later, expresses a lot of sympathy with

the idea of social critiques of science. [NOT INTERESTED IN WHETHER THIS

IS TRUE].

We can see similar ideas, and indeed references to Sokal, outside of the

Science Wars. There’s various cartoons, of course, the journalist Francis

Wheen included postmodernist authors as one of his targets in his 2004

book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World; and there’s the annual

bad writing prize; and the infamous postmodernism generator, which

produces sentences like these entirely algorithmically, i.e. there is no actual

thought as to their content. Again, what I’m interested in is not whether

these sorts of statement actually have any content, but rather perceptions

of why people are writing like this. And as you can see, once again the

verdict is somewhat damning.

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But these examples perhaps seem a bit overblown. Though this sort of

postmodernist style is an extremely easy target, I certainly feel I see a lot

less of it in papers written since the 2000s (and indeed, how dominant is

actually was in the 1980s and 1990s could probably be questioned too).

(Also it certainly still exists – I wrote part of this talk at the back of such a

paper, having lost the thread of argument at the introduction of the first

quotation). But Billig’s work raises the question [WHAT QUESTION?]. One

advantage of reading works like Billig’s and Sokal’s is that you start noticing

these [sorts of things]. I was recently reading a paper co-authored by Alan

Irwin, who I regard as one of the clearer authors working in my field. But

even this paper used the phrase:

“We suggest that one way of moving forward is to view criticism not simply

as negative and an end point but as constitutive and performative”.

And on first reading, I felt I basically understood that. I just nodded and

moved over it. It was only on re-reading the paper for a seminar – and,

probably not coincidentally, I’d only recently been asked to do this

particular talk – that actually I [what]. I don’t want to jump to the

conclusion that this is an Emperor’s New Clothes moment – I think there is

probably a clear argument underneath this, and if I collared Alan Irwin he’d

probably be able to reformulate it in clearer terms. But 1) I don’t know

that for certain 2) it’s probably only my prior sympathies with Irwin and the

STS discipline that are giving me that presupposition and 3) why has he

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written it in such a way that gives me these worries and would probably

earn instant dismissal from people like these cartoonists? This leads into

my central concern. Yes, maybe this extreme postmodernist style might be

less fashionable, but it seems that abstraction persists, more subtly –

perhaps so subtly that we might not immediately notice it ourselves, but

still it’s present. But if Billig is right about the disciplinary pressures within

social sciences pushing us towards more abstract formulations, and if Sokal

and these cartoonists can be taken as indicative of the sort of responses it

might get, are the social sciences pushing themselves towards being

dismissed?

And here we’re starting to move towards that third sphere, the public. The

problem here is that while there’s been a lot written on public

understanding of science, public engagement with science, and public

perceptions of science and scientists, there’s a strong tendency for

‘science’ here to refer to the natural sciences. One of the few relatively

few pieces specifically dealing with public understanding of social sciences,

a review chapter by Angela Cassidy in the 2014 Routledge Handbook of

Public Communication of Science and Technology, makes the point that

there are some important differences between natural and social sciences.

The main one for our purposes is the phenomenon that, in the [WHAT] of

the social sciences, it often seems the case that ‘everything is obvious

(once you know the answer)’ (to borrow the title of yet another extremely

interesting book by Duncan Watts [WHO IS?]). The problem in media

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representations of social sciences, therefore, is that our research is quoted

without referencing expertise – in contrast to natural sciences, where the

scientists feature somewhat as magicians, who’ve done something that

none of you readers could have done. Now obviously from the inside we

know this is not true, there is a role for specialist expertise in social

scientific research. But again, I’m talking about perceptions from the

outside – even, dare I say it, from opponents, people who might be

sceptical of what social sciences are trying to do or how we do it in general.

If these opponents exist – and as a social scientist with quite a few friends

from natural and medical sciences, I frequently feel like there are – then

ambiguous writing and the possibility of multiple interpretations [what].

I’ve drawn a lot of my examples from theoretical formulations, so for my

next one I’ll use a more methodological sample. Again, this comes from a

paper I’ve previously and re-read more recently, knowing I was going to be

giving this talk. It reads:

The questionnaires were analysed qualitatively using the

immersion/crystallization analysis style, in which the researchers examine

the data thoroughly (immersion) and then take out the most important

aspects (crystallization).

Even I’m wondering why this concept has to be named an

‘immersion/crystallization analysis style’. It seems [what]. To a less

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sympathetic reader, it could be read as simply cherry-picking given [what].

[FINISH OFF].

As a slight side note on this topic, I think there’s one more facet which one

can see in the ‘Science Wars’, but also still today as an STS scholar. A key

aspect of STS is that we frequently study scientists. That is, we are

academics talking about other academics. Sometimes this rubs up the

scientists the wrong way – there’s a quotation, often attributed to

Feynman but first found in written form in the work of physicist and

frequent STS opponent Stephen Weinberg, which reads “philosophy of

science is to science what ornithology is to birds”. Which means that

we’re often already treading on thin ice, such that the ambiguities noted by

Sokal aren’t just fodder for existing opponents, but can also risk creating

opponents. Let me make that more precise with some examples. One of

the early lines in Sokal’s hoax paper reads:

feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive

content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology

of domination concealed behind the facade of “objectivity”.

Phrases like “the ideology of domination” are examples of Sokal’s

ambiguous statements which can be read in either a weak or strong form –

so it could be read as ‘science is powerful force in society’, which is fairly

obvious, or it could be read as ‘scientists are part of [WHAT]’. If you’re a

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scientist reading it the latter way, it’s unlikely to endear you to the project.

I’d even go so far as to speculate that maybe this is the driving force behind

the original Gross and Levitt book in 1994 – it must be said I haven’t

finished reading that, but their claims that the academic left are feeding

into things like creationism and parapsychology seem a little overblown,

but that their chapter on AIDS activists for instance reads to me as full of

repressed indignation that their colleagues in medical sciences seem to be

being blamed for the poor progress of AIDS treatments.

[FINISH OFF]

So much for our possible ‘opponents’. I just want to say something about

what might be loosely classified as the ‘supporters’ of social scientists.

[MORE HERE?]. And this goes to a question which is really quite a pressing

one for many social scientists – how does our work leave, and hence make

a difference, outside of the academy? Characterising very crudely, I can

think of two broad ways. Firstly, through the uptake by official bodies,

most notably governmental organisations. Here, ambiguity and abstraction

can at best be frustratingly hard to base political action on and at worst can

be used as an authoritative-sounding smokescreen to use as a flexible

cover for pretty much whatever action the organisation wants to take

anyway. But I don’t want to talk too much about these, for want of a

better word, ‘official’ examples too much – there’s a complicating factor

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there in that in these contexts social scientists are often involved in

ongoing conversations, so reading their writing only shows part of a story.

(Although it has to be said that apparently one of the leading social

scientists in my field always has a slightly more junior ‘translator’ present

at such meetings).

But I do want to talk about another group which can loosely be seen as

‘supporters’ of the social sciences, and that is certain branches of the left

wing. In the very first follow up to his hoax paper, Sokal answers the

question ‘But why did I do it?’ with the answer

I confess that I’m an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood

how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I’m a

stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external

world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is

to discover some of them.

As I’ve said I think the targets of Sokal’s ire have perhaps receded in the

social sciences, but again I want to raise the worry that some of Sokal’s

issues might nonetheless remain. [CAVEATS ABOUT SPECULATION + I

WANT TO DO RESEARCH ON THIS]. And in these cases, the issue that Billig

raises of abstract writing creating the idea that disembodied forces, rather

than people, do things. Thus I do find myself laughing, somewhat against

my better judgement, at a comment on a Guardian article on feminism

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which read ‘yes, this is the first agenda at every meeting of the patriarchy

I’ve attended’. And I do find myself frustrated at debates over inequalities

in universities which tend inexorably towards blaming ‘the marketization of

higher education’. Not because I don’t believe the patriarchy or

marketization don’t, in some form, exist or exert some very important

causal effects. But all too often the use of these terms leaves me confused,

as I can’t see the actions and the links that the writer can. Even worse,

they can leave me feeling impotent or powerless, as [something] feels like

trying to fight some form of modern ghosts or gods. [SOCIAL SCIENTISTS

HAVE TO WORK IN THESE TERMS]. But, and I think this becomes

increasingly important in a world of information overload and the internet,

there’s also an important role for us in using our expertise – and our time –

to clarify these ideas.

That probably sounds like the familiar plea that we should all be doing

some form of public communication or engagement and let’s all have

impact.