Reality as a Text

Reality as a Text

After we came out of the church, we [Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell] stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I [Boswell] observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—"I refute it thus."

—James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

Not everyone today seems to be as readily convinced of the reality of reality as Johnson.

Consider the umpire in Chapter 1: he denied any reality to strikes and balls beyond his own labeling of them. Many people who call themselves postmodernists or deconstructionists would endorse that umpire’s view.

In Jacques Derrida’s phrase: "Il n’y a pas de hors-texte." (There is nothing outside of the text.) People with such orientations sometimes deny that there is any "there" there at all. "Reality" is merely a construction, and nothing exists other than our interpretation of it. The fact that interpretations of some aspect of the world can be widely or even universally shared is irrelevant. Such agreement only indicates that there are shared "social constructions." One of my favorite phrases from this movement is that there are no facts—only "regimes of truth."

This extreme subjectivist view drifted over to America from France in the 1970s. The general idea behind deconstructionism is that texts can be dismantled to show the ideological leanings, values, and arbitrary perspectives that underlie all inferences about the world, including assertions posing as facts about nature.

An anthropologist of my acquaintance was asked by a student at my university how anthropologists deal with the problem of reliability concerning characterizations of the beliefs and behavior of people in other cultures. In other words, what to do about the sometimes varying interpretations of different anthropologists? She replied, "The problem doesn’t arise because what we anthropologists do is interpret what we see. Different people are expected to have different interpretations because of their different assumptions and viewpoints."

This answer scandalized my student—and me. If you’re doing science, agreement is everything. If observers can’t agree about whether a given phenomenon exists, then scientific interpretation can’t even get launched. What you have is a mess.

But my mistake was in thinking that cultural anthropologists necessarily regard themselves as scientists. Early on in my work on cultural psychology I tried to make contact with cultural anthropologists. I wanted to learn from them, and I expected they would be interested in my empirical work on cultural differences in thought and behavior. I was shocked to discover that most of the cultural anthropologists I approached had no desire to talk to me and no use for my data. They were not about to "privilege" (their term) my evidence over their interpretations.

To my astonishment, postmodernist nihilism made strong headway in academic fields ranging from literary studies to history to sociology. How strong? An acquaintance told me about asking a student whether she thought the laws of physics were mere arbitrary assertions about nature. "Yes," she assured her questioner. "Well, when you’re up in an airplane you figure any old laws of physics could keep it in the air?" "Absolutely," she replied. A survey of students at a major university by the philosopher and political scientist James Flynn found that most believed that modern science is merely one point of view.3 Those poor students came by their opinion honestly. It was encouraged by the sort of thing they had been told in many of their humanities and social science courses. One might think that professors in those fields were merely amusing themselves or perhaps trying to stimulate thought on the part of their students. But consider the tale of the physicist and the postmodernists.

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, sent a manuscript to Social Text, a journal with a proudly postmodern stance and an editorial roster including some quite famous academics. Sokal’s article, titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," tested just how much nonsense such a journal was willing to swallow. The article, saturated with postmodern jargon, announced that "an external world whose properties are independent of any individual human being" was "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual outlook." Because scientific research is "inherently theory laden and self-referential," it "cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counterhegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities." Quantum gravity was pronounced a mere social construction.

Sokal’s article was accepted without peer review. On the day of publication of his article in Social Text, Sokal revealed in the journal Lingua Franca that the article was a pseudoscientific hoax. The editors of Social Text responded that the article’s "status as parody does not alter, substantially, our interest in the piece, itself, as a symptomatic document."

George Orwell said that some things are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. But to be fair, no one actually believes that reality is merely a text, though many people undoubtedly think they believe it. Or did. At the time I wrote this account, postmodernism seemed to be fading from the North American academic scene. It had already dissipated in France, where, as my French anthropologist friend Dan Sperber said, "it never even had the prestige of being French!"

Should you find yourself in a conversation with a postmodernist, and I can’t wholeheartedly recommend you do, try the following. Ask whether the balance on the person’s credit card statement is a mere social construction. Or ask whether he thinks power differentials in society are merely a matter of interpretation or whether they have some basis in reality.

I have to admit, incidentally, that postmodernist concerns have produced some research related to power, ethnicity, and gender that seems valid and important. The anthropologist Ann Stoler, for example, has done very interesting research on the shaky and sometimes hilarious criteria used by the Dutch in colonial Indonesia to determine who was and was not "white." Nothing so straightforward as the American rule that anyone with a "single drop" of African blood was a Negro, which of course was a social construction without any remote basis in physical reality. Stoler’s work is of substantial interest to historians, to anthropologists, and to psychologists interested in how people categorize the world and how people’s motivations influence their understanding of the world.

What I find particularly ironic about postmodernists is that they asserted without evidence that interpretations of reality are always just that, and did so in the complete absence of knowledge about the findings by psychologists that support a contention only slightly less radical on its face than postmodernists’ views. One of the greatest accomplishments of psychologists is the demonstration of the philosopher’s dictum that everything from the perception of motion to understanding of the workings of our own minds is an inference. Nothing in the world is known as directly or infallibly as intuition tells us it is.

But the fact that everything is an inference doesn’t mean that any inference is as defensible as another. Should you find yourself at the zoo with a postmodernist, don’t let him get away with telling you that your belief that the large animal with the trunk and tusks is an elephant is a mere inference—because it could be a mouse with a glandular condition.