Making Physical Objects: The Law of the Excluded Middle, Dumbing-Up the World, & Handles, Tools, and Fetishes

I take conventional gender to be structural—that structure, by the way, entrenched socially by a high prestige subculture, that subculture being mathematized natural science and, being a subculture, relecting in turn the larger culture’s categorial normative system of gender, one that insists that mixture is perversion. In order to begin to demonstrate these connections, I shall want to describe how some scientists—broadly understood as physical scientists, at least—make up some of the objects of their world. Notably, these “elementary” objects are remarkably dumb, fully described by a finite list of properties. They are nothing-but these properties. Of course, in the objects’ interaction and composition among themselves there are again remarkable objects created, such as solids, which are often rather less dumb than the more elementary ones. In fact, the elementary objects are often dumbed-up in just the right way so that in their interaction they create those composed objects with which we are often well acquainted—although enormous technical effort may be required to prove this. ¹ I should note that my concern here is not with reductionism or atomism, as philosophical notions, but rather with what some scientists actually do to achieve their objects. I want to provide a cultural description that might be said to deliver on some of the promissory notes signed by Thomas Kuhn and Ian Hacking. ² And in so doing, I want to indicate the meaning of the first sentence of this paper.

As for the relationship of this work to much of science studies, I would say that it is rather more systematic and descriptive than analytic and theoretical, although my description might be grist for the mill of philosophy and social science. On the other hand, I am concerned that when scientists read my description they find it adequate and sufficiently familiar to prompt them to say, “Of course. So what. Seems obvious to me, if a bit strangely put.” Finally, I am suggesting that when gender (or race, or class) is taken as a well-defined category, it is being given a scientific definition, as I understand it here, in terms of what I shall call nondegenerate properties—a definition that is wrong about such a category’s actual mixed and crossed character.

I should like to add that nonscientists not be deterred by the examples I shall use—they are simply illustrations of more general points.

I

Put most straightforwardly, physical objects are known through a game of Twenty Questions in which the properties of these objects—spin, parity, flavor, . . . , valence—are ascertained by a series of yes-no questions, often called experiments. Each object is defined by a series of yes’s and no’s—in effect, a binary number. (Technically, ³ these yes-no questions “code” the object, to speak information theoretically.) Crucially, these questions can be made independent of each other, so that answering one question does not influence the answer to another, so that determining one property—in effect, answering one (set) of the yes-no questions—need not preclude determining another one in any order you choose. Some of the time there is a more determinate order, but still the answers to later questions do not influence the answers to earlier questions (technically, the answers to questions n+1 . . . n(max) do not influence the answers to questions 1 . . . n, where, as we shall see, n(max) is finite and even small). Here, for example, think of weighing something to greater and greater precision, using a balance as in a doctor’s office, a set of yes-no questions independently determining each decimal numeral of the weight. (Technically, in quantum theoretic terms, this determination through a series of yes-no questions is a complete orthogonal set of operators. ⁴ In information-theoretic terms, the code is uniformly convergent; crucially, there are some such codes.)

Robert Tragesser (following Michael Dummett) has argued in a Husserlian vein that what we mean by a real object in natural science and mathematics is specified by...