Everything about the Science Wars totally explained
The
Science wars were a series of intellectual battles in the
1990s between "
postmodernists" and "
realists" (though neither party would likely use the terms to describe themselves) about the nature of scientific theories. In brief, the postmodernists questioned the objectivity of science and encompass a huge variety of critiques on scientific knowledge and method within
cultural studies,
cultural anthropology,
feminist studies,
comparative literature,
media studies, and
science and technology studies. The realists countered that there's such a thing as objective scientific knowledge and accused the postmodernists of having practically no understanding of the subject they were critiquing.
Historical background
Until the mid-20th century, the
philosophy of science had concentrated on the viability of scientific method and knowledge, proposing justifications for the truth of scientific theories and observations and attempting to discover on a philosophical level why science worked. Already
Karl Popper had started a strong attack on this view. He had denied outright that there's something such as a justification for the truth, probability or even only for the belief in scientific theories and so laid fertile foundations for postmodernism to grow on.
During this time there had also been a number of less orthodox philosophers and scientists who believed that logical models of pure science didn't apply to actual scientific practice. It was the publication of
Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in
1962, however, which fully opened the study of science to new disciplines by suggesting that the evolution of science was in part sociologically determined and that it didn't operate under the simple logical laws put forward by the
logical positivist school of philosophy. Kuhn described the development of scientific knowledge not as linear increase in truth and understanding, but as series of periodic revolutions which overturned old scientific order and replaced it with new orders (what he called "
paradigms"). Kuhn attributed much of this process to the interactions and strategies of the human participants in science rather than its own innate logical structure. (See
sociology of scientific knowledge and
Theories and sociology of the history of science).
Some interpreted Kuhn's ideas to mean that scientific theories were, either wholly or in part,
social constructs, which many interpreted as diminishing the claim of science to representing objective reality (though many social constructivists don't put forward this claim), and that reality had a lesser or potentially irrelevant role in the formation of scientific theories. In 1971,
Jerome Ravetz published
Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, a book describing the role that the scientific community, as a social construct, plays in accepting or rejecting so-called "objective" scientific knowledge. A number of different philosophical and historical schools, often lumped together as "
postmodernism", began reinterpreting scientific achievements of the past through the lens of the practitioners, often assigning political and economic conditions as formative a role in theory development as scientific observations. Rather than being held up as heroes of knowledge, many scientists of the past were scrutinized for their connection to issues of gender, sexual orientation, race, and class. Some more radical philosophers, such as
Paul Feyerabend, argued that scientific theories were themselves incoherent and that other forms of knowledge production (such as those used in
religion) served the material and spiritual needs of their practitioners with as equal validity as did scientific explanations.
Somewhat of a middle view between the "postmodernist" and "realist" camps is that put forward by thinkers such as
Imre Lakatos. For Lakatos, scientific knowledge is progressive, however, it progresses not by a strict linear path where every new element builds upon and incorporates every other, but by an approach where a "core" of a "research program" is established by auxiliary theories which can themselves be falsified or replaced without compromising the core. Social conditions and attitudes affect how strongly one attempts to resist falsification for the core of a program, but the program has an objective status, notwithstanding, based on its relative explanatory power. Resisting falsification only becomes
ad-hoc and damaging to knowledge when an alternate program with greater explanatory power is rejected in favor of another with less. But because it's changing a theoretical core, which has broad ramifications for other areas of study, accepting a new program is also revolutionary as well as progressive. Thus, for Lakatos the character of science is that of being both revolutionary and progressive; both socially informed and objectively justified.
The Science wars
This apparent attack on the validity of science from the humanities and social sciences worried many people in the scientific community, especially as the language of social construction was appropriated by groups which claimed to be proffering alternate scientific paradigms, but which were actually, according to the view of many scientists, attempting to assert political control over the use of science in society (as with
creation science,
intelligent design and the ongoing
creation-evolution controversy). In 1994, scientists
Paul R. Gross and
Norman Levitt published, an open attack on the postmodernists. According to supporters, the book brought the shortcomings of relativism into sharp focus, claiming that the postmodernists knew little about the scientific theories they discussed and pursued sloppy scholarship for political reasons. According to scholars in
science studies (the postmodernists under attack), the book brought the authors' failure to understand the theoretical approaches they criticize into sharp focus, and relied more on "caricature, misreading, and condescension than argument." The book received a moderate amount of mainstream attention and became a flashpoint for the science wars.
Higher Superstition also served as the inspiration for a conference hosted by the
New York Academy of Sciences called "The Flight from Science and Reason" and organized by Gross, Levitt and
Gerald Holton. While some participants were critical of the polemical approach of Gross and Levitt, overall the conference was highly critical of the ways non-scientist intellectuals dealt with science.
Science wars in Social Text
In 1996,
Social Text, a journal of critical theory, compiled a special issue entitled "Science Wars", with brief contributions from many of those in the social sciences and humanities labeled as "postmodernists." A number of articles placed the science wars in the context of the changing role of science in culture, as further evidence of the roles social and political factors play in science. In the introduction,
Andrew Ross suggested that the backlash against science studies was a conservative reaction to reduced science funding; he characterized the "Flight from Science and Reason" conference as an attempt at "linking together a host of dangerous threats:
scientific creationism,
New Age alternatives and cults,
astrology,
UFO-ism, the radical science movement, postmodernism, and critical science studies, alongside the ready-made historical specters of
Aryan-Nazi science and the Soviet error of
Lysenkoism" that "degenerated into name calling." Historian
Dorothy Nelkin characterized the vigorous response of scientists to Gross & Levitt's call to arms—in contrast to the historical tendency of scientists to avoid involvement in perceived political threats to science such as
creation science, the
animal rights movement, and attempts by anti-abortionists to end fetal research—as a reaction to the failed marriage between science and the state. With the
Cold War over,
military funding of science continued to decline while funding agencies were demanding increased accountability for grants and research was increasingly directed by private interests; Nelkin claimed that postmodernist critics were "convenient scapegoats" that diverted attention from problems within science.
Physicist
Alan Sokal submitted a paper to the issue in which he purported to argue that
quantum physics supports postmodernist criticisms of the objectivity of science. It was published in the journal, and later Sokal revealed it to be a hoax and an experiment to see if the journal editors would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". Its publication, known as the
Sokal affair, was simultaneously revealed as a parody in the literary magazine
Lingua Franca; this caused an uproar that brought the science wars to the attention of a wide audience of scientists and humanist scholars, and even into the mainstream media.
Continued conflict
Since the "Science Wars" edition of
Social Text, the seriousness and volume of discussion increased significantly, much of it focused on reconciling the "warring" camps of postmodernists and scientists. One significant event was the "Science and Its Critics" conference in early 1997; it brought together scientists and scholars who study science and featured Alan Sokal and
Steve Fuller as keynote speakers. The conference generated the final wave of substantial press coverage (in both news media and scientific journals), though by no means resolved the fundamental issues of
social construction and
objectivity in science.
Other attempts have been made to reconcile the two camps. Mike Nauenberg, a physicist at the
University of California at
Santa Cruz, organized a small conference in May 1997 that was attended by scientists and sociologists of science alike, among them
Alan Sokal,
N. David Mermin and
Harry Collins. In the same year, Collins organized the Southampton Peace Workshop, which again brought together a broad range of scientists and sociologists. The Peace Workshop gave rise to the idea of a book that intended to map out some of the arguments between the disputing parties. The One Culture, edited by physicist Jay A. Labinger and sociologist Harry Collins, was eventually published in 2001. The book, whose title is an obvious reference to
C.P. Snow’s
The Two Cultures, contains contributions from authors such as Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont,
Steven Weinberg and
Steven Shapin. Also in 2001, Bent Flyvbjerg in his book
Making Social Science Matter identified a way out of the Science Wars by arguing that (1) social science is
phronesis, whereas natural science is episteme, in the classical Greek meaning of the terms; (2) phronesis is well suited for the reflexive analysis and discussion of values and interests, which any society needs to thrive, whereas episteme is good for the development of predictive theory, and; (3) a well-functioning society needs both phronesis and episteme in balance, and one can't substitute for the other.
Other important publications related to the science wars include
Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and
Jean Bricmont (1998),
The Social Construction of What? by
Ian Hacking (1999) and
Who Rules in Science by
James Robert Brown.
For some scholars, the
Bogdanov Affair in 2002 served as the bookend to the Sokal controversy: the review, acceptance, and publication of papers, later alleged to be nonsense, in peer-reviewed physics journals. Postmodernists might point out that this occurrence only served to demonstrate what they've always claimed: at the outer reaches of knowledge, where new claims are evaluated and disseminated, no one can be expected to know for certain what is true and what is not.. However, others such as
Cornell physics professor
Paul Ginsparg have argued that the cases are not at all similar and that the fact some journals and scientific institutions have low or variable standards is "hardly a revelation."
Though the events of the science wars are still occasionally mentioned in mainstream press, they've had little effect on either the scientific community or the community of critical theorists. Both sides continue to maintain that the other doesn't understand their theories, or misunderstands what are meant to be constructive criticisms or simple scholarly investigations as attacks. As
Bruno Latour recently put it, "Scientists always stomp around meetings talking about 'bridging the two-culture gap', but when scores of people from outside the sciences begin to build just that bridge, they recoil in horror and want to impose the strangest of all gags on free speech since Socrates: only scientists should speak about science!".
However, more recently some of the leading critical theorists have recognized that their critiques have at times been counter-productive, and are providing intellectual ammunition for reactionary interests. Writing about these developments in the context of
Global warming, Bruno Latour noted that, "... dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we didn't really mean what we meant?".
Further Information
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