Science wars

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The science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world. Encyclopedia.com, citing the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, describes the science wars as the

"complex of discussions about the way the sciences are related to or incarnated in culture, history, and practice. [...] [which] came to be called a 'war' in the mid 1990s because of a strong polarization over questions of legitimacy and authority. One side [...] is concerned with defending the authority of science as rooted in objective evidence and rational procedures. The other side argues that it is legitimate and fruitful to study the sciences as institutions and social-technical networks whose development is influenced by linguistics, economics, politics, and other factors surrounding formally rational procedures and isolated established facts."[1]

The science wars took place principally in the United States in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press. Scientific realists (such as Norman Levitt, Paul R. Gross, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal) accused many writers, whom they described as 'postmodernist', of having effectively rejected scientific objectivity, the scientific method, empiricism, and scientific knowledge.[citation needed]

Though much of the theory associated with '

feminist studies, comparative literature, media studies, and especially science and technology studies
, which does apply such methods to the study of science.

literary critics" whom the scientists "thought ...were ludicrously ignorant of science, making all kinds of nonsensical pronouncements. The other side dismissed these charges as naive, ill informed and self-serving."[2] Sociologist Harry Collins wrote that the "science wars" began "in the early 1990s with attacks by natural scientists or ex-natural scientists who had assumed the role of spokespersons for science. The subject of the attacks was the analysis of science coming out of literary studies and the social sciences."[3]

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 at a philosophical level why science worked.

justificationist/verificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".[4]
His criticisms of scientific method were adopted by several postmodernist critiques.[5]

A number of 20th-century philosophers maintained that logical models of pure science do not 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 socially determined and that it did not operate under the simple logical laws put forward by the logical positivist school of philosophy.

Kuhn described the development of scientific knowledge not as a linear increase in truth and understanding, but as a series of periodic revolutions which overturned the 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).

Some interpreted Kuhn's ideas to mean that scientific theories were, either wholly or in part,

Scientific knowledge and its social problems, a book describing the role that the scientific community, as a social construct, plays in accepting or rejecting objective scientific knowledge.[6]

Postmodernism

A number of different philosophical and historical schools, often grouped together as "postmodernism", began reinterpreting scientific achievements of the past through the lens of the practitioners, often positing the influence of politics and economics in the development of scientific theories in addition to scientific observations. Rather than being presented as working entirely from positivistic observations, 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 equal validity as did scientific explanations.

Imre Lakatos advanced a midway view between the "postmodernist" and "realist" camps. 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 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 is 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

In

polemical approach of Gross and Levitt, yet agreed upon the intellectual inconsistency of how laymen, non-scientist, and social studies intellectuals dealt with science.[12]

Social Text

In 1996,

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".[13]

The historian

military funding of science declined, while funding agencies demanded accountability, and research became directed by private interests. Nelkin suggested that postmodernist critics were "convenient scapegoats" who diverted attention from problems in science.[14]

Also in 1996, physicist

Sokal Affair" and brought greater public attention to the wider conflict.[17]

Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of "anti-relativist" criticism in the wake of Sokal's article, responded to the hoax in "Sokal and Bricmont Aren't Serious", first published in Le Monde. He called Sokal's action sad (triste) for having overshadowed Sokal's mathematical work and ruined the chance to sort out controversies of scientific objectivity in a careful way. Derrida went on to fault him and co-author Jean Bricmont for what he considered an act of intellectual bad faith: they had accused him of scientific incompetence in the English edition of a follow-up book (an accusation several English reviewers noted), but deleted the accusation from the French edition and denied that it had ever existed. He concluded, as the title indicates, that Sokal was not serious in his approach, but had used the spectacle of a "quick practical joke" to displace the scholarship Derrida believed the public deserved.[18]

Continued conflict

In the first few years after 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

social construction and objectivity in science.[19]

Other attempts have been made to reconcile the two camps. Mike Nauenberg, a physicist at the

C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures, contains contributions from authors such as Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Steven Weinberg and Steven Shapin.[20]

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 (2004).

To

Bogdanov Affair in 2002[21] 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. Cornell physics professor Paul Ginsparg, argued that the cases are not at all similar, and that the fact that some journals and scientific institutions have low standards is "hardly a revelation".[22] The new editor in chief of the journal Annals of Physics, who was appointed after the controversy along with a new editorial staff, had said that the standards of the journal had been poor leading up to the publication since the previous editor had become sick and died.[21]

Interest in the science wars has waned considerably in recent years. Though the events of the science wars are still occasionally mentioned in mainstream press, they have had little effect on either the scientific community or the community of critical theorists.[citation needed] Both sides continue to maintain that the other does not understand their theories, or mistakes constructive criticisms and scholarly investigations for attacks. In 1999 Bruno Latour said "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!"[23] Subsequently, Latour has suggested a re-evaluation of sociology's epistemology based on lessons learnt from the Science Wars: "... scientists made us realize that there was not the slightest chance that the type of social forces we use as a cause could have objective facts as their effects".[24]

Reviewing Sokal's Beyond the Hoax, Mermin stated that "As a sign that the science wars are over, I cite the 2008 election of Bruno Latour [...] to Foreign Honorary Membership in that bastion of the establishment, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences" and opined that "we are not only beyond Sokal's hoax, but beyond the science wars themselves".[2]

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.[25]

Writing about these developments in the context of

global warming, 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 did not really mean what we said?"[26]

Kendrick Frazier notes that Latour is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that Latour has said that some of the authority of science needs to be regained.[27]

In 2016, Shawn Lawrence Otto, in his book The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, and What We can Do About It, that the winners of the war on science "will chart the future of power, democracy, and freedom itself."[28]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Science Wars". Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on 3 December 2022. Retrieved 14 December 2022.
  2. ^
    S2CID 45065085
    .
  3. ^ "The Science Wars – Harry Collins". Archived from the original on 3 December 2022. Retrieved 3 December 2022.
  4. Bartley, William W. (1964). "Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality". Archived 2 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine
    In Mario Bunge: The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy. The Free Press of Glencoe, section IX.
  5. ^ Stove, David Charles (1982). Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists Archived 19 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine, Oxford: Pergamon Press.
  6. ISBN 978-0-19-519721-1
    .
  7. ^ Flower, Michael J. (1995). "Review of Higher Superstition ", Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 113–14.
  8. ^ Isis (Vol. 87, No. 2, 1996), American Anthropologist (Vol. 98, No. 2, 1996).
  9. ^ Social Studies of Science (Vol. 26, No. 1, 1996).
  10. ^ The review in The Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 66, No. 5, 1995) snidely suggested that book's final sentence proved that politics, the epistemology, philosophy, and science are inter-related.
  11. ^ Gross, Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis. (1997). The Flight from Science and Reason (New York: New York Academy of Science.)
  12. ^ Kramer, Jennifer. "Who's Flying – And In What Direction?" Archived 10 May 2006 at the Wayback Machine Coverage of the NYAS Flight from Science and Reason conference. Retrieved 15 May 2006.
  13. ^ Ross, Andrew. (1996). "Introduction" Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2, pp. 1–13, esp. p. 7.
  14. ^ Nelkin, Dorothy. (1996). "The Science Wars: Responses to a Marriage Failed" Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2, pp. 93–100., p. 95.
  15. ^ Robbins, Bruce and Ross, Andrew. Editorial Response to the hoax, explaining Social Text's decision to publish Archived 9 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  16. JSTOR 466856
    .
  17. ^ Sokal, Alan. (1996). "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies Archived 2019-09-04 at the Wayback Machine," Lingua Franca, May/June, pp 62–64.
  18. ISBN 978-0-8047-4619-9
    .
  19. ^ Baringer, Philip S. (2001). "Introduction: 'the science wars'", from After the Science Wars, eds. Keith M. Ashman and Philip S. Baringer. New York: Routledge, p. 2.
  20. ^ Labinger, Jay A. and Harry Collins. (2001). "Preface", in: The One Culture?: A Conversation about Science, eds. Labinger, Jay A and Harry Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. ix–xi.
  21. ^
    Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original
    on 7 February 2008. Retrieved 20 March 2008.
  22. Ginsparg, Paul. (12 November 2002). "'Is It Art?' Is Not a Question for Physics". The New York Times
    , section A, p. 26.
  23. ^ Latour, B. (1999). Pandora's Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies Archived 4 September 2007 at the Wayback Machine, Harvard University Press, US.
  24. ^ Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, US, p. 100.[ISBN missing]
  25. ^ SERRC; Erik Baker; Naomi Oreskes (10 July 2017). "It's No Game: Post-Truth and the Obligations of Science Studies". Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Archived from the original on 30 September 2020. Retrieved 8 November 2020.
  26. ^ Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern Archived 16 September 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Critical Inquiry 30, pp. 225–48.
  27. ^ Frazier, Kendrick (2018). "'Science Wars' Veteran Latour Now Wants to Help Rebuild Trust in Science". Skeptical Inquirer. 42 (1): 7.
  28. ^ Radford, Benjamin; Frazier, Kendrick (January 2017). "The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do About It". Skeptical Inquirer. 41 (1): 61.

References

External links

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