Science wars
In the philosophy of science, 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
The science wars took place principally in the United States in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press. Scientific realists accused many writers, whom they described as 'postmodernist', of having effectively rejected scientific objectivity, the scientific method, empiricism, and scientific knowledge.
Though much of the theory associated with 'postmodernism' did not make any interventions into the natural sciences, the scientific realists took aim at its general influence. The scientific realists argued that large swathes of scholarship, amounting to a rejection of objectivity and realism, had been influenced by major 20th-century post-structuralist philosophers, whose work they declare to be incomprehensible or meaningless. They implicate a broad range of fields in this trend, including cultural studies, feminist studies, comparative literature, media studies, and especially science and technology studies, which does apply such methods to the study of science.
Physicist N. David Mermin understands the science wars as a series of exchanges between scientists and "sociologists, historians and literary critics" who 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." 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."
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.Karl Popper, an early opponent of logical positivism in the 20th century, repudiated the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist/verificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".
His criticisms of scientific method were adopted by several postmodernist critiques.
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. Kuhn attributed much of this process to the interactions and strategies of the human participants in science rather than its own innate logical structure..
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, 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 objective scientific knowledge.
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 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 Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science, scientists Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt accused postmodernists of anti-intellectualism, presented the shortcomings of relativism, and suggested that postmodernists knew little about the scientific theories they criticized and practiced poor scholarship for political reasons. The authors insist that the "science critics" misunderstood the theoretical approaches they criticized, given their "caricature, misreading, and condescension, than argument". The book sparked the so-called science wars. Higher Superstition inspired a New York Academy of Sciences conference titled The Flight from Science and Reason, organized by Gross, Levitt, and Gerald Holton. Attendees of the conference were critical of the polemical approach of Gross and Levitt, yet agreed upon the intellectual inconsistency of how laymen, non-scientist, and social studies intellectuals dealt with science.''Social Text''
In 1996, Social Text, a left-wing Duke University publication of postmodern critical theory, compiled a "Science Wars" issue containing brief articles by postmodernist academics in the social sciences and the humanities, that emphasized the roles of society and politics in science. In the introduction to the issue, the Social Text editor, activist Andrew Ross, said that the attack upon science studies was a conservative reaction to reduced funding for scientific research. He characterized the Flight from Science and Reason conference as an attempted "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".In another Social Text article, the postmodern sociologist Dorothy Nelkin characterised Gross and Levitt's vigorous response as a "call to arms in response to the failed marriage of Science and the State"—in contrast to the scientists' historical tendency to avoid participating in perceived political threats, such as creation science, the animal rights movement, and anti-abortionists' attempts to curb fetal research. At the end of the Soviet–American Cold War, 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.
Also in 1996, physicist Alan Sokal had submitted an article to Social Text titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", which proposed that quantum gravity is a linguistic and social construct and that quantum physics supports postmodernist criticisms of scientific objectivity. The staff published it in the "Science Wars" issue as a relevant contribution, later claiming that they held the article back from earlier issues due to Sokal's alleged refusal to consider revisions. Later, in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies", Sokal exposed his parody-article, "Transgressing the Boundaries" as an experiment testing the intellectual rigor of an academic journal that would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it sounded good and it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions". The matter became known as the "Sokal Affair" and brought greater public attention to the wider conflict.
Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of anti-relativist and anti-postmodern 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 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, 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.