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 is such a thing as objective scientific knowledge and accused the postmodernists of having a poor understanding of the subject they were critiquing. For the band, see 1990s (band). ... Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ... Scientific realism is a view in the philosophy of science about the nature of scientific success, an answer to the question what does the success of science involve? The debate over what the success of science involves centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities (objects, process and events) apparently... Cultural studies is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of scholars. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Feminist Studies refers to: Feminist Studies is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program investigating the significance of gender in all areas of human life. ... Comparative literature (sometimes abbreviated Comp. ... Media studies concerns the study of media content, institutions, and its role in society. ... Science and technology studies (STS) is the study of how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture. ...

Historical background

Up 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 (see, for example, Karl Popper). During this time there had also been a number of less orthodox philosophers and scientists who believed that logical models of pure science did 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 sociologically 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 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). Philosophy of science is the study of assumptions, foundations, and implications of science, especially in the natural sciences and social sciences. ... Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA, (July 28, 1902 – September 17, 1994), was an Austrian born naturalized British[1] philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. ... Thomas Samuel Kuhn (July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American intellectual who wrote extensively on the history of science and developed several important notions in the philosophy of science. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Year 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Logical positivism is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world — with a version of rationalism—the idea that our knowledge includes a component that is not derived from observation. ... Since the late 1960s, the word paradigm (IPA: ) has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ... The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), closely related to the sociology of science, considers social influences on science. ... The sociology and philosophy of science, as well as the entire field of science studies, have in the 20th century been preoccupied with the question of large-scale patterns and trends in the development of science, and asking questions about how science works both in a philosophical and practical sense. ...

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 do not put forward this claim), and that reality had a lesser or potentially irrelevant role in the formation of scientific theories. 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, 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. A social construction, social construct or social concept is an institutionalized entity or artifact in a social system invented or constructed by participants in a particular culture or society that exists because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules, or behave as... Postmodernist architecture of the Stata Center by Frank Gehry Sydney Opera House The term Postmodernism (sometimes referred to as Pomo, Po-Mo, or PoMo [1], [2], [3]) was coined in the early 1960s to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, founding the postmodern architecture. ... Paul Karl Feyerabend (January 13, 1924 – February 11, 1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades (1958-1989). ...

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 attempting to assert political control over the use of science in society (for example, the Creation-evolution controversy). In 1994, scientists Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt published Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science, 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."^[1] The book received a moderate amount of mainstream attention and became a flashpoint for the science wars. The creation-evolution controversy (also termed the creation vs. ... Paul R. Gross is a biologist and author, perhaps best known to the general public for Higher Superstition (1994),[1] written with Norman Levitt. ... Norman Jay Levitt is a mathematician at Rutgers University. ... Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science is a book by biologist Paul R. Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt. ... Science studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in a broad social, historical, and philosophical context. ...

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.^[2] 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.^[3] New York Academy of Sciences is a society of some 20,000 scientists of all disciplines from 150 countries. ... Gerald Holton is Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics and Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. ...

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."^[4] 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 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.^[5] Social Text is a postmodernist cultural studies journal published by Duke University Press. ... Andrew Ross is Professor in the American Studies program at New York University. ... Creation Magazine is a publication supporting young-earth creationist beliefs. ... New Age describes a broad movement characterized by alternative approaches to traditional Western culture. ... Hand-coloured version of the anonymous Flammarion woodcut (1888). ... Ufology is the study of unidentified flying object (UFO) reports, sightings, alleged physical evidence, and other related phenomena. ... Deutsche Physik (literally: German Physics) or Aryan Physics was the name given to a nationalist movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s against the work of Albert Einstein, labeled Jewish Physics. ... Please wikify (format) this article as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. ... Dorothy Nelkin (30 July 1933–28 May 2003) was an American sociologist of science. ... Creation science is the attempt to find evidence and rationales to support a literal interpretation of the Biblical account of creation. ... Animal rights is the viewpoint that many (non-human) animals have moral rights that prohibit humans from violating their basic interests. ... For other uses, see Cold War (disambiguation). ... The military funding of science has had a powerful transformative effect on the practice and products of scientific research since the early 20th century. ...

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".^[6] 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.^[7] Alan David Sokal (born 1955) is a physicist at New York University. ... Fig. ... The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal on the editorial staff and readership of a leading journal in the academic humanities. ... Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ...

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 humanists 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.^[8] Steve Fuller in 2005. ... A social construction, social construct or social concept is an institutionalized entity or artifact in a social system invented or constructed by participants in a particular culture or society that exists because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules, or behave as... In science, the ideal of objectivity is an essential aspect of the scientific method, and is generally considered by the scientific community to come about as a result of strict observance of the scientific method, including the scientists willingness to submit their methods and results to an open debate by...

Later significant publications related to the science wars include Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998), and The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking (1999). Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (ISBN 0-312-20407-8; French: Impostures Intellectuelles, published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, ISBN 1-86197-631-3) is a book by professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. ... Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist and a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain. ... Ian Hacking, CC (born 1936 in Vancouver) is a philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of science. ...

For some scholars, the Bogdanov Affair in 2002 [1] served as the bookend to the Sokal controversy and the chord at the end of the Science Wars opera: the review, acceptance, and publication of papers, later demonstrated to be nonsense, in peer-reviewed physics journals. Postmodernists might point out that this occurrence only served to demonstrate what they have 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.^{[citation needed]}. 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."^[9] The Bogdanov Affair is an academic dispute regarding a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twin brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (or Bogdanoff). ... Cornell University is a private university located in Ithaca, New York, USA. Its two medical campuses are in New York City and Education City, Qatar. ... Paul Ginsparg is a physicist widely known for his development of the ArXiv. ...

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 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!"^[10].

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 did not really mean what we meant?"^[11]. Global mean surface temperatures 1850 to 2006 Mean surface temperature anomalies during the period 1995 to 2004 with respect to the average temperatures from 1940 to 1980 Global warming is the observed increase in the average temperature of the Earths atmosphere and oceans in recent decades and the projected...

See also

• Sokal affair
• Bogdanov affair
• Historiography of science
• Deconstruction
• Social construction
• The Two Cultures

The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal on the editorial staff and readership of a leading journal in the academic humanities. ... The Bogdanov Affair is an academic dispute regarding a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twin brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (or Bogdanoff). ... The historiography of science is the historical study of the history of science (which often overlaps the history of technology, the history of medicine, and the history of mathematics). ... Deconstruction is a term in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, denoting a process by which the texts and languages of Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in meaning when read in light of the assumptions and absences they reveal within themselves. ... A social construction, social construct or social concept is an institutionalized entity or artifact in a social system invented or constructed by participants in a particular culture or society that exists because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules, or behave as... The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow. ...

Notes

1. ^ Flower, Michael J. "Review of Higher Superstition," Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1995, pp 113-114. Similarly dismissive reviews appeared in Isis (Vol. 87, No. 2, 1996), American Anthropologist (Vol. 98, No. 2, 1996), Social Studies of Science (Vol. 26, No. 1, 1996), and other social science and humanities journals, and even the almost purely descriptive review in The Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 66, No. 5, 1995) took a snide tone, suggesting in the final sentence that the book itself is further proof that politics and the epistemology and philosophy are science are inter-related.
2. ^ Gross, Levitt and another participant later published a book with the same title, based partly on the conference proceedings: Gross, Paul R., Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis. The Flight from Science and Reason. New York: New York Academy of Science, 1997.
3. ^ Kramer, Jennifer. "Who's Flying - And In What Direction (Coverage of the NYAS Flight from Science and Reason conference)." Accessed May 15, 2006.
4. ^ Ross, Andrew. "Introduction" Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2, 1996), pp 1-13. p 7.
5. ^ Nelkin, Dorothy. "The Science Wars: Responses to a Marriage Failed." Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2, 1996), pp 93-100. p 95.
6. ^ Sokal, Alan. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" Social Text 46/47, Vol. 14, Nos. 1 & 2, 1996), pp 217-252.
7. ^ Sokal, Alan. "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, pp 62-64.
8. ^ Baringer, Philip S. "Introduction: 'the science wars'", from After the Science Wars, eds. Keith M. Ashman and Philip S. Baringer. New York: Routlege, 2001. p. 2
9. ^ Ginsparg, Paul. "'Is It Art?' Is Not a Question for Physics". New York Times (12 November 2002), section A, p. 26.
10. ^ Latour, B. (1999) Pandora's Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Harvard University Press, USA.
11. ^ Latour, B. (2004) Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Inquiry 30, 225-248.

Isis is an academic journal published by the University of Chicago devoted to the history of science, history of medicine, and the history of technology, as well as their cultural influences, featuring both original research articles as well as extensive book reviews and review essays. ... The American Anthropologist is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. ... Social Text is a postmodernist cultural studies journal published by Duke University Press. ... Year 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar). ... Social Text is a postmodernist cultural studies journal published by Duke University Press. ... Year 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar). ... Social Text is a postmodernist cultural studies journal published by Duke University Press. ... Year 1996 (MCMXCVI) was a leap year starting on Monday (link will display full 1996 Gregorian calendar). ... November 12 is the 316th day of the year (317th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

References

• Ashman, Keith M. and Barringer, Philip S. (ed.) (2001). After the science wars, Routledge, London, UK. ISBN 0-415-21209-X
• Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman (1994). Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, USA. ISBN 0-8018-4766-4
• Sokal, Alan D. (1996). Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Social Text 46/47, 217-252.
• Callon, Michel (1999). Whose Impostures? Physicists at War with the Third Person, Social Studies of Science 29(2), 261-86.
• Parsons, Keith (ed.) (2003). The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY USA. ISBN 1-57392-994-8

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science is a book by biologist Paul R. Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt. ...

External links

• Papers by Alan Sokal on the "Social Text Affair"
• The Science Wars: a way out