A House Built On Sand

[Library]

Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science

Edited by

Noretta Koertge
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1998

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A house built on sand: exposing postmodernist myths about science /

edited by Noretta Koertge.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-19-511725-5

1. Science. 2. Science--Social aspects. 3. Science and state.

4. Research--Philosophy. I. Koertge, Noretta.

Q172.H68 1998

501--dc21 97-47506

3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

Acknowledgments

Any collaborative volume depends not only on the talents of the contributors but also on their willingness to cooperate in choosing topics and meeting deadlines. The experience of working with the 16 scientists and humanists involved in this project was heartening in many ways. Despite widespread rumors about the incommensurability of the "Two Cultures," when we circulated drafts of our essays among ourselves there was an amazing consilience of basic intellectual values. People with backgrounds in science, engineering, and mathematics were very concerned with questions of historical accuracy. The historians and philosophers of science in our group placed a high premium on getting the scientific details right. And we all equally deplored the factual errors, weak arguments, and slippery rhetoric that permeated so much of the postmodernist science studies that we were critiquing.

Not that there weren't disagreements! Many of the essays in this volume were modified as a result, thanks to the good ideas of the readers and the good sense of the writers to be receptive to the suggestions of their colleagues.

All of this took time, but thanks to the technology of the internet and the willingness of the contributors to make this project a high priority, we were able to go from the initial prospectus to final manuscript in exactly one year. Many thanks to those who interrupted their preparation of tenure dossiers, grant proposals, and sabbatical leaves to meet the deadlines for this project.

A special acknowledgment also goes to Oxford University Press. We are grateful to those anonymous referees and to the press for their confidence in this project.

I would also like personally to thank various people who supported my editorial efforts: my wise E-mail buddies who served as informal editorial consultants; my patient HPS colleagues here at IU who listened to me over lunch and gave good advice; the spunky students in my "Science Wars" seminar for invigorating discussions; Karen Blaisdell for transforming electronic submissions in every conceivable format into a coherent manuscript; Anne Mylott for compiling the index; and my family-Deborah, Matt, and Emma--for helping me remember what is most important in life.

Bloomington, Indiana N. K.

July 1997

Links:

[Contributors]
[Scrutinizing Science Studies] [2]

[Library]

Contributors

PAUL BOGHOSSIAN is professor of philosophy and chair of the department at New York University. His research interests lie mainly in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language and epistemology. He has published articles on color, rulefollowing, naturalism, eliminativism, self-knowledge, analytic truth, and a priori knowledge. E-mail: boghossn@is2.nyu.edu

ALLAN FRANKLIN is professor of physics and an active participant in the history and philosophy of science program at the University of Colorado. In addition to his work in high-energy physics, he has written extensively on the philosophy of experiment, notably The Neglect of Experiment ( 1986) and Experiment, Right or Wrong ( 1990). E-mail: franklin_a@gold.colorado.edu

PAUL GROSS is university professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. In addition to a long and distinguished research career in molecular biology, including a stint as director of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, he served as director of the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Studies. Both experiences contributed directly to his provocative and influential book (coauthored with Norman Levitt) Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science ( 1994). E-mail: prg@faraday.clas.virginia.edu

JOHN HUTH is professor of physics at Harvard University. He performs experiments in high energy particle physics. His current experiments using the Collider Detector at Fermilab produced recently published data demonstrating the discovery of the top quark. He is also engaged in research in advanced accelerator technology and experiments to test the mechanisms of spontaneous symmetry breaking between the weak and electromagnetic forces. E-mail: huth@huhepl.harvard.edu

MARGARET C. JACOB is professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the pioneers of the social history of science.
Her most recent book, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. She is also coauthor of Telling the Truth about History ( 1994) with Lynn Hunt and Joyce Appleby. E-mail: mjacob@sas.upenn.edu

Her most recent book, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. She is also coauthor of Telling the Truth about History ( 1994) with Lynn Hunt and Joyce Appleby. E-mail: mjacob@sas.upenn.edu

NORETTA KOERTGE is professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University. Her research interests include both the historical and the normative aspects of scientific methodology. She edited Nature and Causes of Homosexuality: A Philosophic and Scientific Inquiry ( 1981) and cowrote (with Daphne Patai) Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies ( 1994). E-mail: koertge@indiana.edu

NORMAN LEVITT is professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and author of Grassmannians and Gauss Maps in Piecewise-Linear Topology ( 1989). His experience at the interdisciplinary seminars on science and culture at the Rutgers University Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture provided motivation and material for the controversial book he coauthored with Paul Gross, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science ( 1994). He is now writing about the relationship between science and democracy. E-mail: njlevitt@math.rutgers.edu

WILLIAM McKINNEY is professor of philosophy at Southeast Missouri State University. His research interests include theories of scientific discovery, philosophical analyses of experimental failures, and the philosophy of technology.

MEERA NANDA first trained as a microbiologist and is now completing a second Ph.D. in the science and technology studies department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In addition to her work in science journalism, she has written scholarly articles on the implications of social constructionist and postmodern critiques of science and technology for the project of modernizing non-Western countries. E-mail: nandam@rpi.edu

WILLIAM NEWMAN is professor of history and philosophy of science at Indiana University. His current research draws connections between alchemical debates and the emergence of modern science. He is the author of The Summa perfectionis of PseudoGeber: A Critical Edition, Translation and Study ( 1991) and Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution ( 1994). E-mail: wnewman@indiana.edu

CASSANDRA PINNICK is professor of philosophy at Western Kentucky University. She has published articles on feminist epistemology, technology assessment, and the ethnographic approach to science studies. Her research interests focus on developing a historically based epistemology of science. E-mail: pinnick@wku.edu

MICHAEL RUSE is professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Philosophy and Biology and the author of numerous books on history and the philosophy of biology, including The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw ( 1979), Sociobiology: Sense or Nonsense? ( 1979), Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy ( 1986), The Darwinian Paradigm ( 1989), and Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology ( 1996). E-mail: mruse@arts.uoguelph.ca
ALAN SOBLE is professor and research professor of philosophy at the University of New Orleans. In 1977 he founded the Society for the Philosophy of Sеx and Love and served as its director until 1992. His recent books include Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality ( 1986), The Structure of Love ( 1990), and Sexual Investigations ( 1996). He is currently writing The Limits of Feminist Scholarship. E-mail: agspl@uno.edu

ALAN SOKAL is professor of physics at New York University and coauthor (with Roberto Fernandez and Jurg Frohlich) of Random Walks, Critical Phenomena and Triviality in Quantum Field Theory ( 1992). He recently wrote a series of critiques of cultural studies commentaries on the physical sciences, most notably his satirical article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," which appeared in a recent issue of Social Text. E-mail: sokal@nyu.edu

PHILIP SULLIVAN is professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies. His research interests include hypersonic flow, air cushion vehicle dynamics, and biological fluid flows. He is currently writing a historically informed textbook on fluid mechanics. E-mail: sullivan@utias.utoronto.ca

[Library]

Scrutinizing Science Studies

Noretta Koertge

The "House" in our title refers to interdisciplinary endeavors called Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) or Science and Culture Studies. Within their veritable carnival of approaches and methodologies we find feminists and Marxists of every stripe, ethnomethodologists, deconstructionists, sociologists of knowledge and critical theorists--those who find significance in rhetoric and others who emphasize the role of patronage and the power of empire. One might expect to find irreconcilable differences between, for example, those who stress material conditions and those who focus on metaphors, and, indeed, there are lively debates on such matters. Yet we also find widely shared convictions and projects. Although it is always hazardous to try to summarize any group's principles and purposes, the following are some noteworthy precepts that appear to be widely shared:

•Every aspect of that complex set of enterprises that we call science, including, above all, its content and results, is shaped by and can be understood only in its local historical and cultural context.
• In particular, the products of scientific inquiry, the so-called laws of nature, must always be viewed as social constructions. Their validity depends on the consensus of "experts" in just the same way as the legitimacy of a pope depends on a council of cardinals.
• Although scientists typically succeed in arrogating special epistemic authority to themselves, scientific knowledge is just "one story among many." The more epistemological authority that science has in a given society, the more important it is to unmask its pretensions to be an enterprise dedicated to the pursuit of objective knowledge. Science must be "humbled."
• Since the quest for objective knowledge is a quixotic one, the best way to appraise scientific claims is through a process of political evaluation. Since the "evidence" for a scientific claim is never conclusive and is always open to negotiation, the best way to evaluate scientific results is to ask who stands to benefit if the claim is taken to be true. Thus, for the citizen the key question about a scientific result should not be how well tested the claim is but, rather, Cui bono?
• "Science is politics by other means": the results of scientific inquiry are profoundly and importantly shaped by the ideological agendas of powerful elites. There is no univocal sense in which the science of one society is better than that of another. In particular, Euroscience is not objectively superior to the various ethnosciences and shamanisms described by anthropologists or invented by Afrocentrists. Neither is there any clear sense in which we can talk about scientific progress within the European tradition. On the contrary, science is characterized chiefly by its complicity in all the most negative and oppressive aspects of modern history: increasingly destructive warfare, environmental disasters, racism, sexism, eugenics, exploitation, alienation, and imperialism. Given the impossibility of scientific objectivity, it is futile to exhort scientists and policymakers to try harder to remove ideological bias from the practice of science. Instead, what we need to do is deliberately introduce "corrective biases" and "progressive political values" into science. There is a call for "emancipatory science" and "advocacy research."

Postmodernists pride themselves on their reflexivity, so it is not surprising to find them defending their own approach by proclaiming it to be morally and politically superior to the traditional scientific emphases on disinterestedness, universalism, and empiricism. Convinced that scientists succeed in making their case by relying on rhetorical devices that include the deployment of judiciously selected "data" and artfully constructed "experimental demonstrations," advocates of the Cultural Studies approach have assembled a group of case studies that are intended to persuade us that their account of science is indeed exemplified by past and present scientific practice. Thus in the now notorious "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, Sandra Harding boasts that "the Right's objections [to science studies] virtually never get into the nitty-gritty of historical or ethnographic detail to contest the accuracy of social studies of science accounts. Such objections remain at the level of rhetorical flourishes and ridicule." (1) Harding's claim is exaggerated--there are already many book reviews and articles (some written by the contributors to this volume) cataloguing the factual errors, interpretative flaws, and shoddy scholarship that are all too pervasive in STS writings. (The Sokal "experiment" vividly illustrates what can easily happen in a field that repudiates all received scholarship, in which "text" is more important than "fact" and the political inspiration for a claim becomes the overriding evaluative criterion.)

But ironically, Harding's remark does reinforce the idea that it would be very useful to have a collection of hard-hitting critiques of the postmodernist case studies that are cited over and over again as evidence for the claim that the results of natural science tell us more about social context than they do about the natural world. Although the overall tone of this collection is critical of the dominant STS portrait of the development of science, we recognize the importance of many of the questions raised by social historians, sociologists, and students of science policy. But we believe that a prerequisite for dealing fruitfully and responsibly with these concerns is to be more careful in our descriptions of the history of science and current scientific practice. This volume is intended to expedite the winnowing process, for only then can we realize the positive potential of the science studies approach.

At the 1994 professional meeting of historians and philosophers of science in New Orleans (a meeting attended, coincidentally, by FBI agents looking for clues to the origins of the ideas in the Unabomber Manifesto), Philip Kitcher read a paper en

titled "How the Road to Relativism Is Paved--With the Best of Intentions but the Worst of Arguments." Because many of the political concerns discussed in science studies are legitimate and widely shared, many people in the academy have been loath to criticize publicly weak philosophical arguments or shaky history, feeling the science critics were well intentioned. However, more and more people (and not just on the right--the Nation was quite supportive of Sokal's intervention) are now realizing that short-run political solidarity is no substitute for scholarly integrity.

In this book we intend to provide a place where reason and good sense can be brought to bear on a field that has lost its mechanisms of scholarly self-control. Our analyses do not pull any punches in identifying errors. Some of the case studies we criticize have turned out to contain crude factual blunders (e.g., Latour's reading of relativity theory). Other cases involve egregious errors of omission, such as the attempt to explain the slow development of fluid dynamics solely in terms of gender bias. However, we will not pick nits, and when a flawed account contains positive aspects or something to be learned, even though it is mistaken, we will not hesitate to say so. Our only target is shoddy scholarship, but our concern stems from the conviction that intellectual values undergird progressive political values.

ON A MORE PERSONAL NOTE. As soon as the news of the Sokal intervention in the "Science Wars" hit the media, I was contacted by various people at my university--several physicists, a sociologist, a comparative literature student, and an art historian. They all were asking, What on earth is going on in science studies these days? Sometimes the question had an implicit (or explicit) follow-up: Is this the sort of thing you people in history and philosophy of science do?

The second question made me wince. I feel privileged to work in one of the oldest "science studies" departments in this country (although we have never used that label). From time to time my colleagues have team-taught or offered courses on their own in Indiana University's departments of physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and economics. Our graduate students have had faculty from mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and cognitive science on their thesis committees. How could anyone, for a moment, believe that we had gone postmodern?!

But the price of respect is vigilance. Many serious scholars in history, philosophy, and sociology of science have been too busy doing good research and too sanguine about the good sense of their more distant colleagues. Some think that deconstruction deserves our "sympathetic indulgence." However, I believe it is high time for what sociologists call "boundary maintenance" but what I prefer to think of not as policing but as a form of Popperian respect. While doing graduate work at Chelsea College, I attended faithfully the famous "Popper Seminar" at the London School of Economics. I often heard Sir Karl (he had just been knighted) say (I quote from memory): "The greatest tribute you can pay someone is to criticize his work. Perhaps you will be able to improve on his ideas, but that is not necessary. We learn from our mistakes."

[2]

[Library]

I believe this book responds well to the question about what is going on in science studies and helps raise the level of critical discussion. What it does not address is the question that kept resurfacing in the Science Wars seminar that I taught while the articles in this book were being written--namely, What is really going on in the Science Wars? Why has the postmodernist perspective become so popular?

The ten members of that seminar drew on a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds and experience: fieldwork in anthropology and archeology; technical laboratory work in an astronomy field station and at Los Alamos; and Peace Corps service and teaching experience in Puerto Rico, Mexico, India, and Turkey. It quickly emerged that we had quite disparate attitudes toward, for example, technology, the philosophy of elementary science education, and governmental regulation! But we also had two immediate points of agreement. When we read Higher Superstition, we all found that it was more moderate and less polemical than we had anticipated (or remembered from earlier reading). Either we had been misled by reviews of the book, or the level of vitriol in the debate has risen so rapidly since the book was written that it no longer sounded so harsh (or both)! (2)

In regard to our other point of agreement, it would provide a pleasing symmetry if I could report that the postmodernist pieces we read were also better modulated than we had anticipated or remembered. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I can easily visualize one participant gesticulating in an agitated fashion while saying something to the following effect: Why do they keep shooting themselves in the foot? I was prepared to be very sympathetic to the postmodernists, you know. I've seen the bad effects of scientism in my own field, and I can go along with them for quite a long ways. But then it gets so absurd I just have to put the book down. Does anyone really believe this stuff? What are they doing!

Some members of the seminar were inclined to bracket the parts in the readings they found gratuitously polemical or subversive to the authors' own projects, especially when they found the project a congenial one. But all of us found many of the interchanges puzzling, and at coffee breaks we kept stewing about what was really going on. Everyone had an ingredient to add: the Vietnam War and Sputnik; C. P. Snow, Alan Bloom, Kuhn, and Feyerabend; Three Mile Island, Bhopal, and the spotted owl; Reagan's defunding of social science and the demise of the supercollider; the explicit political mission of women's studies and black studies programs; anxiety about affimative action and the bad job market for new Ph.D.s; Watergate and the end of the Cold War.

Neither our seminar nor this volume could fruitfully grapple with themes of such magnitude. A respectable account of the broader historical context of the Science Wars awaits the touch of a future Gibbon. It also does not make much sense to call for a new science studies paradigm or a polite division of scholarly labor. We cannot even "agree to disagree" in an authentic fashion until we better understand what divides us. Perhaps the best place to start talking is by focusing on particular scientific episodes and specific claims about the history and practice of science. That is what we do in this volume.

Notes

1. Sandra Harding ( 1996), Science Is "Good to Think With," Social Text 46-47:15.

2. For a synopsis of these later developments, see the new preface and supplementary notes in the paperback edition of Higher Superstition by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998).

[Library]

The Strange World of Postmodernist Science Studies

The three chapters in this introductory section both describe some of the major currents that constitute postmodernist studies of science and offer critical analyses of them. To the novice, the plethora of labels and acronyms is bound to be confusing, so in this volume we have tried, as far as possible, to follow Miss Manners's advice to use the forms of address most congenial to the individual. Thus although "postmodernism" or "POMO" can be used as a form of abuse, it is also the expression that many of the new commentators on science choose to describe their approach.

For example, the 1992 draft of the National Science Education Standards claimed to be based on a "contemporary approach, called postmodernism, [that] questions the objectivity of observation and the truth of scientific knowledge" (quoted in Holton 1997, 553). And in a recent book review in Science, Paul Forman, a historian of science at the Smithsonian, speaks approvingly of "our postmodern works" with its social constructionist epistemology and a "morality-based rather than truth-based Weltgefuehl ( 1997, 750). (1)

Amongst postmodernist critiques of science, it is useful to distinguish between those people who describe what they do as Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the science commentators within the more loosely delineated approach called Cultural Studies. A comparison of the bibliographic items in the "Science Wars" issue of Social Text, a cultural studies magazine, and the 1995 Handbook of Science and Technology Studies ( Jasanoff et al.) (2) quickly reveals the significant overlap in these two approaches. Their disciplinary histories are quite different, however. STS has roots in the history and sociology of science as well as science and technology policy studies, whereas cultural studies draws more on recent trends in literary criticism and continental philosophy.

Any attempt at further classification would be counterproductive. As we will see, there are many varieties of feminist critiques of science. Some anthropologists of science think it is important to understand what the "natives" (i.e., the scientists) think they are doing; others believe it is necessary to de-familiarize scientific practices and to use only outsiders' categories to describe what is going on in the laboratory. Some case studies attempt to discuss the substance of the scientific debates and arguments; others focus on the rhetoric devices employed or the social networks connecting the actor's.

Nevertheless, as the following chapters will show, there are enough shared elements in these writings to warrant treating them as a cluster. All of the writers we discuss clearly are committed to more or less extreme versions of constructionism and relativism. Their essays also seem to have a certain characteristic tone or attitude that is more difficult to pin down but that is in fact contained in the very term postmodern--namely, the conviction that we are now too sophisticated to be moved by the intellectual ideals or accomplishments of the last three centuries.

The following three chapters highlight different weaknesses in postmodernist science studies. Alan D. Sokal, a physicist, is particularly concerned about radical social constructionism and the conflation of ontology and epistemology. Paul Boghossian, a philosopher, emphasizes the incoherence of postmodernist variants of relativism. And Philip Kitcher, a philosopher working in a science studies program, is disturbed by the deleterious effects of various modern historiographies. All suggest that the central tenets of these postmodernist commentators on science are in fact antithetical to their professed progressive political goals.

Notes

1. The book reviewed is Gross et al., The Flight from Science and Reason. Forman agrees that postmodernism is found in most areas of scholarship, but he scoffs at "the organizer's aim of placing science back on its pre-postmodern pedestal" (p. 750) and the "hawking [of a] snakeoil cure for scientific illiteracy" (p. 752).

2. The volume was published with the cooperation of the Society for Social Studies of Science.

References

Paul Forman, Assailing the Seasons, Science 276 ( 1997), pp. 750-752.

Holton, Gerald, Science Education and the Sense of Self. In Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt , and Martin W. Lewis (eds.). 1997. The Flight from Science and Reason. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 557-560.

Jasanoff, Shelia, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen , and Trevor Pinch, eds. 1995. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

[Library]

Alan D. Sokal

I did not write this work merely with the aim of setting the exegetical record straight. My larger target is those contemporaries who--in repeated acts of wish-fulfillment--have appropriated conclusions from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety of social сum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted. Feminists, religious apologists (including "creation scientists"), counterculturalists, neoconservatives, and a host of other curious fellow-travelers have claimed to find crucial grist for their mills in, for instance, the avowed incommensurability and underdetermination of scientific theories. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is-second only to American political campaigns--the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism ( 1990, p. x)

I confess to some embarrassment at being asked to contribute an introductory essay to this collection of critical studies in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. After all, I'm not a historian or a sociologist or a philosopher; I'm merely a theoretical physicist with an amateur interest in the philosophy of science and perhaps some modest skill at thinking clearly. Social Text cofounder Stanley Aronowitz was, alas, absolutely right when he called me "ill-read and half-educated." (1)

My own contribution to this field began, as the reader undoubtedly knows, with an unorthodox (and admittedly uncontrolled) experiment. I wrote a parody of postmodern science criticism, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," and submitted it to the cultural-studies journal Social Text (of course without telling the editors that it was a parody). They published it as a serious scholarly article in their spring 1996 special issue devoted to what they call the "Science Wars." (2) Three weeks later, I revealed the hoax in an article in Lingua Franca (3), and all hell broke loose. (4)

In this essay I'd like to discuss briefly what I think the " Social Text affair" does and does not prove. But first, to fend off the accusation that I'm an arrogant physicist who rejects all sociological intrusion on our "turf," I'd like to lay out some positive things that I think social studies of science can accomplish. The following propositions are, I hope, noncontroversial:

1. Science is a human endeavor, and like any other human endeavor, it merits being subjected to rigorous social analysis. Which research problems count as important, how research funds are distributed, who gets prestige and power, what role scientific expertise plays in public-policy debates, in what form scientific knowledge becomes embodied in technology, and for whose benefit--all these issues are strongly affected by political, economic, and, to some extent, ideological considerations, as well as by the internal logic of scientific inquiry. They are thus fruitful subjects for empirical study by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists.

2. At a more subtle level, even the content of scientific debate--what types of theories can be conceived and entertained, what criteria are to be used for deciding among competing theories--is constrained in part by the prevailing attitudes of mind, which in turn arise in part from deep--seated historical factors. It is the task of historians and sociologists of science to sort out, in each instance, the roles played by "external" and "internal" factors in determining the course of scientific development. Not surprisingly, scientists tend to stress the "internal" factors while sociologists tend to stress the "external" factors, if only because each group tends to have a poor grasp of the other group's concepts. But these problems are perfectly amenable to rational debate.

3. There is nothing wrong with research informed by a political commitment as long as that commitment does not blind the researcher to inconvenient facts. Thus, there is a long and honorable tradition of sociopolitical critique of science, (5) including antiracist critiques of anthropological pseudoscience and eugenics (6) and feminist critiques of psychology and parts of medicine and biology. (7) These critiques typically follow a standard pattern: First, one shows, using conventional scientific arguments, why the research in question is flawed according to the ordinary canons of good science. Then--and only then--one attempts to explain how the researchers' social prejudices (which may well have been unconscious) led them to violate these canons. Of course, each such critique has to stand or fall on its own merits; having good political intentions doesn't guarantee that one's analysis will constitute good science, good sociology, or good history. But this general two-step approach is, I think, sound; and empirical studies of this kind, if conducted with due intellectual rigor, could shed useful light on the social conditions under which good science (defined normatively as the search for truths or at least approximate truths about the world) is fostered or hindered. (8)

I don't want to claim that these three points exhaust the field of fruitful inquiry for historians and sociologists of science, but they certainly do lay out a big and important area. And yet, some sociologists and literary intellectuals over the past two decades have gotten greedier: Roughly speaking, they want to attack the normative conception of scientific inquiry as a search for truths or approximate truths about the world; they want to see science as just another social practice, which produces "narrations" and "myths" that are no more valid than those produced by other social practices; and some of them want to argue further that these social practices encode a bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist worldview. Of course, like all brief summaries, this one is an oversimplification; and in any case, there is no canonical doctrine in the "new" sociology of science, just a bewildering variety of individuals and schools. More importantly, the task of summarization is here made more difficult by the fact that this literature is often ambiguous in crucial ways about its most fundamental claims (as I'll illustrate later using the cases of Latour and Barnes-Bloor). Still, I think most scientists and philosophers of science would be astonished to learn that "the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge," as the prominent sociologist of science Harry Collins claims, (9) or that "reality is the consequence rather than the cause" of the so-called "social construction of facts," as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar assert. (10)

[mix master]

You actually expect anyone to read all that?

[SatansLittleHelper]

Originally Posted by Library

Alan D. Sokal

I did not write this work merely with the aim of setting the exegetical record straight. My larger target is those contemporaries who--in repeated acts of wish-fulfillment--have appropriated conclusions from the philosophy of science and put them to work in aid of a variety of social сum political causes for which those conclusions are ill adapted. Feminists, religious apologists (including "creation scientists"), counterculturalists, neoconservatives, and a host of other curious fellow-travelers have claimed to find crucial grist for their mills in, for instance, the avowed incommensurability and underdetermination of scientific theories. The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is-second only to American political campaigns--the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.

Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism ( 1990, p. x)

I confess to some embarrassment at being asked to contribute an introductory essay to this collection of critical studies in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. After all, I'm not a historian or a sociologist or a philosopher; I'm merely a theoretical physicist with an amateur interest in the philosophy of science and perhaps some modest skill at thinking clearly. Social Text cofounder Stanley Aronowitz was, alas, absolutely right when he called me "ill-read and half-educated." (1)

My own contribution to this field began, as the reader undoubtedly knows, with an unorthodox (and admittedly uncontrolled) experiment. I wrote a parody of postmodern science criticism, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," and submitted it to the cultural-studies journal Social Text (of course without telling the editors that it was a parody). They published it as a serious scholarly article in their spring 1996 special issue devoted to what they call the "Science Wars." (2) Three weeks later, I revealed the hoax in an article in Lingua Franca (3), and all hell broke loose. (4)

In this essay I'd like to discuss briefly what I think the " Social Text affair" does and does not prove. But first, to fend off the accusation that I'm an arrogant physicist who rejects all sociological intrusion on our "turf," I'd like to lay out some positive things that I think social studies of science can accomplish. The following propositions are, I hope, noncontroversial:

1. Science is a human endeavor, and like any other human endeavor, it merits being subjected to rigorous social analysis. Which research problems count as important, how research funds are distributed, who gets prestige and power, what role scientific expertise plays in public-policy debates, in what form scientific knowledge becomes embodied in technology, and for whose benefit--all these issues are strongly affected by political, economic, and, to some extent, ideological considerations, as well as by the internal logic of scientific inquiry. They are thus fruitful subjects for empirical study by historians, sociologists, political scientists, and economists.

2. At a more subtle level, even the content of scientific debate--what types of theories can be conceived and entertained, what criteria are to be used for deciding among competing theories--is constrained in part by the prevailing attitudes of mind, which in turn arise in part from deep--seated historical factors. It is the task of historians and sociologists of science to sort out, in each instance, the roles played by "external" and "internal" factors in determining the course of scientific development. Not surprisingly, scientists tend to stress the "internal" factors while sociologists tend to stress the "external" factors, if only because each group tends to have a poor grasp of the other group's concepts. But these problems are perfectly amenable to rational debate.

3. There is nothing wrong with research informed by a political commitment as long as that commitment does not blind the researcher to inconvenient facts. Thus, there is a long and honorable tradition of sociopolitical critique of science, (5) including antiracist critiques of anthropological pseudoscience and eugenics (6) and feminist critiques of psychology and parts of medicine and biology. (7) These critiques typically follow a standard pattern: First, one shows, using conventional scientific arguments, why the research in question is flawed according to the ordinary canons of good science. Then--and only then--one attempts to explain how the researchers' social prejudices (which may well have been unconscious) led them to violate these canons. Of course, each such critique has to stand or fall on its own merits; having good political intentions doesn't guarantee that one's analysis will constitute good science, good sociology, or good history. But this general two-step approach is, I think, sound; and empirical studies of this kind, if conducted with due intellectual rigor, could shed useful light on the social conditions under which good science (defined normatively as the search for truths or at least approximate truths about the world) is fostered or hindered. (8)

I don't want to claim that these three points exhaust the field of fruitful inquiry for historians and sociologists of science, but they certainly do lay out a big and important area. And yet, some sociologists and literary intellectuals over the past two decades have gotten greedier: Roughly speaking, they want to attack the normative conception of scientific inquiry as a search for truths or approximate truths about the world; they want to see science as just another social practice, which produces "narrations" and "myths" that are no more valid than those produced by other social practices; and some of them want to argue further that these social practices encode a bourgeois and/or Eurocentric and/or masculinist worldview. Of course, like all brief summaries, this one is an oversimplification; and in any case, there is no canonical doctrine in the "new" sociology of science, just a bewildering variety of individuals and schools. More importantly, the task of summarization is here made more difficult by the fact that this literature is often ambiguous in crucial ways about its most fundamental claims (as I'll illustrate later using the cases of Latour and Barnes-Bloor). Still, I think most scientists and philosophers of science would be astonished to learn that "the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge," as the prominent sociologist of science Harry Collins claims, (9) or that "reality is the consequence rather than the cause" of the so-called "social construction of facts," as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar assert. (10)

omfg.........no ones gonna read all this.........

[***HeII's Little Angel***]

Holy shit Wtf

Too..many.. words



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[Karlos]

Omg Too many words. My brain hurts