The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology

Rating:
Summary: The debate from many sides
Review: The Science Wars is a fine collection of essays edited by Keith Parsons (who includes himself among the defenders of science) that attempts to look at the main arguments that go on in the ongoing discussions about the validity and purpose of science in our modern culture. The term "Science Wars" is itself, as I understand it, somewhat controversial. I've heard it said that there is no war here, just discussion. I tend to doubt this view. As we see in this text, there are a great many people who attack (yes, attack) science from a variety of perspectives.

Parsons has taken a good selection of essays from both sides and arranged them topically. Perhaps it represents his editorial point of view that the format is attackers first, followed in each section by defenders. This format works fine for me. I think the selection is a fair one, and he has presented what the authors see as their main arguments. There does not appear to be any attempt to give us only the most bizarre essays available (as in Sokal and Bricmont). It is probably an honest attempt to give both sides their say.

Specifically, the first section is on constructivism, the idea that scientific facts are actually social constructs, with no claim to universal truth at all. The work of Bruno Latour is prominent here. He is the sociologist who worked at the Salk institute disguised as a day laborer (I not sure what), observed the scientists, and then reported that science is just a bunch of people consulting wavy lines on funny machines, consulting scientific holy texts, inscribing patterns on paper, and then declaring themselves wise, sort of like witch doctors or shamans would go through some religious rite. Needless to say, there are rebuttals to this sort of thing.

The next section is feminism. Sandra Harding's writing provides the main attack, though her "attack" is probably less so than for others. She promotes the idea that feminists must by necessity be more objective than ordinary oppressors who do science. Parsons does not mention whether she is the same feminist that called Newton's Principia a "rape manual". Unlike many of the attackers, Harding does seem to want to improve science, and does not deny its benefits and uses. But there are rebuttal essays to what she does say.

Next up is postmodernism. This is where things really get wild, since one of the features of postmodernism is a denial of, well, pretty much everything. Refuting postmodern writers is hard because first, they won't say anything is certain, and second, they cloak every thought in multiple layers of jargon, doublespeak, and gibberish (see Sokal and Bricmont for more on this). It was, in fact, Alan Sokal's famous hoax of sending a parody article full on deliberate nonsense to the postmodernist journal Social Text that started one of the fiercest battles in the science wars when the editors failed to notice it was a joke and published in. The largest selection of essays in this section are devoted to this event and how various people felt about not only the hoax, but about other people's responses to the hoax.

And finally we get to the conservatives. Lest anyone has forgotten the continual Darwinism versus creationism debate and tensions between religion and science, they are brought out here.

For a short book, don't expect anything too long and detailed. There is a lot of ground to cover here, and this selection can do little more than scratch the surface. But if you would like an intellectually honest attempt to identify the major (defined as popular) arguments against science, this is a good choice. Parsons introduces and summarizes each subject, letting us know what the topics are. The reader may then read and learn.

Rating:
Summary: What science wars?
Review: This is a useful collection of articles on the science wars, although it seems like the thesis has been set up for easy challenge by antithesis, and science emerges victorious once again, leviathan, heat pump, and the rest.
It seems the constructivist critique of science got off on the wrong foot and lost a sense of perspective, making the retort of science fundamentalists all too easy.
The point, or what should have been the point, is that current science cannot resolve all issues of reality, yet claims hegemony over all forms of knowledge. The science wars never go around to the main event. And it is interesting through the whole debate Darwinism remained untouched. In fact, that angle seems to have been left to the ID critics, and we have Philip Johnson's essay on science, from Reason in Balance. But a critique of scientific methodology in that form is inadequate. So one can only regret the lack of 'guts' in the progression of critics from Kuhn, to Popper, Feyerbend, and the rest. Interesting enough collection