[MD] Science Wars

[Ham Priday]

Marsha, Willblake2 --


What's all this about Science Wars in the 1990s?

Science and religion have always been in conflict ideologically, and I could 
see how the Scopes trial of 1925 might be regarded as the opening skirmish 
in the "battle" between the Darwinians and the Creationists.  But science 
wars in the 1990s in which, Marsha (the sophist) conjectures, "RMP led the 
attack against Science"...?

To see what I'd missed in the last decade, I checked Wikipedia (which seemed 
to be the only reference), and learned that the cultural journal 'Social 
Text' was the first to use the term in May 1996 when it ran a "Science Wars" 
issue with essays contributed by controversial writers in the social 
sciences and humanities.  Among the contributors was Alan Sokal, who 
submitted a paper purporting to argue that quantum physics supported 
postmodernist criticism of scientific objectivity.  Sokal, a physicist, 
later confessed it was a "...hoax 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".  The incident 
became known as "the Sokal Affair".

In a 2001 book titled "Making Social Science Matter", Dr. Bent Flyvbjerg, 
writes: "However entertaining for bystanders, the mudslinging of the Science 
Wars is unproductive.  The Wars undoubtedly serve political and ideological 
purposes in the competition for research funds and in defining what Charles 
Lindblom and Michel Foucault have called society's 'truth politics.'  Judged 
by intellectual standards, however, the Science Wars are misguided."

My Google search also revealed that Wikipedia has itself been criticized for 
promulgating a case for the Science Wars.  Stuart Geiger, a Georgetown U. 
graduate who has submitted a number of articles to Wiki, notes: "Instead of 
debating about the efficacy and authority of science, academics are now 
debating the efficacy and authority of Wikipedia."  He's probably on to 
something.

Personally, I think the so-called "wars" are overblown if not actually 
bogus.  Despite the hand-wringing of Nicholas Maxwell and others who would 
"humanize" the methodology of Science, the empiricists should continue doing 
what they have done so brilliantly for more than a century, and the 
philosophers and social scientists should have the wisdom to get off their 
back.

(That's my opinion anyway.)

--Ham