In
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994), 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, [rather] 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 (1945–91),
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 (a) it sounded good and (b) 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 (
triste) 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 (an accusation several English reviewers noted), 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.
Continued conflict In the first few years after 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 postmodernists 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. Other attempts have been made to reconcile the two camps. Mike Nauenberg, a physicist at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, organized a small conference in May 1997 that was attended by scientists and sociologists of science alike, among them
Alan Sokal,
N. David Mermin and
Harry Collins. In the same year, Collins organized the Southampton Peace Workshop, which again brought together a broad range of scientists and sociologists. The Peace Workshop gave rise to the idea of a book that intended to map out some of the arguments between the disputing parties.
The One Culture?: A Conversation about Science, edited by chemist Jay A. Labinger and sociologist Harry Collins, was eventually published in 2001. The book's title is a reference to
C. P. Snow's
The Two Cultures. It contains contributions from authors such as Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont,
Steven Weinberg, and
Steven Shapin. Other significant publications related to the science wars include
Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and
Jean Bricmont (1998),
The Social Construction of What? by
Ian Hacking (1999) and
Who Rules in Science by
James Robert Brown (2004). To
John C. Baez, the
Bogdanov Affair in 2002 served as the bookend to the Sokal controversy: the review, acceptance, and publication of papers, later alleged to be nonsense, in peer-reviewed physics journals.
Cornell physics professor
Paul Ginsparg, argued that the cases are not at all similar and that the fact that some journals and scientific institutions have low standards is "hardly a revelation". The new editor in chief of the journal
Annals of Physics, who was appointed after the controversy along with a new editorial staff, had said that the standards of the journal had been poor leading up to the publication since the previous editor had become sick and died. Subsequently, Latour has suggested a re-evaluation of sociology's epistemology based on lessons learned from the Science Wars: "... scientists made us realize that there was not the slightest chance that the type of social forces we use as a cause could have objective facts as their effects". Reviewing Sokal's
Beyond the Hoax, Mermin stated that "As a sign that the science wars are over, I cite the 2008 election of Bruno Latour [...] to Foreign Honorary Membership in that bastion of the establishment, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences" and opined that "we are not only beyond Sokal's hoax, but beyond the science wars themselves". Writing about these developments in the context of
global warming, 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 said?"
Kendrick Frazier notes that Latour is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that Latour has said that some of the authority of science needs to be regained. In 2016,
Shawn Lawrence Otto, in his book ''The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, and What We can Do About It,'' that the winners of the war on science "will chart the future of power, democracy, and freedom itself." ==See also==