Proposal

Revision:

Science Wars and the End of History

This project will focus on the Science Wars, a highly charged intellectual debate between scientific realists and postmodernists that exploded in the 1990s. The aim is not to discuss the merits of either side of the debate but instead to look at the issue from a historical lens. In other words this project is meant to be a narrative that explains this event in intellectual history, not engages with it. The focus will be to determine why the Wars occurred and why they occurred when they did, the possible motivations and motives of the participants, as well as the net result of the exchanges.

The Science Wars have their roots in earlier, though less visceral, debates. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn, a physicist, published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a history of science that called into question the unbreakable objectivity of science. In the piece, he argued that most scientific work is “normal science,” produced in an intellectual “paradigm” of agreed upon fundamentals (such as Newtonian physics or the theory of relativity). Inevitably, there would be contradiction that would become more and more difficult to ignore (due to procedural error, etc.) and a scientist or group of scientists would come up with a whole new way of thinking about the world that would incorporate these paradoxes into a new paradigm. However, according to Kuhn, the switch from paradigm to paradigm occurred not because a proven link but a new consensus among workers in the field. This stood against the works of contemporary philosopher Karl Popper who argued that science could not necessarily prove anything but it could easily disprove theories (if a theory could not be disproven is was probably true) and was thus essentially an objective discipline.

Kuhn’s work was then taken up by the humanities, especially after the translation of postmodern texts from French in the 1980s. English-speaking philosophers now argued that science was not objective at all and in fact muddled with culture. Richard Rorty, for example, wrote that he and other people who shared his “pragmatist” or “left-wing Kuhnsianist” views, try “to enlist Kuhn in our campaign to drop the objective-subjective distinction altogether.” This idea, along with the postmodernists’ connection of science with religion and social construction did not go well with scientists, among them Kuhn himself. When pressed about the reinterpretation of his views at a conference, the physicist publicly declared “I am not Kuhnsian.”

However, there was no coherent reply to the idea of science as a fundamentally cultural phenomenon by scientists themselves until the publication of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt in 1994. They argued that humanists and social scientists as part of “culture studies” have examined the sciences without fully understanding them to further their political ends. The realists who wrote the book claimed to be protecting a true left from ludicrous arguments. The acidity of the text can be seen in the title, which, interestingly, is counter-accusation of religion. In reply, many postmodernists accused Gross and Levitt of engaging a in a conservative reaction. For example, historian Dorothy Nelkin called the book “call to arms in response to the failed marriage of Science and the State.” A compilation of such responses were brought together in the postmodernist journal Social Text in 1996. One participant was mathematician and physicist Alan Sokal, whose work, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, turned out to be a deliberate hoax: ”liberally salted with nonsense [that] (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” This did some damage to the postmodernist position. The academics involved organized conferences to try to settle the wars in 1997 and 2001. Since then interest in the topic has somewhat waned.

This chronology raises interesting questions. Why 1994? What made this time in history so special? The divide between relativist and realist interpretations of science and the world at large have a long history. In the English-speaking world, an early influential text on the subject, a lecture by C. P. Snow. In it he lays out a still very much familiar fissure:

The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment. And so on. Anyone with a mild talent for invective could produce plenty of this kind of subterranean back-chat.

His piece was written before most postmodernists started writing (and long before they were translated into English). It was a few years before Thomas Kuhn wrote his magnum opus on the effects of social pressure on scientific thought and coined the term paradigm shift. Was it the scientists’ fears of the end of Cold War funding, as historian Dorothy Nelkin suggests? Was it a general war over soul of the academy? Where there other ulterior motives? What was the result of the Science Wars and are they truly over? And of course, the of course the question that comes of after all wars when the dust settles: who won and who lost?

To answer these questions, this project will try to conduct a social history of the major participants, look into the data of higher education funding and the changes brought by the end of the Cold War, and examine the Science Wars in the context of the Cultural Turn, a philosophical change in the humanities that began before this crisis but was in full swing the 1990s. There are of course numerous problems with regards to conducting historical research of a period so recent. The traditional job of a historian usually requires “reading dead people’s mail,” but the people in question are almost all alive and probably have no interest in giving researchers access to their emails while their phone conversations were probably lost altogether. Thus, it is difficult to find an “innocent” document (from the Archival standpoint, one not meant for an audience, such as government transcript) to get to the inner thoughts of the actors. However, the digital age does provide new opportunities. Not only are most published texts easily available, but also there are recording of live interviews and lectures of the people involved. A good journalist or lay questioner in a lecture hall audience can ask his/her interviewee a question that had no prepared response and thus receive a less constructed answer. Moreover, data on the funding and workings of higher education over the years is available and can be interpreted.

This project aims at a more or less professional audience that is willing to read through some admittedly dense passages in order to get the author’s interpretation of the causes, motivations and effects of the Science Wars. Nevertheless, the author will make an effort to make text readable, complying with the main points of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” The result will include not only an academic text, but also a chronology, profiles of the main actors and some relevant statistics.

Original:

The Science Wars: Winners, Losers and Motivations

The divide between humanist and realist interpretations of science and the world at large have a long history. In the English-speaking world, an early influential text on the subject, a lecture by C. P. Snow. In it he lays out a still very much familiar fissure:

The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment. And so on. Anyone with a mild talent for invective could produce plenty of this kind of subterranean back-chat. (Snow 1959: 5-6)

His piece was written before most postmodernists started writing (and long before they were translated into English). It was a few years before Thomas Kuhn wrote his magnum opus on the effects of social pressure on scientific thought and coined the term paradigm shift. Kuhn’s work caused much public debate but it never questioned the validity of science as a whole. In the coming decades many philosophers influenced by postmodernism and the New Left wrote just that and argued that science was a social construct.

From the side of the realists, there was virtually no answer, until 1994 and the publishing of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. This rather acidic text received an immediate and angry response, its fallout being the Science Wars. Why 1994? What made this time in history so special? Was it the scientists’ fears of the end of Cold War funding, as historian Dorothy Nelkin suggests? Was it a general war over soul of the academy? Where there other ulterior motives? What was the result of the Science Wars and are they truly over?

To answer these questions, this project will try to conduct a social history of the major participants, look into the data of higher education funding and the changes brought by the end of the Cold War, and examine the Science Wars in the context of the Cultural Turn, a philosophical change in the humanities that began before this crisis but was in full swing the 1990s. There are of course numerous problems with regards to conducting historical research of a period so recent. The traditional job of a historian usually requires “reading dead people’s mail,” but the people in question are almost all alive and probably have no interest in giving researchers access to their emails and their phone conversations were probably lost. Thus, it is difficult to find an “innocent” document (from the Archival point of view) to get to the inner thoughts of the actors. However, the digital age does provide new opportunities. Not only are most published texts easily available, but also there are recording of live interviews and lectures of the people involved. A good journalist or lay questioner in a lecture hall audience can ask his/her interviewee a question that had no prepared response and thus receive a less constructed answer. Moreover, data on the funding and workings of higher education over the years is available and can be interpreted.