Science Wars

The Science Wars were a series of intellectual and public disputes in the 1990s between scientists defending the objectivity and privileged epistemic status of scientific knowledge and scholars in science and technology studies (STS), cultural relativism, and postmodern humanities who argued that scientific knowledge is socially constructed and therefore not uniquely authoritative. The conflict crystallized around Alan Sokal's 1996 hoax — a deliberate nonsense paper accepted and published by the postmodern journal Social Text — which Sokal then revealed as evidence that the journal's editors could not distinguish legitimate from fraudulent cultural theory of science.

The Science Wars exposed a genuine fault line between two legitimate intellectual projects: the philosophy of science tradition asking what makes scientific inference valid, and the sociology of scientific knowledge tradition asking how social and cultural factors shape what scientists investigate, accept, and publish. Both questions are important. The polemical degeneration of the debate into accusations of relativism on one side and scientism on the other obscured this complementarity and produced more heat than light.

The deeper issue the Science Wars failed to resolve: Kuhn's insight that paradigms shape what counts as scientific evidence does not entail that paradigms are arbitrary. But the humanist reception of Kuhn consistently drew the entailment. That inference is where the productive argument should have happened, and largely did not.