Imagine yourself
at a bowling alley where a match between two teams of bowlers is underway. The
bowlers themselves are intensely involved in the match and they have brought
with them small groups of respective supporters who are equally intensely
involved. Everyone else at the bowling alley occasionally glances over at the
scoreboard but is much more involved with their own motives for being there –
their own game, socialising or merely passing some time. Bowling is not a
general spectator sport. Bowling matches occasionally draw the attention of
those who happen to be there on the night but a relatively few number of people
are there on the night because of the match. Rarely does something about a
bowling match appear in the local newspaper.

Through this easy
exercise in imagination, you already have a good contextual idea of the
‘science wars’. The bowling alley is academia. The two teams are comprised of
scientists on the one hand, and, on the other, a loose confederacy of social
constructivists, feminists, postmodernists, and conservatives. For the teams,
the match is where careers are made and lost with the passing of each bowl. For
the rest of us, the match affords some light entertainment if we bother to
glance in the right direction. Keith Parsons has brought together all the major
plays of this match from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s. Chapter excerpts,
published papers, book reviews and essays published in the scholarly media
comprise The Science Wars, thus providing everything the student and
layman need to know in order to catch up on the fuss.

The term ‘science
wars’ first appeared most prominently as the title to a special double issue of
the journal Social Text in 1996, produced in the wake of, and as
a response to, a series of attempts aggressively defending science and
questioning the integrity of the approach to, and criticism of, science by the
area broadly referred to as ‘cultural studies’. The general reference to
‘wars’, as opposed to one ‘war’, reflects the current state of play whereby
science is involved in at least four simultaneous wars, one with each
respective group of the aforementioned confederacy. For although the four
groups have shared objectives, they do have distinct agendas and approaches
toward science which makes not for different battles in one war but for
different wars in one battle: the battle for the defence of science as the best
and perhaps ultimate epistemological methodology in the service of mankind.

The four parts of
the book are respectively dedicated to each of the four groups of the
confederate team, presenting some of their key arguments and the rebuttals they
provoked. Overall, Parsons has remained faithful to his aim: the avoidance of
diatribes in favour of the serious underlying issues. Although Parsons provides
excellent introductions to each part, however, it is unfortunate that the
introductory chapter to the whole book barely touches upon the historical
origins and developments of the wars. As such, the reader is left believing
that the science wars are a recent phenomenon, and especially mostly an
Anglo-American one.

It is common to
associate the trigger of the science wars with one of two occasions. On the one
hand, the 1962 publication of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions
is deemed to be a prime candidate. On the other (and this is Parsons’ implied
take), the arrival, a decade later, of a little known French
socio-anthropologist (Bruno Latour) at a remote research laboratory housed in
the Salk Institute in California is usually taken as an equally (if not more)
forceful trigger. Notwithstanding the significance of these two events – and
Parsons’ book well explicates the latter – the contemporary science wars have,
in fact, a rich 150 year international history.

They were
triggered almost simultaneously to William Whewell’s coining of the term
‘scientist’ in the 1830s. Some of the most famous commanders have included the
Germans Ernst Mach and Max Planck, the (Soviet) Russian Boris Hessen, the
Briton J.D. Bernal and the émigré Alexandre Koyré. Some of the watershed events
include the formation, in 1918 Britain, of the National Union of Scientific Workers
and, much later of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament); the publication of
two monumental historical works about science by George Sarton and Joseph
Needham, respectively; the McCarthyism which rippled well beyond its sell-by
date; the Velikovsky affair with which Carl Sagan was involved; and the
publication of the Radical Science Journal.

Underlying this
historical tapestry is that relatively new branch of philosophy known as
‘philosophy of science’. Indeed, the wars find their common basis in one
central question in the philosophy of science concerning the degree of
influence empiricism and rationalism respectively play in scientific
engagement: is the mind actively involved in the constitution of empirical
objects and truth? The more you lean toward the empirical end, the more you
support the scientists; the more you lean toward the rational end, the more you
support one or all members of the confederacy. If undecided, it is worth
turning to fin-de-siècle France and the fathers of contemporary philosophy of
science: Poincaré, Duhem, and Meyerson.

Indeed, sandwiched
between German rationalism and British empiricism, France’s geographical
location makes it an ideal philosophising no-man’s-land in which the shots
fired from the empiricist and rationalist trenches are observed, analysed and a
score of sorts is kept. The effectiveness of the use France has made of its
accidental position is obvious: the English-speaking historicist (e.g. Kuhnian)
and somewhat rationalist (e.g. Popperian) reaction against scientific
positivism ‘discovered’ what the French had already articulated half a century
before. This may serve to explain why the French have hardly shared in the
excitement of what they rightly see as old news.

If Parsons has
omitted such contextualisation, it is because he chooses to focus on relatively
recent developments, and such developments have indeed been momentous. The
Sokal affair, to take but one example — perhaps the single, most famous strike
against the confederacy (it made it to the newspapers) – is faithfully
recorded through the eyes of physicist and Nobel prize-winner Steven Weinberg
(although, in this respect, you do not have to buy the book for the New York
Review of Books website allows you to download all the relevant articles for free).
In addition, Parsons’ choice of not excluding the contemporaneous, and very
American, conservative-creationist reaction is informative. Although the
excerpts of this final section do highlight the weakness of this member of the
confederacy, they do serve to remind us that science and religion need not be
enemies, that, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, scientists can (perhaps even
should) believe in God without fearing any paradox.

As to the current
state of play based upon Parsons excellent editing, it would appear that
science is continuously hitting strikes whereas the confederacy only ever
manages a few spares — these coming mainly from the social constructivist
bowlers. Still, the bowling alley is well worth a visit for the match is far
from over.

© 2003 Ion Georgiou

Ion Georgiou is Visiting Professor at the Universidade Estadual do
Sudoeste da Bahia, and Professor  &
Director of Scientific Research at the Faculdade de Tecnologia e Ciências, both
situated in Bahia, Brazil. He has also taught and undertaken research at the
London School of Economics, Kingston University (UK), and universities in
Russia and Spain. His main interests are Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General
System Theory, Husserlian and Sartrean phenomenology, philosophy of science and
knowledge management methods. Fluent in five languages, he has consulted on
commercial and academically-linked public projects across Europe and Brazil.

Categories: General, Philosophical