12/1/2008

1

from the left:

“science wars”

12/1/2008

2

Sweet is the lore that Nature

brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous

forms of things

We murder to dissect.

Wordsworth “The Tables Turned” (1798)

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3

1851

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4

H.G. Wells

National concern with vivisection

Common descent

Human nature

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5

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6

Rede lecture (1959)

Lack of communication between the sciences and humanities prevents the solution of the world‟s problems.

Incomprehension & hostility from literary intellectuals towards science and scientists.

12/1/2008

7

“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare‟s?”

“I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question --such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.”

The constructivist world view within the humanities, which sees the scientific method as embedded within language and culture; and

the scientific viewpoint, in which the observer can still objectively make unbiased and non-culturally embedded observations about nature.

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8

The “court jester” of science

Against Method (1975) Science in a Free Society

(1978)

Epistemological anarchism –

◦ “Anything goes!”

◦ “The terrified exclamation of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history.”

Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann (1965) The Social Construction of Reality.

A social construction is a concept or practice which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society.

Individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived social reality.

“[S]ome categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States.”

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9

All reality is a social construction.

Science does not have any ontological primacy; all scientific constructs, physical laws, or concepts, are essentially arrived at by consensus and are social constructs

Reality is really a narrative, a discourse rooted in consensus.

Science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one

particular culture in the circumstances of one particular historical period;

thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge

and testable conjecture concerning the real world. It is a discourse,

devised by and for one specialized interpretive community, under terms

created by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion,

economic incentive and ideological climate that constitutes the

ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science

is but one discursive community among the many that now exist and

that have existed historically. Consequently its truth claims are

irreducibly self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to

the standards that define the scientific community and distinguish it

from other social formations.

The Edinburgh School of SSK

David Bloor & Barry Barnes

The outcome of all scientific controversies should be explained by social factors and not by appeal to “truth”

◦ Causality: it examines the conditions (psychological, social, and cultural) that bring about claims to a certain kind of knowledge.

◦ Impartiality: it examines successful as well as unsuccessful knowledge claims.

◦ Symmetry: the same types of explanations are used for successful and unsuccessful knowledge claims alike.

“This book is dedicated to all the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them.”

Strange Weather

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10

“Truth” claims are socially constructed

Intelligent design is being held back by socio-political forces and should be thus give an „equal opportunity program‟ and be included in high school biology class.

“The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability – it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something – of a center starting from which an observer could master the field – but the very concept of the game.”

Physicist specializing in quantum field theory and mathematical physics

Leftist credentials

Submitted a paper: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” for a special issue of Social Text on “The Science Wars” (1996)

Aimed to see if the academic left would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions.”

12/1/2008

11

“There are many natural scientists, and especially

physicists, who … cling to the dogma imposed by the long

post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western

intellectual outlook, which can be summarized briefly as

follows: that there exists an external world, whose

properties are independent of any individual human being

and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties

are encoded in „eternal‟ physical laws; and that human

beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative,

knowledge of these laws by hewing to the „objective‟

procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by

the (so-called) scientific method.”

“It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical

„reality‟ … is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that

scientific „knowledge‟, far from being objective, reflects and

encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the

culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are

inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and

consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community,

for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged

epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic

narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized

communities.”

“Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther,

by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity:

the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's

quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at

once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we

shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an

objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and

contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of

prior science - among them, existence itself - become

problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I

will argue, has profound implications for the content of a

future postmodern and liberatory science.”

“Only then can we begin to talk about different ways of doing science: ways that downgrade methodology [and] experiment … in favor of local environments, cultural values and principles of social justice.”

Science Wars p. 5

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12

“Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical

concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could

possibly take seriously. For example, I suggest that the

„morphogenetic field‟ -- a bizarre New Age idea due to Rupert

Sheldrake -- constitutes a cutting-edge theory of quantum

gravity. This connection is pure invention; even Sheldrake makes

no such claim. I assert that Lacan's psychoanalytic speculations

have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field theory.

Even nonscientist readers might well wonder what in heavens'

name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis;

certainly my article gives no reasoned argument to support such

a link.”

“I claim that quantum gravity … has profound political implications

(which, of course, are „progressive‟).

In support of this improbable proposition, I proceed as follows: First, I

quote some controversial philosophical pronouncements of Heisenberg

and Bohr, and assert (without argument) that quantum physics is

profoundly consonant with „postmodernist epistemology.‟ Next, I

assemble a pastiche - Derrida and general relativity, Lacan and topology,

Irigaray and quantum gravity - held together by vague rhetoric about

„nonlinearity‟, „flux‟ and „interconnectedness.‟ Finally, I jump (again

without argument) to the assertion that „postmodern science‟ has

abolished the concept of objective reality.”

A “liberatory science‟ and

“emancipatory mathematics”

must be developed that spurn

“the elite caste canon of „high

science‟” for a “postmodern

science [that] provide[s]

powerful intellectual support

for the progressive political

project.”

“My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. ... There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even counterproductive.”

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“Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)”

“Show me a relativist at 30000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.”

“[D]angerous 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 meant?”

12/1/2008

14

from the right:

politicizing science