User:Patrick Welsh/Science Wars

The origin of what would ecome known as the Science Wars was the 1962 publication of physicist-turned historian of science Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.^[1] Kuhn disputes the prevailing view that there is a logically progressive methodology that uncovers what reality simply is. Instead, he says, the direction of scientific inquiry — the kind of questions that can be asked, and what counts as a correct answer — are governed by a "paradigm" defining what counts as "normal science" during any given period.^[2] This concept set the agenda for much of The Postmodern Condition and has been presented as the beginning of "postmodern epistemology" in the philosophy of science.^[3][4]

Because of the new assumptions introduced by successive paradigms, they are "mutually incommensurable".^[5][a] In the early 1970s, the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend began to advocate for a radical version of incommensurablity. What he termed "epistemological anarchism" is described by one commentator as the thesis according to which "there are no useful and exceptionless methodological rules governing the progress of science or the growth of knowledge."^[7] These works connected the largely Ango-American debate about science to the development of poststructuralism in France.^[8] Particularly influential in this regard were Derrida and Foucault, with their deep skepticism about foundationalism and the possibility of closure or finality.^[9]

To some, the stakes were more than epistemological.^[b] The philosopher Israel Scheffler, for instance, argued that the ever-expanding body of scientific knowledge embodies a sort of "moral principle" protecting society from its authoritarian and tribal tendencies.^[12] In this way, with the addition of the poststructuralist influence, the debate about science expanded into a debate about Western culture in general.^[13]

In 1985, the French political philosophers Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry began a series of responses to this interpretation of postmodernism.^[14] Their work also inspired the physicist Alan Sokal to submit a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal, where it was accepted and published in 1996.^[15] Although the so-called Sokal hoax proved nothing about postmodernism or science, it added to the public perception of a high-stakes intellectual "war" that had already been introduced to the general public by popular books published in the late '80s and '90s.^[16][c] By the late '90s, however, the debate had largely subsided, in part due to the recognition that it had been staged between strawman versions of postmodernism and science alike.^[11]