14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A confusing but very instructive break in the science wars, April 2, 2002
This review is from: The One Culture?: A Conversation about Science (Paperback)
In the late 20th century we began to see a number of books and journal articles out of some academic disciplines that criticized the positivist approach to science and its claims to authority. Many of these have been themselves brutally criticized with such characterizations as "fashionable nonsense," "anti-science" and "higher superstition." This has been variously associated with such terms as "confused academic left," postmodernist philosophy, and social constructionism.
At their most dramatic, the so-called wars seem to revolve around a core of scientists, such as Norm Levitt, Paul Gross, Alan Sokal, and Stephen Weinberg, and their reaction to the way science is being characterized by people outside their fields. They present a largely united front in expressing that some pure and essential form of science and clear human reasoning is under siege from several fronts.
The opponents of the hardcore scientists are more varied and thus harder to characterize. The most persuasive criticisms come from people who study science and scientists and publish in academic journals: historians of science, philosophers of science, and sociologists of science. It is this sub-group of critics, and especially the people considered sociologists of science, that are the antagonists for the hardcore scientists in The One Culture.
_The One Culture_ is not (quite) another salvo in these wars, it is an uneasy and often difficult attempt at an open dialog between the sides. Notably, the participants here don't even agree on whether there is a war going on, or if there is, whether it makes sense to be declaring a truce. In spite of the confusion, a number of important concessions are declared and I learned an awful lot about the variety of perspectives on each side, and how fuzzy the boundaries between the sides really is.
It is quickly apparent from this book that the extremes often presented in popular accounts are not accurate. The people studying science are not necessarily trying to undermine it, nor are they necessarily contributing to an unhealthy or unrealistic view of science. It is a legitimate topic of academic study to observe scientific research and study the effects of various factors on its conduct and its results. Also, the scientists here are not necessarily trying to present science as a great bolt of Truth from Mt. Olympus, and recognize that there are social forces that do influence their work, at least when controversies arise.
At times, I got a real sense from this book that people were almost deliberately misinterpreting each other, but then would concede that they may not quite be representing their opponent fairly. The result is ironically and strangely confusing. Reading these essays I felt like I wanted to accept one of the views as true and just be done with the whole thing. It was confusing because the concessions made helped me realize that the sides were seeing things differently, and I think our
instinct is to want to choose a side to agree with. Rather than feeling more certain about the importance of science education, and the tragic decline of scientific literacy, I began to consider some of its limits, and even the limits of critical thinking and scientific thinking in daily life problems. In that sense, this is a mind-expanding book in some ways, if read deeply.
This is not the most exciting or immediately satisfying book about the so-called "Science Wars" because it it is structured as a serious attempt at a dialog rather than a pitched battle or clear presentation of any one perspective. However it is one of the most educational books on the subject for the same reason. You can actually begin to see areas of significant agreement between sociologists studying science and the scientists themselves, and consequently you begin to see the real areas of disagreement as well.
A Lesson About Language
One gem in this book is a remarkable essay by theoretical physicist David Mermin where he recalls his published arguments with sociologist of science Harry Collins over Collins' interpretation of the construction of the theory of relativity. Although their debate was heated and even rancorous at times, Mermin eventually recognized that the two weren't saying anything radically different, they were making different assumptions about each others' motives, they were using language differently, they were emphasizing different aspects of the process of theory building, and they were looking at human belief from different perspectives. Mermin ends the essay with a set of simple "lessons learned" from the debate:
1. Focus on the substance not on the assumed motives
2. Don't assume that people in other disciplines are using specialized terms in the same way or that they understand the nuances of your own disciplinary language
3. Don't assume that you have penetrated the nuances of the disciplinary language of another field just because it appears to be easy.
Many of the essays contain similar (seemingly obvious in retrospect, but often forgotten) insights into inter-disciplinary communication. Several of the hardcore scientists represented here seem to concede that they gave some of the sociologists of science too little credit and misunderstood them, and several of the sociologists of science concede that they didn't clearly state that observations are "experiment bound" as well as "theory bound."
The final lesson seems to be that the development of theories is neither arbitrary nor inevitably takes a single final form, and that theories come from a web of interlocking evidence rather than being decided by one or two critical experiments. Sociologists of science care more about the social aspects of that process and scientists themselves care more about the conceptual aspects, but both, when pressed, admit to the central points made by the other side. One of the remaining sticking points concerns education, whether science and critical thinking should be consistently in the forefront, or whether education should be more rounded. In this sense, C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" are still alive and well, even though they needn't fight over science.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What makes science go?, November 30, 2007
This review is from: The One Culture?: A Conversation about Science (Paperback)
This book is an attempt at an ecumenical reconciliation between two loosely knit factions of scientists and philosophers over whether or not natural scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists...) are, by their profession, in the best position to speak authoritatively on whether history, philosophy and sociology have anything interesting to say about the efficacy of the scientific enterprise. During the 1980s some passionate lines were drawn in academia over this issue - resulting in what has become called The Science Wars. The lines were drawn roughly between natural scientists on one side and practitioners of the humanities and social sciences on the other.
A similar episode took place during the 18th century when leading figures of the Enlightenment pushed the notion that priests and theologians might not be the best persons to consult when asking the question, "What makes religion go?" Thankfully, these Enlightenment historians and literateurs (critiquing a discipline for which they had no formal training or expertise), influenced discourse on religion, shifting it away from theology and toward the social, historical-political dimension. This has resulted in the sort of talk and thinking we lay-persons regularly conduct on religious matters today. I don't make this comparison in order to draw a similarity between science and religion per se -- they are very different -- but only because both of these things have in turn served as the primary institution of knowledge production in Western culture. They have both at times been the transparent lenses through which we inquire about the world. Examining the lenses themselves has historically led to intellectual conflict over who is entitled to perform the examination and from what perspective. The question that vexed the Science Wars was whether or not there is anything intrinsic about science that made it fundamentally immune to Enlightenment-style critique.
Most of the impressive contributors are represented in this book and I was amazed at how careful they each were in really trying to understand each others' position. I was particularly surprised by Steven Weinberg's even-handed criticisms of the historian's treatment of science. Almost every essay was gripping. I really liked Jane Gregory and Steve Miller's essay on public perception of science. I also really enjoyed physicist Peter Saulson's report of what he learned from spending almost his entire professional career as a sociological case study. Even though this collection is supposed to represent a road toward closure of a thirty-year war, it can still be read as an introduction to the issues that compose the so-called Science Wars. Lest the reader fears that this book will be bogged down by careful scholarship and close, mutually nuanced readings of each essay, the editors have included three rich essays by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont which serve as a sort of comic relief to the otherwise serious and careful treatment. One has to wonder just why the editors put these characters into the mix. I got the impression that it was a backhanded way of insulting them. After all, the editors could have invited David Bloor and Barry Barnes to play obstinate counterpart to Sokal and Bricmont. But instead Sokal and Bricmont are just paraded around like a couple of pious old fundamentalists who've been invited to an ecumenical council for laughs.
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