---
title: "Science wars"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:37:07.536969+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In the philosophy of science, the science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world.
Encyclopedia.com, citing the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, describes the science wars as the

"complex of discussions about the way the sciences are related to or incarnated in culture, history, and practice. [...] [which] came to be called a 'war' in the mid 1990s because of a strong polarization over questions of legitimacy and authority. One side [...] is concerned with defending the authority of science as rooted in objective evidence and rational procedures. The other side argues that it is legitimate and fruitful to study the sciences as institutions and social-technical networks whose development is influenced by linguistics, economics, politics, and other factors surrounding formally rational procedures and isolated established facts."
The science wars took place principally in the United States in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press. Scientific realists (such as Norman Levitt, Paul R. Gross, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal) accused many writers, whom they described as 'postmodernist', of having effectively rejected scientific objectivity,  the scientific method, empiricism, and scientific knowledge.
Though much of the theory associated with 'postmodernism' (see post-structuralism) did not make any interventions into the natural sciences, the scientific realists took aim at its general influence. The scientific realists argued that large swathes of scholarship, amounting to a rejection of objectivity and realism, had been influenced by major 20th-century post-structuralist philosophers (such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and others), whose work they declare to be incomprehensible or meaningless. They implicate a broad range of fields in this trend, including cultural studies, feminist studies, comparative literature, media studies, and especially science and technology studies, which does apply such methods to the study of science.
Physicist N. David Mermin understands the science wars as a series of exchanges between scientists and "sociologists, historians and literary critics" who the scientists "thought ...were ludicrously ignorant of science, making all kinds of nonsensical pronouncements. The other side dismissed these charges as naive, ill-informed and self-serving." Sociologist Harry Collins wrote that the "science wars" began "in the early 1990s with attacks by natural scientists or ex-natural scientists who had assumed the role of spokespersons for science. The subject of the attacks was the analysis of science coming out of literary studies and the social sciences."

== Historical background ==
Until the mid-20th century, the philosophy of science had concentrated on the viability of scientific method and knowledge, proposing justifications for the truth of scientific theories and observations and attempting to discover at a philosophical level why science worked. 
Karl Popper, an early opponent of logical positivism in the 20th century, repudiated the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist/verificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".
His criticisms of scientific method were adopted by several postmodernist critiques.
A number of 20th-century philosophers maintained that logical models of pure science do not apply to actual scientific practice. It was the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, however, which fully opened the study of science to new disciplines by suggesting that the evolution of science was in part socially determined and that it did not operate under the simple logical laws put forward by the logical positivist school of philosophy.
Kuhn described the development of scientific knowledge not as a linear increase in truth and understanding, but as a series of periodic revolutions which overturned the old scientific order and replaced it with new orders (what he called "paradigms"). Kuhn attributed much of this process to the interactions and strategies of the human participants in science rather than its own innate logical structure. (See sociology of scientific knowledge).
Some interpreted Kuhn's ideas to mean that scientific theories were, either wholly or in part, social constructs, which many interpreted as diminishing the claim of science to representing objective reality, and that reality had a lesser or potentially irrelevant role in the formation of scientific theories. In 1971,  Jerome Ravetz published Scientific knowledge and its social problems, a book describing the role that the scientific community, as a social construct, plays in accepting or rejecting objective scientific knowledge.

=== Postmodernism ===