---
title: "Science wars"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:30:31.714006+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Continued conflict ===
In the first few years after the 'Science Wars' edition of Social Text, the seriousness and volume of discussion increased significantly, much of it focused on reconciling the 'warring' camps of postmodernists and scientists.  One significant event was the 'Science and Its Critics' conference in early 1997; it brought together scientists and scholars who study science and featured Alan Sokal and Steve Fuller as keynote speakers.  The conference generated the final wave of substantial press coverage (in both news media and scientific journals), though by no means resolved the fundamental issues of social construction and objectivity in science.
Other attempts have been made to reconcile the two camps. Mike Nauenberg, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, organized a small conference in May 1997 that was attended by scientists and sociologists of science alike, among them Alan Sokal, N. David Mermin and Harry Collins. In the same year, Collins organized the Southampton Peace Workshop, which again brought together a broad range of scientists and sociologists. The Peace Workshop gave rise to the idea of a book that intended to map out some of the arguments between the disputing parties. The One Culture?:  A Conversation about Science, edited by chemist Jay A. Labinger and sociologist Harry Collins, was eventually published in 2001. The book's title is a reference to C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures. It contains contributions from authors such as Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Steven Weinberg, and Steven Shapin.
Other significant publications related to the science wars include Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998), The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking (1999) and Who Rules in Science by James Robert Brown (2004).
To John C. Baez, the Bogdanov Affair in 2002 served as the bookend to the Sokal controversy: the review, acceptance, and publication of papers, later alleged to be nonsense, in peer-reviewed physics journals. Cornell physics professor Paul Ginsparg, argued that the cases are not at all similar and that the fact that some journals and scientific institutions have low standards is "hardly a revelation". The new editor in chief of the journal Annals of Physics, who was appointed after the controversy along with a new editorial staff, had said that the standards of the journal had been poor leading up to the publication since the previous editor had become sick and died.
Interest in the science wars has waned considerably in recent years.  Though the events of the science wars are still occasionally mentioned in the mainstream press, they have had little effect on either the scientific community or the community of critical theorists. Both sides continue to maintain that the other does not understand their theories, or mistakes constructive criticisms and scholarly investigations for attacks. In 1999, the French sociologist Bruno Latour—at the time believing that the natural sciences are socially constructivist—said, "Scientists always stomp around meetings talking about 'bridging the two-culture gap', but when scores of people from outside the sciences begin to build just that bridge, they recoil in horror and want to impose the strangest of all gags on free speech since Socrates: only scientists should speak about science!" Subsequently, Latour has suggested a re-evaluation of sociology's epistemology based on lessons learned from the Science Wars: "... scientists made us realize that there was not the slightest chance that the type of social forces we use as a cause could have objective facts as their effects".
Reviewing Sokal's Beyond the Hoax, Mermin stated that "As a sign that the science wars are over, I cite the 2008 election of Bruno Latour [...] to Foreign Honorary Membership in that bastion of the establishment, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences" and opined that "we are not only beyond Sokal's hoax, but beyond the science wars themselves".
However, more recently, some of the leading critical theorists have recognized that their critiques have, at times, been counter-productive and are providing intellectual ammunition for reactionary interests.
Writing about these developments in the context of global warming, Latour noted that "dangerous 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 said?"
Kendrick Frazier notes that Latour is interested in helping to rebuild trust in science and that Latour has said that some of the authority of science needs to be regained.
In 2016, Shawn Lawrence Otto, in his book The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, and What We can Do About It, that the winners of the war on science "will chart the future of power, democracy, and freedom itself."

== See also ==
Chomsky–Foucault debate
Culture war
Deconstruction
Grievance studies affair
Historiography of science
Nature versus nurture
Normative science
Positivism
Positivism dispute
Science for the People
Scientific rationalism
Scientism
Searle–Derrida debate
Strong programme
Suppressed research in the Soviet Union
Teissier affair

== Notes ==

== References ==
Ashman, Keith M. and Barringer, Philip S. (ed.) (2001). After the science wars, Routledge, London. ISBN 0-415-21209-X
Gross, Paul R. and Levitt, Norman (1994). Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland. ISBN 0-8018-4766-4
Sokal, Alan D. (1996).  Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Social Text 46/47, 217–252.
Callon, Michel (1999). Whose Impostures? Physicists at War with the Third Person, Social Studies of Science 29(2), 261–286.
Parsons, Keith (ed.) (2003). The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, US. ISBN 1-57392-994-8
Labinger, Jay A. and Collins, Harry (eds.) (2001). The One Culture?: A Conversation About Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 0-226-46723-6
Brown, James R. (2001). Who Rules in Science? An Opinionated Guide to the Wars, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

== External links ==
Papers by Alan Sokal on the "Social Text Affair"
Henriques, Gregg (1 June 2012). "Revisiting the Science Wars | Psychology Today". Psychology Today. Retrieved 3 June 2023.