SCIENCE WARS

Mara Beller, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IV-C)

The Sokal hoax, according to its author, was aimed to expose the far-fetched, uninformed, even "ridiculous" argumentation of the post-modernist critics of science, as opposed to the rational, objective, no-nonsense reasoning of natural scientists. Yet many inferences from physics to the political and psychological realms, indistinguishable from those satirized by Sokal, abound in the writings of the great physicists of the 20th century -- Bohr, Born, Heisenberg and Pauli. The founders of the orthodox quantum philosophy provided both the source and the legitimization for many post-modernist argumentative strategies.

The problem is not so much with a legitimate inquiry of the possible reciprocal connection between scientific theorizing and wider cultural concerns, but rather with the unhesitant confidence with which such inferences are often made. The "rhetoric of inevitability" which permeates the orthodox philosophy of quantum physics encourages hasty inferences, and creates an illusion that arguments connecting the scientific to the cultural and political realms are compelling. Thus, the lion's share of responsibility for the post-modernist excesses (with or without quotation marks) seems to be located in the scientific community itself.

Important philosophical issues, whether explicitly or implicitly, underlie the arguments of the participants in "science wars". It is instructive to compare, for example, the writings of social constructivists with those of logical positivists on the issues of the cultural implications of science. I will conclude with a discussion of the challenges such comparisons pose for the future philosophy of science.