Science wars

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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. 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...

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