Kinder, Gentler Science Wars

摘要

If, like many intellectuals, some of them eminent, you cheered the hatchet jobs of the science wars, then you may be bored by this mostly civil, often thoughtful and sometimes thought-provoking conversation about the social studies of science and the science wars. Indeed, to hear the editors tell it, it could have been called 'Not the Science Wars'. In it, 'It makes me laugh' is not an argument. Nor, more generally, is 'There is only one reading of a text, so if I have one, it must be the author's'. Of course, nobody really believes that 'It makes me laugh' is an argument or that there always is only one reading of a text or that context does not matter. Yet the science wars are, in large part, a story of otherwise smart people, both participants and observers, behaving as if they did believe these and similar absurdities (Stolzenberg, 2001).