Search

The ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, whose central moment was the Sokal hoax, was understood to be ‘political’, but it was never quite clear what the political issue was. Two recent books, James Robert Brown’s Who Rules in Science?(2001) and Phillip Kitcher’s Science, Truth, and Democracy(2001), attempt in different ways to reflect on and extend the discussion from a ‘Left’ perspective. Brown argues Sokal’s case from a perspective of philosophical rationalism and anti-naturalism. Kitcher’s argument is that the aim of science is significant truth, and significance is a valuative notion. Explanation is relative to interests or values. But this does not mean that truth does not matter, or that the world has no influence on what we believe - the two considerations, significance and truth, interact and co-evolve. If this is true, how science is governed, and particularly what is studied, make a difference. A well-ordered science would be one in which decisions about what is studied would be both wise and democratic. Pure democracy would undermine wisdom, so a novel relation is needed, in which the preferences of voters would be tutored and a family-like dialogue would allow optimal choices to be made. Both discussions point to a genuine political dilemma over science and democracy, related to the dilemma faced by the Old Left, which hoped that science, through ‘Planning’, would seamlessly integrate itself into the social good in solidarity with the proletariat. Kitcher grasps that the forms of Liberal Democracy are not up to the task of dealing with science - and thus places himself at the opposite pole from thinkers like Habermas, who think that the Left must expand Public Reason. So the issue is ‘Who rules?’ and whether the proper role of science in society is one that effectively precludes ‘democratic control.’

3. See Jacobs et al. v. The Seminole County Canvassing Board and Gore v. Harris. 4. This principle was instrumental in the judicial reasoning for many of the secondary cases filed by Florida citizens during the election recount process. Even in Jacobs et al v. The Seminole County Canvassing Board, where the County Supervisor of Elections admitted allowing Republican party officials to add voter identification numbers to thousands of ballots, the judge ruled that this action should not outweigh the right of those voters to have their votes counted. The judge's ruling reads: 'If the court finds "substantial compliance with the absentee voting laws", the ballots cast are not void or illegal'. 5. Boardman v. Esteva, 323 So.2d 259; 1975 Fla. 6. Ibid. 7. This sense of arbitrariness was enhanced by the failure of two key justices O'Connor and Kennedy to offer any reasoned explanation for their choice to abide by the 12 December deadline, given their apparent unwillingness to sign on to the tortured logic of the Scalia concurrence. 8. For a scholarly treatment of the interpretive flexibility associated with following rules in practice, see H.M. Collins, 'The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks', Science Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 1974), 165-86, and Collins, Artificial Experts: Social Knowledge and Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

From the point of view of the philosophy of science, the idea that the sociology of science has epistemological implications pushes in two directions; one is that the implications are necessarily destructive of the project of a philosophy of science; the other that the two enterprises must find a place in some kind of cognitive division of labour subordinated to the larger pursuit of 'a theory of science' as a whole. Fuller's book is an attempt to flesh out the idea of an integrated conception of science, an epistemology that is genuinely 'social', organized around the following problem