The Poverty of Science Wars by Frederick Gregory History of Science Soceity Newsletter, Volume 26, No. 1 (January 1997) © 1997 by the History of Science Society, All rights reserved E-mail: hssexec@u.washington.edu In Atlanta at the annual meeting Tom's name came up more than
once.
On the very first evening at the plenary session Charles Rosenberg began
the proceedings with the observation that Tom had not anticipated in 1962
nor did he approve in 1996 the "science wars" and polarized antipathies
that
emerged in the wake of his success. Yet it is undeniable that after the
Structure was published science had been brought, as Charles put it, "into
the realm of the temporal, the contingent, the negotiated." The Pandora's
Box of epistemological and social privilege scientists enjoyed prior to
Kuhns time had been opened. Yes, Charles continued, science had been moved
from the timeless to the mundane. Yes, few scientists remained noble and
disinterested seekers after truth in their ethnographer's account. And yet
nowhere did Tom Kuhn assume that he had forced historians or anyone else
to declare that the human circumstances of a scientific discovery were
more important than the discovery itself, as if one had to choose between
mutually exclusive factors. Another plenary session participant, Angela Creager, was
particularly unhappy with what she called the "dichotomous
misrepresentation" of the fields of science and science studies by media
bent on sensationalizing. Actual exchanges among scientists reveal a
variety of diverse opinions about the status of scientific knowledge just
as among science studies scholars there is and has been a spectrum of
views about relativism. But all these differences have been flattened into
"science wars" by protagonists on both sides and the result has been that
the relationship between scientists and historians has too often of late
been determined by media and their interests. The testimony of all four
participants in the plenary session betrayed that their experience of
interaction between historians and scientists has been and remains nothing
like what has been depicted in the attacks that make headlines. The last two speakers in the session stressed the pragmatic
benefits of constructive interaction. Evelyn Fox Keller suggested that
historians and philosophers of science might even play a facilitating role
for scientists who have become overly invested in existing theory,
provided there is mutual respect between the scientists and historians and
provided the latter possess technical competence necessary to understand
the science in question. Sylvan Schweber reminded us of the key role
scientists played in transforming the university after World War II into
places where research and scholarship flourished in relative freedom. He
drew a parallel between scientists then and intellectuals today, urging us
in the present to be wary of an ominous new transition that threatens to
commercialize research. Should we abandon our responsibility as
Kulturträger by becoming Kulturkämpfer we become expressions of the very
forces that threaten the academy. No one, it would seem, found anything good at all in the extreme
positions that have been trumpeted about in public. And neither, I am
convinced, would Tom Kuhn. So what was it that Tom brought to an end? Why
did I have the sense that the end of something had been marked? The
answer, for me, is that after Kuhn's work science could never again be
captured by any simple or even homogeneous set of categories. That means
that no individuals, including scientists and historians, can any longer
claim to be the true spokespersons for science and/or its history. It is
really just a matter of learning how to have mutual respect.
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