Benighted elite: postmodernist critics of science get their comeuppance

Reason, June, 1999 by Walter Olson

Some Navajo schoolchildren, like many other children, have trouble in math class. According to an article published in a leading journal for mathematics educators, one reason may be that "the Western world developed the notion of fractions and decimals out of a need to divide or segment a whole. The Navajo world view consistently appears not to segment the whole of an entity." Teachers in the rural Southwest might therefore want to begin with concepts more "naturally compatible with Navajo spatial knowledge," such as "non-Euclidean geometry, motion theories, and/or fundamentals of calculus," and de-emphasize or postpone "segmentation...into smaller parts."

One of the many high points of the essay collection A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodern Myths About Science (Oxford University Press) is watching the volume's editor, Indiana University philosopher of science Noretta Koertge, struggle to keep her patience as she apprises readers of such developments. The notion of teaching calculus before fractions is "quite astounding," writes Koertge, for reasons that begin with the difficulty of expressing the slope of a line, one of the fundamentals of calculus, in any way other than by using a fraction or decimal. And while well-meaning teachers puzzle out such difficulties, Navajo children are presumably supposed to grow up without learning how to compute sales tax.

The notion of a special "Navajo way of knowing," assuredly more spiritual and holistic than European ways, is just one of an array of by-now-familiar "standpoint epistemologies" associated with the idea that, as Koertge puts it, claims of fact "are always to be understood as a product of the culture, gender, ethnicity, [or] class of the observer who made them." Aside from Afrocentrism, there are such developments as "female-friendly science," some of whose supporters have proposed starting out girls in physics class on the study of wave phenomena or fluid mechanics, which they might find more congenial than the motions of "those darned old rigid bodies." (The phrase is Koertge's; in the 1994 book Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women's Studies, she and co-author Daphne Patai brought to light many similar follies). Most widespread of all such doctrines is postmodernism, which treats assertions of scientific fact as indeterminate texts constructed by readers. All these various streams converge to form the body of work known as the "new sociology of science," a.k.a. Science and Technology Studies (STS) or simply Science Studies, brought to many readers' notice for the first time in Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's 1994 expose Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Gross and Levitt's polemic against "hermeneutic hootchy-koo" is so spirited that you might consider it overdrawn, until you check out what leaders of Science Studies have to say on their own behalf. Quite a few are fond of asserting that critical observers of science should stay agnostic as between, say, astronomy and astrology. "What makes a belief true," declares one prominent figure, Trevor Pinch of Cornell University, "is not its correspondence with an element of reality, but its adoption and authentication by the relevant community." After all, "many pictures can be painted, and...the sociologist of science cannot say that any picture is a better representation of Nature than any other."

"The truth value of scientific knowledge is not necessarily at stake for its STS researcher," agrees Marianne de Laet of Columbia University in what is billed as "an insider's perspective" on the field in the Columbia Webzine 21st C. "Most of its practitioners subscribe to some form of subjectivism.... For them, material reality is not ready-made, independent of the knower, waiting to be discovered." "Science is politics," adds the editor of the journal Science As Culture.

One consequence of such ideas is to make newcomers think it less urgent than they might once have to obtain a thorough grounding in scientific literacy - after all, the concepts are all "contestable" anyway, right? Writing in The Nation two years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh recounted an incident at an interdisciplinary conference on the emotions in which University of Michigan psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth ventured some favorable comments about the experimental method. Several audience members promptly rose to criticize her for collaborating with a methodology so identified with white Victorian males. Ellsworth allowed that she too had problems with some of those dead males but noted that they had laid the groundwork for such crucial accomplishments as the discovery of DNA. Came the retort: "You believe in DNA?"

Academics making careers in Science Studies may know better than to carry fact skepticism quite that far, but, according to the various scientist-contributors to A House Built on Sand, their basic knowledge of the fields they presume to deconstruct is often woefully lacking. Bruno Latour of Ecole des Mines in Paris, by some accounts the leading figure in the field, commits "crude factual blunders." French theorist Luce Irigaray's critique of the gendered nature of the physical sciences contains "preposterous" assertions, while a hapless professor of English who attempts to popularize Irigaray "misconstrues every one of the mathematical and physical issues she addresses." Histories of the scientific method which contrive to portray alchemy as somehow in tune with women's needs, while pouncing on occasional sexist metaphors to malign Francis Bacon and other forerunners of the modern method, are at best perversely selective. Supposed feminist insights into the mechanism of egg fertilization turn out to be spurious in the extreme (though they fool Newsweek). And even the most careful works in the field - Andrew Pickering's 1984 Constructing Quarks receives some mild praise - don't prove what their authors think they do.