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BERUBE_SCIENCE_WARS

                                             February 08, 2015
                                             May      23, 2022


Some quotations from Micahel Bérubé's
piece "The Science Wars Redux", with a             https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/19/the-science-wars-redux/
long discursive discussion (which I'm
skipping here) of the intellectual                 "Democracy Journal",
phenomena surrounding Sokal's "Hoax", and          Issue #19, Winter 2011
eventually making the point that the
fashionable embrace of subjectivity among
the anti-science pomo left stopped                         THE_SO_CALLED_HOAX
looking quite so stylish when the right
started playing the same game:

  "And I was fond of saying to my friends in the
  sciences ... the culture warriors of the right are
  after English and women's studies today, but they'll
  be coming for you soon enough, just you wait. To a
  man (and they were all men), my scientist friends
  refused to believe this. Some merely said, plausibly
  enough, that debates over PC were irrelevant to their
  work on dark matter or the properties of metals;
  others insisted that the conservative attack on the
  universities was entirely the fault of radical
  artists and humanists with their queering this and
  their Piss Christ that and their deconstructing the
  Other. You're the ones making it hard for all of us
  in the academy, they said ..."


  "But what of Sokal's chief post-hoax claim that the
  academic left's critiques of science were potentially
  damaging to the left? That one, alas, has held up very
  well, for it turns out that the critique of scientific
  'objectivity' and the insistence on the inevitable
  'partiality' of knowledge can serve the purposes of
  climate-change deniers and young-Earth creationists
  quite nicely. That's not because there was something
  fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical
  anti-foundationalism ... "


  "But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth
  creationists are coming after the natural scientists,
  just as I predicted-- and they're using some of the very
  arguments developed by an academic left that thought it
  was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard
  left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust
  of 'experts' and 'professionals' and assorted
  high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they're the boss
  of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful
  device for delegitimating scientific research. ... "

  "The right's attacks on climate science, mobilizing a
  public distrust of scientific expertise, eventually led
  science-studies theorist Bruno Latour to write in
  Critical Inquiry:

       '... Was I wrong to participate in the
       invention of this field known as science
       studies? Is it enough to say that we did not
       really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my
       tongue to say that global warming is a fact
       whether you like it or not? Why can't I simply
       say that the argument is closed for good?'

  "Why, indeed? Why not say, definitively, that
  anthropogenic climate change is real, that vaccines do
  not cause autism, that the Earth revolves around the Sun,
  and that Adam and Eve did not ride dinosaurs to church?"





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