What Is Science Studies for and Who Cares?

Abstract

We are, self-evidently, at a moment of aggressive public attack (some call it debate) on science studies. Just as the wars against political correctness managed to deflect attention from the real problems as an entrenched community appealed to democratic virtues while defending privilege, so now well-funded and powerful forces are claiming to be oppressed by the likes of Bruno Latour, Andrew Ross, and Katherine Hayles and are attempting to trash-in the name of reason, truth, objectivity, justice, and the first amendment-people who raise awkward questions. Conferences of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) (in November 1994) and of the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) (May 1995) are symptomatic of an aggression that touches-perhaps dangerously, perhaps only with a rather sad and silly paranoia-on some of the most important issues of our time. While support for all serious intellectual enterprises is being more than threatened by newly empowered anti-intellectual political forces, these organizations are behaving as though the threat to science is really coming from some of the few intellectuals who have taken the trouble to think seriously about it. The excess and silliness of the response may seem the mere pettishness of spoiled researchers used to big-time funding and might well induce in us both complacency and a tendency to enjoy tweaking for its own sake; but complacency or teasing are the last things we need at the moment. Questions about the relations between society and science are among the most important of our time. We need, rather, to be thinking about how our healthy instincts to be oppositional might be channeled in more productive directions.