Science Wars Research Articles

Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (review)

Reviewed by: Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars Andrew Jenks (bio) Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. By Ethan Pollock. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. viii+269. $35. Joseph Stalin is known by many titles: "Uncle Joe," "the Generalisimus," "General Secretary," "the Man of Steel." Less well known is Joseph Stalin, "the coryphaeus of science." Ethan Pollock has written an important book that reveals Stalin's paramount role in shaping and directing the Soviet scientific establishment. Based on extensive research in Soviet archives, his account reveals a dictator who had an image of himself as "a man who united political power and intellectual acumen" (p. 1). In fulfilling his vision of himself as a great thinker, Stalin managed to divert precious time from the tricky business of guiding the world revolution to intervene in a number of scientific disciplines. The imposition of politics on Soviet science is a well-known story. Pollock's unique contribution is to document and explain Stalin's personal and active role in "the Soviet science wars." Along the way, he makes a surprising claim: Stalin intervened in numerous scientific controversies in the name of promoting debate rather than restricting it. Far from being another propaganda ruse, Stalin's espousal of "a free exchange of opinions" was based on a genuinely held belief that debate would nurture a scientific enterprise essential to Soviet success in the cold war. Discussions were designed to "strike the proper balance between the Party's role in determining the outcomes of debates and the importance of scholarly participation" (p. 8). Even when Stalin intervened, as he often did, his pronouncements were sufficiently opaque to allow continued interpretation and discussion among scientists as well as among the gatekeepers of ideological purity. The book's six main chapters follow six separate debates in which Stalin intervened: philosophy, biology, physics, linguistics, physiology, and political economy. A clear and concise introduction mentions the crucial role of World War II in the development of Soviet attitudes toward science, when the invention of radar, nuclear weapons, and antibiotics illustrated the importance of science in national security. Moreover, the Soviet vision of itself as a successful modern polity required a demonstration of scientific achievement. As a result, scientists received material privileges and scarce resources, as well as increased political attention. It was expected that "Soviet intellectual achievements could serve as symbolic measures of the superiority of the Soviet system" (p. 5). Finally, a fear of ideological backsliding during World War II prompted Stalin to reemphasize the role of ideology in Soviet life after the war, which in turn set the stage for the series of debates that Pollock so ably discusses. Of course, there was no small irony in "Stalin's dictating answers in the name of the free exchange of opinions" (p. 135). And Stalin's interventions [End Page 488] often had the opposite of the intended effect: rather than encouraging scholarly debate, they caused most scientists to either keep their mouths shut or to express their views in a way that most approximated (they hoped) the party's often obscure and vague political demands. One of Pollock's central points, supported by his sources, is that Stalin believed what he said. This challenges a longstanding assumption among many historians that Stalin's ideological pronouncements masked more conventional and less revolutionary motives—a Machiavellian desire for power or vengeance, for instance. On the contrary, Stalin genuinely believed his claim that the objective search for truth would simultaneously benefit science and enhance Soviet politics. Stalin felt that Marxist philosophy and science were mutually reinforcing, so much so that he thought scientists should be free to conduct their own investigations without undue political interference—except his own, of course. Stalin seems not to have entertained the possibility that "objective" scientific truth might contradict or challenge Soviet ideology, since Marxism Leninism, in his view, was also an objective science. According to Pollock, Stalin's belief that the pursuit of scientific truth could only dovetail with Soviet political goals had unexpected implications for the post-Stalin era. Science became "a subject beyond the party's ideological reach" (p. 221). After Stalin's death, none of his successors intervened...

Leavis's Grandchildren? New Perspectives on Science and Modernism

Leavis’s Grandchildren? New Perspectives on Science and Modernism Suzanne Black (bio) Allen Thiher. Fiction Refracts Science: Modernist Writers from Proust to Borges. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2005. xii + 297 pp. Jeff Wallace. D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman. Basingstroke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xi + 264 pp. Reviewing Richard Powers's new novel The Echo Maker (2006) for The Nation, William Deresiewicz expresses weary skepticism about aesthetically interesting connections between literature and science. Book reviewers, Deresiewicz grumbles, are expected to "genuflect" before Powers's knowledge of physics, neuroscience, and ecology, but "intellect and scientific acumen are not synonymous" (25). Moreover, Powers lacks the basic literary gifts of "narrative or psychological complication" (26). For Deresiewicz, the benefits of yoking science and literature are dubious and ill-defined: "From Matthew Arnold to C. P. Snow to today, there's been a vague feeling afloat that if only somehow these two modes of knowledge could be made to talk to each other, science would be humanized (whatever that means) and art made relevant to the scientific age (as if it weren't already)" (25–26). [End Page 569] As this comment indicates, the specter of C. P. Snow and periodically recurring versions of the two cultures debate continue to stalk the study of literature and science. Even Deresiewicz's resentment of science and his scorn for Powers's ability as a novelist echo F. R. Leavis's acerbic response to Snow. In fact, the field has long operated under the paradox that the very writers who originated it did so primarily by denying its existence. It is therefore unsurprising that the two books under review open by engaging Snow or Leavis. For Allen Thiher, Snow "set off a noisy tempest in a teapot that has somehow remained a necessary point of reference," because many humanists (like Deresiewicz) "intuitively feel that science and literature cannot be joined in any meaningful way" (4). Thiher points out that tensions between poetry and knowledge go as far back as Plato and as far forward as the science wars. Jeff Wallace makes a compatible point by arguing that "literary studies has prospered on the idea that it defends the 'human' against the reductive mechanisms of science" (2); one of his major examples is, of course, Leavis, who did much to establish Lawrence's reputation as both a major novelist and critic of technoscience. Unlike Snow and Leavis, both Thiher and Wallace reject the two cultures' tradition and traditional humanism by seeing science and literature as manifestations of a single, larger culture. This view is so frequent in science studies that it is hard to find Thiher's assumption that "science and literature share a cultural matrix setting forth presuppositions, axioms, and constraints for all endeavors to make sense of the world" a "controversial side" of his book (1). In fact, Wallace claims virtually the same thing: "The guiding principle behind contemporary studies of the relations between science and culture . . . has been that culture is their shared domain, and that we stand to gain much from a recognition of the cultural, and specifically discursive, dimensions of science" (3–4). However, as both authors point out, seeing science as entirely discursive poses its own dangers. Thiher refuses to believe that our view of reality is ultimately dependent on or easily reducible to language, preferring instead the cultural matrix, which he insists is "an empirical notion" including history and philosophy (1). His primary alternative is epistemological; Thiher's discomfort with poststructuralism (a point to which I will return) becomes clear in his single reference to Michel Foucault, which places the theorist of the episteme alongside Snow and Thomas Kuhn as another advocate of "epistemic ruptures" (5). Wallace, on the other hand, sees the discursive conception of science as potentially imperialistic, for it "mask[s] the perpetuation of an older hegemony. . . . If science is fundamentally a linguistic phenomenon, then literary studies can continue to hold a master key" (4). Instead, [End Page 570] he proposes that we consider science as expressing human values and literature as communicating facts and information, then use these reversed stereotypes to challenge humanism itself. In short, Thiher and Wallace's work, I would argue, builds...

Commentary: Reflections on Field Research and Professional Practice

Borrowing from the ethnographic genre that Van Maanen (1988) called the confessional tale, this commentary reflects on the political, ethical, and professional concerns that arise when critical intellectuals work in a government installation that maintains the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The authors suggest that the future is, as Haraway (1997) argued, ineluctably technological and that the best way to engage this cultural formation is from within, eschewing the easy politics of the science wars and articulating critical projects with the hard work of science. The modernist ideal of unconflicted ideological positions and research—stories of good guys and bad guys—is a disabling illusion. Practicing rhetoricians face a kind of “worldliness” that Hall (1989) described as a necessary counterpart to the “clean air” of theory. The authors invite their colleagues to join them in grappling with political and ethical analyses in a world of impure identity in which knowledge and power circulate promiscuously.

Science War II: the shift from physics to biology as the field of struggle

It is generally agreed that, in some sense, there have been 'science wars' for at least the past ten, perhaps even twenty, years. In fact, as I argue here, there have been two such wars, the second of which is ongoing. The first part of this paper is concerned with distinguishing the two science wars and marking the transition between them. The second part deals with the substantive issues arising from a key theatre in Science War II, namely evolution versus intelligent design. The third part concludes the paper with a brief proposal for regular monitoring of the state of science in society, perhaps anticipating the terms of engagement of any subsequent 'Science War III'.

The two cultures, or the end of the world as we know it

This essay examines the 'war' of science and culture in the twentieth century – its terms in part fixed by C. P. Snow's influential polemic on 'The two cultures' in the 1950s – which continued into the 1990s with a series of intellectual skirmishes sometimes referred to as the 'science wars'. Military metaphors can quickly become apocalyptic on both sides. Rather than contributing to this overheated rhetoric, I suggest instead that we need to acknowledge the interdependencies of scientific and cultural discourse. To that end, a reading of science fiction and fictions in science is sketched out using models of networks and hybrid assemblages developed by French science theorist Bruno Latour.

The Science Wars

The so-called 'Science Wars' is a puzzling, largely American cultural phenomenon. The phrase gained prominence in 1996, when a rather obscure cultural studies journal called Social Text devoted an entire issue to critiques of Paul R. Gross and Norman Leavitt's controversial book, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science.1 According to the journal's editors, apologists for the militaryindustrial complex on the right had declared war against science studies scholars, techno-sceptics, and environmentalists of the Left.

Intuitive Economics: The Role of Power and Knowledge in the Dismal Science

Recent disputes over the epistemological nature of social science inquiry, often referred to as “Science Wars”, display many of the hallmarks of a much older, largely forgotten quarrel in social science: The Methodenstreit of Economics ‐ pitting the Austrian School of Economics against the German Historical School in the 1880s ‐ has largely remained unresolved to date, despite several attempts to overcome it. Yet, curiously, these e orts seem overlooked and outside of the current battlefield of the science wars, where much of the debate is shaped by contemporary political theory. While critical theory, poststructuralism and postmodernism are leaving distinct marks on the sociological research agenda, mainstream economic theory seems impervious to similar much-needed developments. Revisiting Edgar Salin’s concept of Anschauliche Theorie (intuitive theory) and putting it into context with power and knowledge presents a useful starting point for rekindling this debate in the dismal science. Indeed, a recasting of these ideas in the form of intuitive economics might constitute a central element in a broader framework aimed at overcoming the lack of vision in contemporary economic theory.

The Views and Influence of Ernst Von Glasersfeld: An Introduction

Research into learners' ideas about science suggests that students often have alternative conceptions about important science concepts. Because of this dissatisfaction, constructivism has been adopted as a theoretical framework by many teachers and researchers, and it has had a curricular influence in many countries. Constructivism is much more than an educational doctrine and we are aware that a ‘science war’ about the possibility of objectivity is in progress. ‘Constructivism’ cannot necessary be a package deal: it must be possible to accept educational suggestions deemed useful without buying all the epistemology or the metaphysical implications. The claim that cognitive agents understand the world by constructing mental representations of it can be a shared suggestion for changing science instruction. Many teachers are much more concerned in finding productive teaching methods than about philosophical questions as if knowledge must be considered an objective representation of the real world or not. We have to ponder if some ideas from the constructivist theory of instruction can help instructors to become better teachers. The pragmatic suggestions that come from the constructivist theory of instruction developed by von Glasersfeld, the leading proponent of radical constructivism, could be a good start in this␣search.

Science Wars and Beyond

Science Wars and Beyond

Psychobiography and the Psychology of Science: Understanding Relations between the Life and Work of Individual Psychologists

This paper presents initial interpretive hypotheses about connections between the life and work of a number of eminent psychologists: Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Henry Murray, B. F. Skinner, and Paul Meehl. Each of these interpretations can be critically evaluated, revised and improved, leading to incrementally more adequate understanding of individual lives, interacting with advances in psychological theory and research. Psychobiographical studies of individual scientists are a valuable complement to experimental and correlational lines of research in the psychology of science. In the “Science Wars” of the 1990s, there was an apparent conflict between scientists and those in social studies of science. The psychology of science can contribute to this debate, exploring the ways in which scientific inquiry, social-political worlds, and personal-experiential processes construct each other over time.

Organized Skepticism, Naïve Methodism, and Other -ISMS

The Science Wars have pitted defenders of science against those accused of attacking it with the weapons of constructivism and relativism. I argue that this defensive stance is in large part a consequence of two other -isms, organized skepticism and naive methodism, that play a significant, if mostly unconscious, role in how scientists tend to think about science, and suggest that increased awareness of these -isms may help dissipate the perceptions of hostility.

Vetenskapskrig och det goda samtalets retorik - biologer talar om »tokfeminism«

In this case study based article, Holmberg analyses a Swedish science based debate from 2002. The debate concerned what came to be labelled "crazy-feminism" ("tokfeminism"). The first aim is to highlight how talk about the "science war" becomes contrasted, and yet intertwined, with talk about the "good conversation". A second aim is to show how, what at a first glance can be interpreted as a hopeless and unfruitful controversy may include a subversive potential for unexpected alliances. The case study is based on a range of empirical material, newspaper articles, e-mail letters, private correspondence, webbased contributions and conference lectures. The material is analysed from the sociology of science perspective, with focus set on the rhetorical nature of discourse. In the analysis Holmberg uses concepts such as categorisation, contrast structures and rhetoric strategies and she investigates howeach pole of this debate builds up rhetorical credibility primarily by way of irony, citation and extreme case formulations, attaching the opponents to the context of the science war, while at the same time distancing "us" from that same war. This is done by both sides, as they embrace the ideal principle of the good and fruitful scientific conversation.

Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations

On April 6, 1922, Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein met at the Societe francaise de philosophie in Paris to discuss the meaning of relativity. In the years that followed, the philosopher and the physicist became engaged in a bitter dispute.2 It is commonly asserted that during their confrontation Bergson lost to the young physicist; as subsequent commentators have insisted, Bergson made an essential mistake because he did not understand the physics of relativity.3 Their debate exemplified the victory of rationality against intuition.4 It was a key moment which demonstrated that intellectuals (like Bergson) were unable to keep up with revolutions in science. For the physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, the historical origins of the Science Wars lay in Einstein's and Bergson's fateful meeting. Since then, they have seen the malaise of le bergsonisme continuing to spread-recently reaching Deleuze, after passing through Jankelevitch and Merleau-Ponty.5

Keith Parsons (ed.), The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books (2003), 300 pp., $21 (paper).

Keith Parsons (ed.), <i>The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology</i>. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books (2003), 300 pp., $21 (paper).

Again, What the Philosophy of Biology is not

There are many things that philosophy of biology might be. But, given the existence of a professional philosophy of biology that is arguably a progressive research program and, as such, unrivaled, it makes sense to define philosophy of biology more narrowly than the totality of intersecting concerns biologists and philosophers (let alone other scholars) might have. The reasons for the success of the "new" philosophy of biology remain poorly understood. I reflect on what Dutch and Flemish, and, more generally, European philosophers of biology could do to improve the situation of their discipline locally, regionally, and internationally, paying particular attention to the lessons to be learned from the "Science Wars."

Boundary Work and the Science Wars: James Robert Brown'sWho Rules in Science?

The Science Wars have not involved any violence, nor even threats of violence. Thus the label “wars” for this series of discussions, mostly one-sided and mostly located within the academy, is something of an overblown metaphor. Nonetheless, I will suggest that there are some respects in which the metaphor is appropriate. The Science Wars involve territory, albeit a metaphorical kind of territory. They inspire work that can be best interpreted as ideological, a result of disciplinary interests. Moreover, fellow participants in the wars and others reward that ideological work.My goal in this is to display efforts to maintain a discipline's epistemic authority, the recognition that members of that discipline have legitimate claims to knowledge on a subject. The central section of the paper takes the form of a discussion of one recent contribution to the Science Wars, James Robert Brown'sWho Rules in Science?My argument is at least somewhat generalizable beyond this book, and it therefore points to interesting phenomena related to epistemic authority.

Boundaries, Reasons, and Ideology: Reply to Sismondo

Sergio Sismondo's “Boundary Work and the Science Wars” (this journal, xxx) nicely exemplifies a hotly debated central issue. One side, let me call them the rationalists, tries to explain episodes in the history of science in terms of reason. They claim that scientists, past and present, believe what they do because of the evidence that they have at the time. The other side, following Sismondo, let me call them STSers (STS = science and technology studies), claim that social and other non-cognitive factors are the frequent causes of belief. This disagreement naturally leads to a meta-level debate. Rationalists, such as myself, try to give reasons for believing the STSers are wrong-headed in their approach. And Sismondo replies with the claim that whether I realize it or not I am really doing boundary work – an explanation of my activity in terms of social factors.

On Seeing the Generative Possibilities of Dalit neo‐Buddhist Thought

Nanda’s irresponsible book carelessly prescribes for the U.S a return to Cold‐War science politics; and for India, nothing less than a cultural revolution which would install science as the arbiter. She sees this as smashing the backwards looking metaphysics of Hindu thought. I argue that her iconoclasm carries with it a purist fetishism deriving from science’s denied metaphysics. The metaphysics embedded in Nanda’s secularist critique is no more innocent than that she wishes to smash, yet being denied is more tricky to deal with. I claim Nanda’s book is irresponsible both in the context of India’s contesting social imaginaries, but also in the USA where she seeks to intervene in the so‐called science wars. Taking seriously the neo‐Buddhist Dalit resistance waged by those occupying the lowest rungs of the Hindu caste system, as Nanda prescribes, requires a refusal of metaphysics and positivist thought generally. Being unaware of the metaphysical ladeness of her critique, the ontological move that is necessary to achieve a shift to generative mode of thought that characterises Dalit Buddhism is invisible to Nanda.

MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN1

The so-called evolution wars (Futuyma 1995; Pigliucci 2002) between the scientific understanding of the history of life on earth and various religiously inspired forms of creationism are more than ever at the forefront of the broader ‘‘science wars,’’ themselves a part of the even more encompassing ‘‘cultural wars.’’ With all these conflicts going on, and at a time when a potentially historical case on the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) in public schools is being debated in Pennsylvania, it may be useful to consider a number of books that have come out recently to help scientists and the public at large to understand what all the fuss is about. Let me make clear at the outset that creationism is not going to go away just because it will be defeated on intellectual grounds. If that were the case, we would not have this problem at the onset of the 21st century, long after Copernicus and Galileo ought to have paved the way. This is a problem deeply rooted in psychological fears, religious ideology, political opportunism and widespread anti-intellectualism, the latter itself with complex and profound roots (Hofstadter 1963). However, it is important to understand what the intellectual issues are, if one is to honestly make a case for science to the general public. Moreover, it is important for scientists to come to terms with the fact that most of the discussion is inextricably connected with issues about the very nature of science; that is, with philosophy. That is why the first book to be considered in this review is about philosophy of science, though it was written by a biologist. We will then examine what an actual philosopher has to say about the issue, and conclude with two edited volumes, one of which attempts to give a ‘‘balanced’’ view, the other unapologetically proscience.

The Social Psychology of “Pseudoscience”: A Brief History

The word ‘pseudoscience’ is a marker of changing worries about science and being a scientist. It played an important role in the philosophical debate on demarcating science from other activities, and was used in popular writings to distance science from cranky theories with scientific pretensions. These uses consolidated a comforting unity in science, a communal space from which pseudoscience is excluded, and the user's right to belong is asserted. The urgency of this process dwindled when attempts to find a formal demarcation petered out, and the growth of social constructionism denied science any special access to truth. The reaction to this led to the science wars, which ushered in a new anxiety in the use of ‘pseudoscience’, especially from the least secure branches. But recent writings on the disunity of science reveal how the sense of support drawn from it may be based on an illusion, creating a disunity of pseudoscience as well as of science.