PD Smith

Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment, 26 July 2002

Jay A. Labinger and Har­ry Collins (eds), The One Cul­ture? A Con­ver­sa­tion About Sci­ence (Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press, 2001), 342pp., £11.00

Review by P.D. Smith

It may have escaped your notice but we are in the mid­dle of a war. The Sci­ence Wars began in the ear­ly 1990s when schol­ars in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences began to look crit­i­cal­ly at sci­ence. Sci­en­tists resent­ed this encroach­ment onto their ter­ri­to­ry, fear­ing a threat to those sci­en­tif­ic shib­bo­leths, ratio­nal­i­ty and truth. In 1996 the debate entered the pub­lic are­na fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of physi­cist Alan Sokal’s spoof arti­cle in Social Text. Sokal’s now infa­mous par­o­dy of post­mod­ernism exposed what he saw as the gulli­bil­i­ty and wil­ful mis­un­der­stand­ing of sci­ence in crit­i­cal the­o­ry and ‘science stud­ies’.

But just as the war was becom­ing nasty some of the lead­ing play­ers came togeth­er at the Southamp­ton Peace Work­shop in 1997, a forum for sci­en­tists and soci­ol­o­gists organ­ised by soci­ol­o­gist Har­ry Collins. The result is The One Cul­ture?, a book whose fraught ori­gins are reflect­ed in its scrupu­lous struc­ture that owes as much to ACAS as acad­eme: twelve intro­duc­to­ry posi­tion state­ments are fol­lowed by two rounds of com­men­taries and rebut­tals by each pro­tag­o­nist. There are excel­lent con­tri­bu­tions from Collins, Steven Shapin, Trevor Pinch, and Steven Wein­berg.

The One Cul­ture? offers a fas­ci­nat­ing insight into the argu­ments on both sides. As the con­tri­bu­tions show, the stakes are high. Soci­ol­o­gists of sci­ence fear a loss of intel­lec­tu­al cred­i­bil­i­ty if they fail to con­test the crit­i­cisms of their method­ol­o­gy. Sci­en­tists believe their author­i­ty and research fund­ing will decline due to pub­lic sus­pi­cion of sci­ence. Some even pre­dict a new dark age of super­sti­tion and anti­science, ush­ered in by post­mod­ernist intel­lec­tu­als who want to replace the hard fac­tic­i­ty of sci­ence with a rel­a­tivis­tic mélange of Wittgen­stein­ian lan­guage games and Fou­cauldian pow­er strug­gles.

Sokal and Bric­mont write cogent­ly on these threats. And yet, as Jane Gre­go­ry and Steve Miller empha­size, it is unre­al­is­tic nowa­days to expect “awe-struck admi­ra­tion for the mys­te­ri­ous men in white coats” from the pub­lic. After the atom­ic bomb and genet­ic engi­neer­ing the need to under­stand sci­ence is more urgent than ever and soci­ol­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans and, yes, even writ­ers and artists have a part to play in this project. It is pre­ma­ture to speak of one cul­ture, but this impor­tant book, moti­vat­ed by an exem­plary spir­it of aca­d­e­m­ic tol­er­ance and debate, shows how bridges might be built in the future.