The Science Wars Go Public

Abstract

In the 1990s, the Science Wars moved from the academic world into the public arena, further widening the gulf between critics of science, who argued that science was a socially empowered belief system or ideology, and defenders of a more traditional view of scientific knowledge. The critics of science were alienated by scientists’ insistence on promoting scientific knowledge as archaeological-ontological rather than interpretational-epistemological. They became actively hostile to the practice of science as well as to the putative knowledge that scientists produced, denouncing both as ideological, patriarchal, sexist, racist, and pretenders to truth. The religious right responded with its own critique of science by arguing that creation science was just as legitimately science as evolutionary theory, but successive court decisions rejected this interpretation. The implications for how we are to understand the nature of scientific knowledge remain profound for formulating effective science-based public policies.