Science Wars最新文献

{"title":"Science Is \"Good to Think With\"","authors":"S. Harding","doi":"10.2307/466841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/466841","url":null,"abstract":"shows how the \"order of knowledge\" has also been the \"order of society.\" When challenges to the social order have arisen, these challenges have also changed the prevailing ways that the production and legitimation of knowledge have been organized, and vice versa: the social order and the structure of a culture's sciences are generated through one and the same social transformations (see, for example, Merchant 1980; Restivo 1988; Shapin 1994; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). This is pretty close to what the antidemocratic right believes: the new science studies, feminism, \"deconstructionism,\" and multiculturalism threaten the downfall of civilization and its standards of reason.1 The latter criticism does not contest that the order of knowledge and the social order shape and maintain each other, but only the way science studies reveals how such science-society relations have worked in the past and operate today, and the proposal in some of these science studies tendencies for more open, public discussion about the desirability of prevailing science-society relations. It is significant that the Right's objections virtually never get into the nitty-gritty of historical or ethnographic detail to contest the accuracy of social studies of science accounts. Such objections remain at the level of rhetorical flourishes and ridicule.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124841529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Few Good Species","authors":"Andrew Ross","doi":"10.2307/466855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/466855","url":null,"abstract":"Andrew Ross If there has been one constant in the history of science, it is the relationship of applied research and technology to military force. Nothing belies the myth of pure science more than the evidence that it has served as the handmaiden of warfare or, in the period of the national security state, as a central component of the permanent war economy that continues to sustain elite interests among the major powers and their clients. We all know about science's utility to the military trade of destruction, but what happens when the military is charged with utilizing science to repair the destructive consequences of that trade? The euphemism of the \"peace industry\" took on a new life after the cessation of the Cold War at a time when the security establishment, deprived of its staple of Manichaean ideological conflict, turned in the direction of environmental considerations and elevated \"environmental security\" to the forefront of its global overviews. The result, by no means conclusive, is the outcome of a messy encounter between the functional ethics of ecological science and the institutional mentality of warmaking.","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122716162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dispatches from the Science Wars","authors":"J. Kovel","doi":"10.2307/466852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/466852","url":null,"abstract":"Let us begin with a fact or, at any rate, a finding. Other matters could be adduced to support the line of reasoning I have in mind, but it is better to keep focused for now on the following: it has been found, by \"science,\" that for about thirty to fifty years, sperm counts have been declining, in both numbers and motility, among men in industrialized countries. Recent studies from Paris indicate that the decrease amounts to about 2 percent per year during the last two decades. A 175-page report from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency presents the evidence, along with certain interpretations, to be discussed below. Other reports from Scotland and Belgium point in the same direction. These in turn support a 1992 finding by Elizabeth Carlsen, based on a historical analysis of sixty-two separate sperm count studies. The findings are correlated with others: a marked rise in testicular cancer among young men as well as congenital anomalies of the male reproductive organs; a rise in associated problems among women, especially breast cancer; and similar deterioration among wildlife, including panthers, alligators, birds, bats, turtles, and fish.1 There are a number of possible responses to this information. The most obvious would be to inquire as to the causes of these phenomena, their implications, and potential remedies. This would be shadowed by an elementary extrapolation: at the rate of a 2-percent decline a year-and there are reasons to believe that the rate will accelerate-the reproductive capacities of higher animals, at least in certain areas and perhaps across the globe, will at some point sink below a threshold of sustainability. In the meanwhile, an increasing number of beings are going to suffer in one way or another, and an increasing number of genetically damaged organisms are going to be launched into the ecosphere. Thus, if the processes to which these studies are calling attention continue, drastic conclusions for the future of complex organisms on earth are to be drawn. For it would appear that a kind of systematic poisoning is inexorably destroying the genetic legacy of a billion years of evolution. But let us not be too hasty. The preceding paragraph used conditional and subjunctive modes for more than conventional reasons. That the aforementioned extrapolation takes place is itself based on a number of assumptions, namely:","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115781075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Gloves Come Off: Shattered Alliances in Science and Technology Studies","authors":"L. Winner","doi":"10.2307/466845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/466845","url":null,"abstract":"Langdon Winner The acrimonious disputes surrounding social studies of science today reflect long-standing disagreements about the character and purpose of inquiry in this field. The publication of Higher Superstition underscores how nasty these quarrels can be, perhaps foreshadowing explosive clashes between the two cultures in years to come.1 One might have hoped spirits less malicious than Gross and Levitt's would have been the ones to bring these conflicts to light. But for those who have followed the development of science and technology studies (STS) over the years, it has been obvious that eventually the other shoe would drop, that someday it would occur to scientists and technologists to ask: Why do the descriptions of our enterprise offered by social scientists and humanists differ so greatly from ones we ourselves prefer? How much longer should we put up with this?","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125314419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Meeting Polemics with Irenics in the Science Wars","authors":"Emily Martin","doi":"10.2307/466843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/466843","url":null,"abstract":"According to Webster's, a polemic is \"an aggressive attack on, or the refutation of, others' opinions, doctrines or the like.\" In today's academy, professors and students often have cause to be polemic, but seldom have cause to remember that polemic has an opposite.1 Webster's defines that opposite, irenic, as \"fitted or designed to promote peace; pacific, conciliatory, peaceful.\" Recent skirmishes in the Science Wars have seemed to me so polemically bitter on all sides that rather than sending back another volley intended to hurt and destroy, I want to try moving irenically toward common ground. I will do this by discussing a few recent occasions in which I have been involved in the Science Wars. The first was an occasion when","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116006510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Politics of the Science Wars","authors":"S. Aronowitz","doi":"10.2307/466853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/466853","url":null,"abstract":"reason versus unreason. While the language and vocabularies of science are different from those of the arts, the animus is the same: as for those safeguarding culture and science, the barbarians are at the gates. Those who would demystify science by showing it is subject to the same cultural and social influences as any other discourse, no less than critics who excoriate science for remaining silent when its discoveries are recruited for nefarious purposes, are charged with being prophets of (take your pick) unreason, mysticism, anti-Enlightenment, and nihilism, and with being promulgators of a higher superstition. Science controversies are by no means as esoteric as one would think. Consider the bizarre result of an FBI investigation into the identity of the notorious Unabomber who, according to the New York Times, has, in the last seventeen years, \"killed three people and injured 23 others\" (Broad 1995). An agent appeared at the New Orleans meetings of the History of Science Association in October 1994 and subpoenaed its membership records because the FBI suspected the \"bomber is immersed in the most radical interpretations of the history of science.\" According to the Times report, \"professors have begun reconsidering old suspicions, acquaintances and tracts to help solve the crimes.\" Except for Langdon Winner of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, most of the association members and officials the reporter interviewed were donning their detective hats and Sherlock Holmes pipes or were prone to dismiss the bomber as \"marginal\" in professional science studies. Winner joked he was disappointed the FBI did not consult him on the case. \"I feel left out. It's like being left off the guest list for a really good party\" (Broad 1995). Defenders of science such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994) write polemics that betray philosophical naivete; others, like the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), are hosting conferences and symposia in which the critical theory of science is represented as a virus that must be","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121978894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ten Propositions on Science and Antiscience","authors":"R. Levins","doi":"10.2307/466847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/466847","url":null,"abstract":"Au-dela de la diversite de la pensee marxiste de la science et au-dela de son opposition a la conception capitaliste de la science europeenne et nord-americaine, l'A. souligne l'objectivite de la connaissance scientifique en tant qu'elle represente le progres du genre humain. Denoncant les aspects reductionnistes de la science moderne, l'A. revendique l'ouverture de la science aux exclus par un processus de democratisation","PeriodicalId":114432,"journal":{"name":"Science Wars","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1996-01-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132382512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}