The Gloves Come Off: Shattered Alliances in Science and Technology Studies

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?