Science wars

The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of scientific theory and intellectual inquiry. They took place principally in the U.S in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press. The scientific realists accused the postmodernists of having effectively rejected scientific objectivity, the scientific method and scientific knowledge. Scientific realists (such as Norman Levitt, Paul R. Gross, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal) argued that scientific knowledge is real, and that postmodernists thought that it is not real. Though much of the theory associated with 'postmodernism' (see Poststucturalism) did not make any interventions into the natural sciences , the scientific realists took aim at its general influence. The scientific realists argued that large swaths of scholarship, amounting to a rejection of objectivity and realism, had been influenced by major 20th Century poststucuralis philosophers (such as Jacques Derrida,Gellies Deleuze ,Jean Francois Lyotard and others), whose work they declared to be incomprehensible or meaningless. They implicated a broad range of fields in this trend, including cultural tudies , cultural anathropology, feminist studies, comparative liturature , media studies , and science and technology studies. They accused those postmodernist critics who did actually discuss science of having a limited understanding of it.