Experts and the Will of the People by Harry Collins & Robert Evans & Darrin Durant & Martin Weinel

Author:Harry Collins & Robert Evans & Darrin Durant & Martin Weinel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030269838
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Embrace of Rethink?

The 1970s change in the analysis of science could itself be described as a ‘paradigm shift’ and, in some respects, the term ‘mob psychology’ would not do violence to the way it was received and assessed. The least edifying reaction was what was known as the ‘Science Wars’, which comprised scornful attacks by certain scientists and philosophers on the new analysts and their work. They insisted that because scientific knowledge was self-evidently superior, and the consequences of a levelling down of its legitimacy were too awful to contemplate, the analysis must be not only wrong but stupid. Some of the new work was, indeed, careless, driven primarily by iconoclastic passion, but much of it was careful and detailed; in respect of this face of the 1970s revolution, the ‘science warriors’ were, essentially, abandoning a scientific approach to safeguard science as they wanted it to be.12 It would have been much better from the beginning if both advocates and detractors had worked together to try to make the findings of the new work compatible with the wide agreement that a good society needed respect for science. As it was, the Science Wars gave rise to polarisation, with each side digging in to defensive positions. It would be a decade or more before it became possible to try to ‘square the circle’ and then resistance to the new peace proposals came as much from one entrenched side as the other.

What can be seen in retrospect, is that the findings of the new analysts of science can be handled in two ways, even by those who accept them as a sound description: the consequences—a science more intimately related to politics and other social forces—can be embraced and glorified or it can be resisted with the value and the values of science continuing to be endorsed but in more subtle ways. A contributor to the choice of position was probably the tension between ‘The Two Cultures’. C. P. Snow’s essay by that name, presented in 1959, described the way the sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities, on the other, rivalled each other in intellectual life, driven by social-class-related snobbery. Notably, it was perfectly respectable for someone from the non-science side to flaunt ignorance in public about scientific matters whereas ignorance of artistic or humanistic matters showed a lack of refinement. At the same time, of course, the sciences were lauded for their successes both in the Second World War and its aftermath, with the excitement over nuclear power and the like in full spate. Many of those who engaged in the new analysis of science from the humanities side would naturally find relief in the fact that the sciences were no longer to be seen as giving rise to a kind of knowledge that was unquestionably superior in terms of its truth to their more refined knowledge. Such entrants to the new game would enthusiastically embrace the erosion of the status of the sciences. Many of those entering

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