Taking the spin out of science
By beginning to investigate the Bush administration's interference with scientists' work on global warming, the Democratic Congress has embarked on a key task: restoring respect for science -- and more generally, for evidence and reason -- in the federal government.
That we need such reform, and from Democrats, is a historic irony, because it's the Republicans who have often tried to paint themselves as defenders of "sound science" against ideologically motivated attacks.
In the 1990s, conservatives such as Dinesh D'Souza, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Roger Kimball wrote best-selling jeremiads attacking postmodernist academics who, they insisted, were taking over American universities and subverting the standards of scholarship. Although much exaggerated, this contained a grain of truth. Some self-described leftist academics did seem determined to reduce the real world to mere "discourse." No worldview, they insisted, could be considered objectively more valid or factual than any other. Even the findings of science were described as reflecting societal conditions and struggles for power and dominance rather than something true about the nature of the world.
One of us -- Sokal -- was sufficiently disturbed by these trends to try an unorthodox experiment: write a parody of postmodern science criticism to see whether a trendy academic journal would accept it as a serious scholarly article. Asserting up front that "physical 'reality' [note the scare quotes]
After Sokal revealed his hoax in the magazine Lingua Franca, a debate exploded about the nature of science and rationality, popularly known as the "science wars." It pitted scientists and their staunch defenders within and outside of the academic community -- spanning the political spectrum from left to right -- against a band of intellectuals from the humanities, virtually all of them situated on the left.
Sokal took on his postmodernist colleagues because he feared that the rejection of a rigorous, evidence-based standard for assessing claims of purported fact would disarm us not only in the face of quack medical remedies or alleged paranormal occurrences, but also when confronted by distortions of scientific information having major public-policy implications. A classic example is the tobacco industry's well-documented campaign to sow doubts about the health risks of smoking. Another is the interminable push by religious fundamentalists to undermine the teaching of evolution in American schools.
