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] ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct," Sokal averred that the latest conceptions of quantum gravity support deconstructive literary theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, "postmodernist epistemology" and, of course, progressive politics. The cultural-studies journal Social Text ate it up.
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.
