Posted on 02/20/2006 5:54:51 PM PST by jennyp
The recent, notorious confrontation, embodied in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, between Creationism (in the guise of "Intelligent Design Theory") and biological science was notable for many things, not least among them the dissolution of standard political categories. The decision itself confronted us the startling image of Judge J. Jones, a conservative Republican and a recent Bush appointee to boot, coming forth with an opinion that in its unquestioning deference to the "establishment" clause of the First Amendment, its pervasive concern for civil liberties, and its determination to maintain a materialist, naturalistic definition of science, seemed to have come straight out of a secular-humanist handbook. There were some assertions with which a hard-core monist might quibble, specifically, that there is no real conflict between science, evolutionary and otherwise, and religion as such. But these were minor diplomatic gestures, and did little to shield theocratic pretensions from the decision's thrust.
On top of that, the post-trial school board election that preceded the decision by a few weeks revealed the massive defection of a largely conservative and Republican community to the Democratic column and to an explicitly liberal view of church-state relations, clearly rejecting the theocratic bullying of the previous board. Moreover, the case itself had the effect of prying some prominent conservative thinkers away from their previously unquestioned allegiance to the Christian Right.
Yet the trial itself put on display a contrary anomaly, slight in its overall legal significance yet striking in its reversal of familiar dichotomies. That anomaly, to give it a personal name, was Professor Steve Fuller, an American academic now in the sociology program of the UK's University of Warwick, who provided an aggressive and cocksure rationale for the Dover Board's position and for the "Intelligent Design" program in general.
Fuller, who has a degree in philosophy of science, has long been a strident, insistent voice in the "science studies" movement that has insinuated itself into the European and American scholarly community. By the sole criterion of page counting, and leaving aside questions of accuracy, soundness, and irredundancy, he has been massively prolific. With entrepreneurial acumen, he early on founded his own journal, Social Epistemology, to tout the supremacy of his own doctrines. He has nimbly climbed the greasy pole of academic prestige, at least insofar as British redbricks and a field like sociology can generate it, rocketing upward on a ceaseless stream of words, most of them inflected by more than a hint of self-praise. As is almost inevitable in the prevailing climate, he positions himself on the supposed left of the political spectrum. Indeed, he has repeatedly resorted to "lefter than thou" rhetoric to bolster his claim to theoretical primacy. For instance, his book on Thomas Kuhn, probably the best known of his works, propounds the peculiar thesis that Kuhn's all-too-famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was at heart a Cold War scheme to lull western scientists into accepting their assigned role as accomplices of anti-Communist militarism. This is Fullerism at its slyest; the author simultaneously dethrones a figure who has been (rightly or wrongly) the philosophical demigod of left-wing science studies, while seizing the crown for himself.
In Fuller's mind, working scientists are in an important sense intellectually deformed. They constitute a narrow, cloistered, inbred hierarchy of myopic specialists largely blind to the "true" nature of science and oblivious to its future trajectory. Science, on this view, maintains its prestige, authority, and access to resources by playing the power game, bullying and intimidating the rest of society. It is "an arrested social movement in which the natural spread of knowledge is captured by a community that gains relative advantage by forcing other communities to rely on its expertise to get what they want." In other words, what we now think of as "science" does not truly comprehend nature, but rather constructs from its own idiosyncratic perspective a limited image of nature, while using the prerogatives of a privileged mandarinate to nullify or suppress all rival knowledge claims that impinge on its territory.
But fear not! Paladins (most notably, Steve Fuller!) have arisen from the socially oriented disciplines to overthrow this view of things. Specifically, Fuller regards himself as a leader in the movement to "open up" science by nurturing and canonizing ways of "doing science" that differ radically from practices currently endorsed by the professional scientific consensus. This is a theme that plays well on the academic left, since it explicitly includes such notions as "citizen science" and "people's science," projects that Fuller gives leave to confront and reject the findings of established science. There is an obvious nod to the epistemic relativism that is central to the postmodernist view of things, notwithstanding the fact that Fuller indignantly refuses the "postmodernist" label.
This bizarre project is propped up by Fuller's dogma that one need not actually understand standard science to criticize it or to pose profoundly different alternatives. The specific content of standard science, its internal logic, the empirical results that buttress it, are not crucial elements in understanding "Science" as he maintains it should be understood. What, then, authorizes those who, like Fuller, do "social studies of science" to claim that supposedly superior understanding? "We study them [scientists] as people, not minor deities. We observe them in their workplaces, interpret their documents, and propose explanations for their activities that make sense of them, given other things we know about human beings." This, presumably, gives Fuller and friends the Archimedean leverage to condemn professional science as a hermetic cult and to toss aside its findings when ideology so dictates. "If a theory 'forced' one to assent to politically distasteful, depressing, and counterintuitive claims, then one could regard those consequences as in themselves good reasons to find the theory implausible," says feminist philosopher Sandra Harding; Fuller would doubtless agree, as evidenced by his sympathy for the War Against Darwin.
... [snip Fuller getting snookered by the Sokal affair] ...
Going well beyond [the Sokal] incident, a search of Fuller's manifestos reveals that he knows little, if anything, about the content or logic of biology or physics. Mathematically, he seems to be quite illiterate. On the other hand, as the cited incident shows, he is easily gulled. To put it another way, he is not a very astute judge of human nature, at least when the human in question is a scientist representing himself through scientific (or fake-scientific) rhetoric. ...
... Fuller, however, made his own backhanded contribution to the outcome [of the Dover case]. Jones's opinion is a telling commentary on Fuller's tin ear for his own voice. Fuller's connection with the ID crowd is a rather old one. He signed on as a fellow-traveler as early as 1998, embracing Intelligent Design Theory as a ploy in his more general campaign to challenge the hegemony of standard science and to compel scientists to accept the legitimacy of "local knowledges" of the sort that fail when confronted with scientific standards of rigor. But despite his long familiarity with ID and its rationales, Fuller utterly failed to sway Judge Jones to take a more kindly view of the movement. ...
Needless to say, Fuller's sycophancy toward the ID movement has drawn considerable criticism, even from folks who are inclined, on the whole, to a favorable view of the "science studies" movement. The primary objection is that a supposed champion of the left is lending his services and his rhetorical skills to a deeply reactionary project. The ultimate aim of the ID movement is not only to replace secular science by a zombie simulacrum deferential to fundamentalist myth, but further to exploit that anticipated achievement in order, ultimately, to turn this country into a fundamentalist Christian commonwealth. This is perfectly clear to anyone who has paid attention to the pronouncements of ID godfather Phillip E. Johnson. Fuller's rather blithe defense is that he is trying to keep the ID movement from falling completely into the hands of the religious right. He advises his critics to "Mainstream these guys [ID advocates] now, so that they don't have to depend on the religious right for material support." This is rather like advocating support of the SS in order to prevent it from falling completely under the sway of the Nazis! Fuller is too feckless to perceive that ID belongs to the religious right, body and soul. ...
It's a good guess that Fuller first veered into the ID orbit because it provided him with a concrete and ongoing example of what he took to be serious "alternative science," science that rebels against the methodological constraints as well as the metaphysical assumptions of the orthodox variety. Crucially, it also provided him with a cast of "rebel angels", presumptive credentialed scientists who had taken arms in defense of the defiant new mode of "science". Thus, he repeatedly refers to the Discovery Institute's well-known legionnaires as serious working scientists, guided by a teleological metaphysics opposed to materialistic naturalism, but aboveboard and straightforward in their experimental and theoretical rigor. He ignores extensive and damning criticism of these purported scientists, assuming, that is, that it doesn't simply go right over his head. ... [snip examples of Dembski's refusal to define his mathematical terms consistently, etc.] ...
Fuller is blind to this entire risible history. For one thing, as a mathematical duffer, he lacks the intellectual resources even to follow the debate. But beyond that, he is wedded to the idea that ID involves serious, if philosophically unorthodox science, and ignores the obvious fact that Dembski is not a scientific inquirer at all, but rather a tractarian with a gimmick, using his credentials (rather meaningless by now) to promulgate a conventional religious dogma. Fuller tries to deny that Dembski is even a Creationist; but Creationists themselves, at least of the Old Earth variety, have no trouble embracing him as one of their own without any protest from Dembski. Mutatis mutandis, Fuller's attitude to the rest of the bloody crew -- Behe, Wells, Berlinski, et al -- is pretty much the same.
Perhaps Fuller lulls his conscience by dreaming up these lame excuses for ID, but the curious fact remains that he has thrown in his lot with a pack of full-bore, no-holds-barred, reactionaries who can prosper only at the expense of the political causes and ideals Fuller claims to uphold. Frankly, I think that for once he has made a bad career move. His unremitting hatred for the prestige and authority of conventional science has carried him over a brink that most of his science studies colleagues are too prudent even to approach.
It might pay, at this point, to inquire a little more deeply into the question of motivations, that is to say, the motivations of those proponents of science studies who have, like Fuller, spent the past two decades or so beating the drums for epistemic relativism and cognitive pluralism, making social constructivist doctrine bear the weight of their argument. I want to explore the possibility that their deepest guiding impulses don't derive from an intellectual conversion to social constructivist theory, but rather from a profound and rather frantic discontent with the world-view science forces them to confront. Most of the visitors to this site have accepted that view to a great degree, regarding the knowledge of the natural world that science affords and the consistency of its knowable laws as adequate consolation for the eclipse of a vision of the universe as governed by divine purpose, moral equity, and ultimate justice. Most people in the world, however, are unenthusiastic about the trade-off. Where those who are most comfortable with science see it as "a candle in the dark," to use Carl Sagan's memorable phrase, they are far outnumbered by the mass of those who, at one level or another, harbor bitter feelings toward science for revealing just how pervasive and complete that darkness is.
The world of professional intellectuals is hardly immune from these resentments, even though religion as such, with its burden of highly arbitrary doctrine, is muted within its precincts, if not wholly absent. The desire to re-enchant the world, to shape a vision that brings the workings of the greater universe closer, once again, to the realm of human purposes and values, takes many forms. Some of these visions are ancient, some newly sprung from the human imagination. Often, they are rather inchoate, consisting of a generalized sense that some higher or deeper or kinder purpose lurks behind the world of direct appearances that science accesses. In the scholarly domain, these feelings often take the form, not of specific positive doctrine that clearly confronts science, but rather of ideological tenderheartedness toward the social phenomena -- sects, cults, ethnocentric tall-tales, unorthodox belief systems -- that actually mount such challenges.
I propose that such sentiments underlie much of the pugnacity toward science exhibited by science studies, radical cultural anthropology, feminist epistemology, and so forth. I think that the persistent popularity of the notion that science is a historically contingent social construct, a narrative not necessarily superior to other accounts of the world, a kind of cognitive imperialism devised by the western ruling caste to humble and demoralize subaltern cultures, stems not from the philosophical plausibility of social constructivism as such, but rather from the deep discontent with the death of teleology to which I have alluded. This unhappiness fastens upon the explicit doctrines of social constructivism, forging them into a cudgel with which the hegemony of orthodox science can be repeatedly belabored.
Something like this, I submit, lurks beneath the pompous and scatterbrained epistemological latitudinarianism that Steve Fuller offers in defense of Intelligent Design Theory. That in itself won't save him, I believe, from the disdain of most social constructivist colleagues. He is giving aid and comfort to too dire an enemy. His career is probably headed for some fairly rocky shoals. Nonetheless, he is merely extending to a nasty gang of right-wing religious nuts the logic that has led the science studies community and its hangers-on to speak up for tribal shamans, UFO cultists, and homeopathists.
Fuller's sentiments echo those of many other science studies luminaries. Collectively, these give the game away. Andrew Pickering notoriously tells the readers of Constructing Quarks that physics need not be taken seriously as a ground for one's world-view. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch in The Golem slyly damn with faint praise, averring that science is above all a "craft". From this doctrine, we are to infer that scientific theories are merely variously clever intellectual gizmos cobbled together according to the guild's rules -- a very different thing from a body of reliable and universally valid knowledge. On his own hook, Collins rages against CSICOP and the Amazing Randi for their deadly accurate debunking of the paranormal. Meanwhile, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour boast that, "The field of science studies has been engaged in a moral struggle to strip science of its extravagant claim to authority." "We have challenged the assumption that there is only one way of doing things right, that there is only one way to investigate our social worlds or to investigate the earth and the universe where we live," claims Sharon Traweek likewise. "How can metaphysical life theories and explanations taken seriously by millions be ignored or excluded by a small group of powerful people called 'scientists'?" Andrew Ross chimes in.
None of this, needless to say, will lead science studies to join Steve Fuller in a passionate embrace of Phillip E. Johnson and company (although Harvard's Sheila Jasanoff once briefly flirted with the idea). But it does illuminate the primal source of Fuller's folly and the overall surliness of the practitioners of science studies, which, to speak brutally, consists of a subterranean desire to bring about a world in which superstition, in one form or another, has clawed its way back into respectability. For all its progressive posturing, "postmodernism," at bottom, reflects a deeply reactionary cast of mind. Steve Fuller's enthusiasm for the Intelligent Design movement, therefore, is not a contradiction so much as it is a consummation.
But as many of us FREvos have argued, it really makes perfect sense when you look at creationism vs. evolution on a deeper level. This math professor, who doesn't sound like a conservative but certainly is anti-postmodernism, gets it too.
PING to all opponents of post-modernism, deconstructionism, and epistemological nihilism...
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Postmodernists, creationists, and militant Islamists - an odd combination if I have ever seen one.
This is what is so weird...people allying with people who will end the end eat them.
Having this conversation with another crap-for-brains right now on another thread. Science, when done right, is a systematic investigation of nature. Nature is out there and it isn't anything old silly you want it to be based on your convenience of the moment.
LOL!!
Science, when done right, is a systematic investigation of nature.
Absolutely!
So what is "Social Constructivism" in real world terms again?
Something like this, I submit, lurks beneath the pompous and scatterbrained epistemological latitudinarianism that Steve Fuller offers in defense of Intelligent Design Theory. That in itself won't save him, I believe, from the disdain of most social constructivist colleagues. He is giving aid and comfort to too dire an enemy. His career is probably headed for some fairly rocky shoals. Nonetheless, he is merely extending to a nasty gang of right-wing religious nuts the logic that has led the science studies community and its hangers-on to speak up for tribal shamans, UFO cultists, and homeopathists.
Fuller doesn't have a clue, does he? The schmuck has no idea what would happen to him if his buddies achieved their ambitions.
This thread isn't getting the attention it deserves. But it's good that this article is posted.
It's the notion that knowledge is "constructed" in the context of the society in which people live. Commonly used to denigrate scientists as people who construct knowledge to advance the agenda of the white male power structure. Or to put it another way, science does not objectively define reality; rather, scientists fudge the answers to serve the existing political and social institutions (yeah right).
Social constructivism is also used to justify the idiotic idea that there is no such thing as a right answer; children smply construct their own knowledge based on their own experiences. Silly stuff but a lot of NEA types love it.
I think this goofiness caught on because it facilitates the giving of degrees to people who cannot master statistics or logic. Keeps the money coming into the university coffers.
"This bizarre project is propped up by Fuller's dogma that one need not actually understand standard science to criticize it or to pose profoundly different alternatives." [emphasis added]
No wonder the anti-Evo truffle-heads embraced him!
Global warming fits the above fine.
Yes, I see it as a good reference, especially whenever a FreCreo starts complaining about "all those know-it-all high-priest scientist in their ivory temples who are forcing their silly ideas on all us normal folk."
Reminds me of William F. Buckley
He looked better in a BEARS uniform...
I would have thought it the use of science to *assault* existing political and social institutions.
The point is not that there is no one in science with an agenda. It's the idea that everyone gets together in support of some vast conspiracy to support the existing power structure that is so goofy.
Reminds me of William F. Buckley.
I can almost hear him spitting that out on Firing Line.
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