Does It Matter

There is today a broad, generational, postmodernist current of irrationalism with its roots deep in the seductively brilliant thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, which is at its core elitist and antidemocratic, even though that thought is often absorbed only in the flattened, simplified version popular among today's students and intellectuals. This is the cloven hoof of earth mother communitarianism, the need for the organic, the authentic feeling and for passion as against the cool "patriarchal" logic of the broad Left. This trend includes the rejection of science as well as scientistic fetishism. And, of course, it is permeated by utter contempt for the warp and woof of genuine democracy, for discussion, give and take, compromise, and elected representative bodies.

Discounting the Critics

Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise. Every active investigator is inescapably aware of this. It creates the pain as well as much of the delight of research. Reality is the overseer at one's shoulder, ready to rap one's knuckles or to spring the trap into which one has been led by overconfidence, or by a too complacent reliance on mere surmise. Science succeeds precisely because it has accepted a bargain in which even the boldest imagination stands hostage to reality. Reality is the unrelenting angel with whom scientists have agreed to wrestle.

Yet those who insist that science is driven by culture and by politics, by economics, by aesthetics, even by a species of understated mysticism, are not for that reason alone to be dismissed as wrongheaded. On the contrary, these assertions, if "driven" is replaced by "influenced," come near to being truisms. Great difficulties arise, however, when such insights are wielded as ideological blunt instruments in the name of "demystification," or to nourish the political vanity of factions and the academic vanity of scholarship more
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notable for its novelty than for profundity. A serious investigation of the interplay of cultural and social factors with the workings of scientific research in a given field is an enterprise that requires patience, subtlety, erudition, and a knowledge of human nature. Above all, however, it requires an intimate appreciation of the science in question, of its inner logic and of the store of data on which it relies, of its intellectual and experimental tools. In saying this, we are plainly aware that we are setting very high standards for the successful pursuit of such work. We are saying, in effect, that a scholar devoted to a project of this kind must be, inter alia, a scientist of professional competence, or nearly so.

This is not a dictum that sits at all happily in the minds of those thinkers whom this book has criticized. They read it as an ideological demand, emanating from the arrogance of a priesthood that denies the intellectual fitness of anyone who is not an initiate. Such resentment is quite understandable on an emotional level. But as logic, it is of little avail. The critiques of science and the political misuses of it that we have evaluated vary greatly in perspective and argumentative strategy. Yet common to almost all of them is a failure to grapple seriously with the detailed content of the scientific ideas they propose to contest, and with the scientific practices they wish to impeach.

This alone, aside from other defects of reasoning and evidence, aside from the routine intrusion of special pleading, almost invariably guarantees that the results, however aggressively proclaimed, will lack accuracy and specificity. Such work founders because it treats science as a token of the illegitimacy of the current social order, rather than as a coherent body of ideas requiring the most exacting attentiveness. Scientists--aside from a small cadre of ideologically motivated sympathizers--generally ignore these critiques, not out of blind defensiveness of their own turf, not out of snobbery, but because the critics simply sail so wide of the mark, and have so little to say about the actual ideas with which scientists contend every day of their working lives.

Science, from the most cloistered and abstruse to the most directly applicable, has taken little notice of recent critiques of its underlying conceptual basis. Instead, it has tended to be vaguely receptive to the political right-thinking to which the critics lay claim, but without examining the details. There has been no rethinking of fundamental ideas, or of how these are to be articulated to experimental and observational reality, in response to recent criticism by feminists, sociologists, and postmodern philosophers. Occasionally, the opinions of such thinkers are voiced in scientific journals of the more general, informal sort (as opposed to specialized research publications). ¹ This illustrates an admirable intellectual hospitality, or--sometimes--a lazy and weak-minded one. But it should not be misread as general acceptance or

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influence on actual scientific practice. Science as such--molecular biology, solid-state physics, polymer chemistry, nonlinear equations, and the thousands of other specialties--would have taken the same course over the last couple of decades had no feminist philosopher or postmodern social critic ever addressed a line to scientific matters. To put it bluntly, the probability that science will sooner or later take these critiques sufficiently to heart to change its fundamental way of knowing is vanishingly small.

This is not to say that criticism of the social implications of scientific practice has been without effect.  In a few areas of applied science, medicine, and technology, practices have been rethought and modified on the basis of specific critiques (for example, of workplace safety monitoring), a good many of them having a left wing provenance. Some of the modifications have been useful; some, as we have seen, are less than justifiable on logical grounds. In any event this must be distinguished very clearly from revisions at the level of concepts ant fundamental methodology. There, despite the hyperbole and the earnest attempts of ideologically charged enthusiasts, the effect is imperceptible.

Thus we come round once more to the question of why the critiques of science generated by the academic left should be taken seriously enough to require an honest rejoinder from science. If, as we believe, science will not, in any serious way, be influenced, deflected, restricted, or even inconvenienced by these critics and those they influence, why should their work draw more than passing comment from anyone outside that mutual admiration society? Why, in fact, have we troubled to worry about it? From the broadest point of view, we worry, and believe that scientists as well as lay persons well disposed toward intellectual progress should worry, because unanswered criticism must in due course have effects. We worry for the reason articulated by Arthur Potynen, for example, among many others who have begun to ask this question.

Those attempting to ignore Post modernism are many: for example, the natural sciences and business departments often hope that the affected, yet essentially harmless, humanities will remain isolated and irrelevant. But if power is the essence of all human endeavors, then can science escape being labeled willful and coercive? Can business be anything other that rapacious? Can either science or business continue to function in a political culture that assumes them to be oppressive? (Emphasis added.)²

Those who choose to do so may dismiss this remark as the carping of one to whom "business as usual" may be the most sacred of values. The epigraph of this chapter, a cri de coeur from Bogdan Denitch, a life long socialist of

unswerving faith, fully demonstrates that such misgivings do not necessarily go hand in hand with a benign attitude toward "business." A similar complaint is heard from the left wing social theorist Alan Chalmers:

I am by no means alone in viewing social trends in the contemporary world with dismay and alarm. The gulf between rich and poor and between developed and undeveloped countries widens, the environment is destroyed, and the threat of annihilation looms. The social and political problems facing us are urgent and vital. I do not think this cause is helped by construals of science as a capitalist male conspiracy or as indistinguishable from black magic or voodoo.³

Plainly, one needn't be in any sense a conservative to view the antiscientism of the academic left with deepest apprehension. One needs only to have paid some attention to it, to have understood its meanings, deep as well as superficial, to be concerned.

Academic Recognition and Fairness

The issue of academic recognition derives, we admit, from what some will descry as academic priggishness. Much of the work we have cited has been received with enthusiasm in certain academic quarters, where trendiness in the humanities and social sciences combines with "identity politics" and with the residue of Marxist intellectual totalism that persists among leftist thinkers. Paradoxically enough, in the United States--this bastion of free-market capitalism and reflexive hostility to socialist ideas--such enthusiasm is usually enough to guarantee success and even celebrity in the narrow world of the academy. The critics whose work so disturbs us will, in one sense, have the last laugh. For the most part, they have made it to the upper rungs of the academic ladder, from which no rejoinder, however well founded, will dislodge them in any likely future. Nor will the richest charitable foundations cease to support and honor them.

Most of the science critics with whom we have dealt in this book, for instance, have high positions in such notable universities as Princeton, Berkeley, Brown, MIT, Rutgers, and the CUNY Graduate Center--and, if we allow some British examples, Oxford and the University of Edinburgh. They do not struggle in outer darkness: many of them are influential, politically as well as intellectually. We shall not illustrate this point with a list of the chairs, fellowships, and academic titles to which they lay claim at those institutions, but the facts are a matter of public record, and readers so inclined can easily satisfy themselves that most of our subjects, far from struggling as

assistant professors, hanging on by their fingernails, are near the summit as regards academic prestige and seniority. Moreover, they enjoy that status principally by virtue of the work we find so unsatisfactory. Since we are hardly alone in such judgments, as we have tried to show, this fact raises serious questions about the presumed intellectual meritocracy of the academy.

It seems clear to us, in fact, that on the whole the academic left's critiques of science have enjoyed an astonishing free ride. Most evaluation of this work has come, so far, from scholars whose own ideological commitments are strong and whose scientific backgrounds tend to be deficient. It has been shielded, we suppose, from more skeptical treatment for a number of reasons. First of all, its egalitarian posture has won it the benefit of the doubt from prospective hostile critics whose own political sentiments run along the same lines. A critical response to particular feminist assertions, for instance, poses a problem for well intentioned academics, many scientists among them, on whom the general moral claims of feminism exert a strong, positive influence. There is a reluctance to dissect them with the same rigor that might be applied to work that is not put forward as part of a wider struggle for justice. We have repeatedly run into this attitude on the part of left wing humanists, in particular, who are willing to overlook the inconsistencies and evidentiary inadequacies of antiscience critiques in part because, as nonscientists, they are imperfectly aware of those flaws, but more importantly because such work strikes them as courageous and pathbreaking in its political ambitions. To these sympathizers, the very act of putting on the table questions about the competence and objectivity of science, about its complicity with the injustices of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, is praiseworthy in and of itself; nagging doubts about the competence and fairness with which this is done are easily deferred.

This attitude is seconded by a frame of mind that derives from envies, rivalries, and resentments that have long beset academic life. Humanists and sociologists alike take a certain pleasure in the notion that the mighty principality of the exact sciences, with its arsenal of laboratories and observatories, its inexhaustible sources of funding, its imagined stentorian voice in public policy, its intimidating intellectual mystique, is now itself put on the bench for demystification. They are eager to find virtue in any analysis that claims to have accomplished this trick. Its novelty alone insulates it from severe questioning.⁴ Moreover, as many of those questions would themselves require a reasonably deep knowledge of scientific particulars, it is far from clear that humanists and sociologists are even able to frame them. On the other hand, they are not immune to the flattery implicit in claims that the perspectives of postmodern literary theory or radical social theory have brought to light

certain aspects of, shall we say, theoretical physics or evolutionary biology to which the scientists themselves were heretofore blind! They are correspondingly uneager to subject such claims to skeptical scrutiny, especially in light of the painful fact that to exercise it, they would have to acquire expertise in a field they have studiously avoided.

More than once we have been told by Y, the eminent professor of English and cultural critic, that X's critique of science shows her to be intimately familiar with some specific technical subject. On looking into X's work, however, we seem to find a great deal of psycho-talk, a good deal of literary language, and a glaring absence of knowledge of the supposed subject. In this case Y's wish has clearly been father to the thought. Likewise, we have been told over and over again that the keen methodologies of contemporary literary analysis leave up-to-date literary critics uniquely placed to analyze the rhetorical strategies and semiological underpinnings of scientific treatises. This claim--it amounts to an unquestioned truth in some circles--has however, remained entirely unsupported. We have never seen it illustrated with reference, for example, to a paper on the instability of induced magnetic fields in high-temperature superconductors. We doubt we ever shall. Nonetheless, it remains an effective sop to the vanity of contemporary literati.

At the same time, we find that scholars who are eager to praise cultural and political critiques of science are reluctant to take into account the (admittedly rare) actual responses of scientists to this work. Having, as they see it, reduced the scientific community to an object of study, they are quite unwilling (despite their repertory theater "feeling for the organism") to allow the specimen to wriggle free of its new restraints. Their logic is that any objections on the part of scientists are tainted, prima facie, by self interest and special pleading. It is never taken into account that the same defects might afflict the critiques themselves. In any event, this kind of exclusion serves the further purpose of acquitting the humanist and social-scientist enthusiasts of recent science criticism of the tiresome chore of learning the specifics of the biology, chemistry, physics, or mathematics being criticized.

In sum, we are accusing a powerful faction in modem academic life of intellectual dereliction. This accusation has nothing to do with political correctness or "subversion"; it has to do, rather, with the craft of scholarship--a craft that has always had consequences, independently of the behaviors of individual scholars. We allege that eagerness to praise a certain spectrum of work has disarmed skepticism and careful critical attention. Political sympathy has combined with professional vanity to give undue weight, prestige, and influence to a decidedly slender body of work.

As we have observed, substantial careers have been made and salvaged on

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the basis of it, to the relative detriment of scholars whose own work is more competent but less ideologically intoxicating. As scientists, we observe this fact with some dismay. We know how hard it is to achieve even a modestly successful career in science or mathematics. In addition to native talent and appallingly hard work over many years, it requires unremitting self scrutiny and attention to the possibility of error. There is the constant risk, unknown outside of the sciences, that the rewards of one's patient effort will vanish beyond recovery because a colleague announces the same result a few weeks before one's own work is ready for publication. Moreover, there is rarely any lasting payoff for mere self promotion, or for the ability to talk a good game-- although, as in life generally, such talents don't hurt.

To top it all, for the typical faculty scientist, teaching responsibilities, charged as they are with the necessity to cram huge amounts of hard technical information into a few dozen lectures every semester, afford little opportunity to play to the grandstand. The displays of classroom charisma to which many humanists are frankly given, and that make campus celebrities of the cleverest,⁵ are simply out of place in most science courses. Science has its staginess and its celebrities, to be sure, but the style is different. Papers, for example, are never literally "read." Delivery is almost ostentatiously casual, even at the great international meetings. It is a gaffe not to credit one's graduate students and collaborators, in great detail. Emphasis is supposed to be upon the idea, the data, the structure, the equations: forceful or rhapsodic presentation is taken to be amateurish. To be sure, this is as much a style as is the page fuming and premeditated diction of the humanists; but in science it is the findings, that are supposed to enchant, not the person offering them. The classroom offshoot of this is that even a young and inexperienced science teacher, following the example of his mentors, does not rhapsodize on the grandeur of, say, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, in which simple, single graph the life, teeth, and evolution of all the stars is displayed or implied: that grandeur is supposed to be grasped by the student who is prepared, by prior study, to grasp the implications of such a plot. Some, but not many, are.

In view of this, we can hardly be indifferent to the spectacle of major academic honors and emoluments accruing to work whose lack of substance and whose reliance on special pleading and appeals to political solidarity seem perfectly obvious. The situation is the more provoking in that, when all is said and done, the central appeal of such work is the pretext it provides to disparage the natural sciences--to dismiss their astounding achievements as so much legerdemain on the part of a ruling elite. Would that we could--but we cannot--recommend practicable remedies for this situation that are also simple and fair. The best we can do, for the moment, is to bring our point of

A Schism in the Academy?

Emeritus professor of sociology Lewis S. Feur has recently written:

If multiculturalists succeed in acquiring control of the curriculum and if they then institute a kind of force conditioning of students with the "literatures" and ideological apologia for backward peoples, the consequence for the universities will be quite other than they foresee. Science students, with their essential preparatory studies growing all the time, will finally rebel against the "humanities" requirements, and for all practical purposes, the colleges of science will secede from their traditional association with the liberal arts college . . . The free marketplace of students and professors will, unless politically intimidated, decide for those institutions loyal to scientific values.⁶

Even if one judges Feuer's vision to be unduly pessimistic, it must be admitted that he has his finger on something. The mood he detects is real, if unfocused. The National Association of Scholars, antiradical if not in any simple way "conservative," may intend to exploit it.⁷ One of its principles seems to be that in campus disputes over "political correctness" and the like, among the things to be done is "get the scientists on your side."⁸

The immediate subjects of Feuer's ire--"multiculturalists"--have not under that description, received much attention from us, aside from our remarks concerning "Afrocentric" science. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that our subjects and his don't have a large overlap. Left wing critics of science such as Stanley Aronowitz, Sandra Harding, and Helen Longino salt their analyses heavily with appeals to the presumed superiority of "multicultural" epistemologies. If their views become part of the general intellectual baggage of the academic left, a process we believe is well advanced, then Feuer's scenario, or something resembling it, becomes very much more likely. Departments of chemistry or electrical engineering, other things being equal, have little to say, and will continue to have little to say, about the kind of "multiculturalism" that infuses the reading lists of courses on the modern novel with works by Third World women. If, however, the same academic factions are seen to be agitating for a similarly politicized view of science, one that draws heavily on the critiques we have analyzed above, academic life, already fractious, is likely to become considerably more belligerent. The chemists and engineers are quite likely to insist on a say about such agitation,

once it is their own courses, rather than the vague metaphors of a discipline, that are being proposed for purification or diversification.

On the whole, it is regrettable that serious students of the exact sciences rarely encounter, in their training, courses in the history of their disciplines that pay close attention to social, cultural, and political factors. Such knowledge is usually acquired ad hoc by those scientists who take a particular interest in it. But, as Feuer points out, the burden of essential preparatory studies is enormous, ant is continually growing. Time is precious to a young scientist, and the optimal career path leads to the frontier of the subject as quickly as possible, leaving little opportunity for historical rumination. Nevertheless, much as one might lament the rarity of historically oriented science courses (and we join in that lament), in our judgment their absence is, on the whole, preferable to a hypothetical curriculum that requires such courses but hands responsibility for them over to historians and sociologists whose views derive from the science critiques of the academic left. We should be very surprised if our opinion is not shared by the vast majority of our colleagues, including some whose political outlook is unequivocally egalitarian and feminist..

The humanities, as traditionally understood, are indispensable to our civilization and to the prospects of living a fulfilling life within it. The indispensability of professional academic humanists, on the other hand, is a less certain proposition. Academic scientists have acceded to it, and properly so, out of respect for their colleagues, as well as a deep concern that the real traditions of Western humanism should not be buried under the shabby detritus of popular culture and philistinism. The current stir over the postmodern style of humanist scholarship invokes the possibility that this body of sentiment may erode. Scientists are not the only skeptics, or even the most important ones; nor is such skepticism, we insist, necessarily a badge of right. wing leanings. Many of our wholeheartedly left liberal, humanist colleagues are increasingly embarrassed by the spectacle of flamboyant celebrities in their respective herds playing "such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep." How far things would have to go before the disenchantment becomes severe enough to provoke a genuine crisis in university life is anyone's guess. It is, however, obvious that to the extent that the various misconceptions about science we have examined become part of the general stew of postmodern assertions, the irritation of scientists will grow increasingly acute.

This tendency will be amplified because of the activism inspired, to a great degree, by left- wing antiscientism. In this regard, we might mention the raids on laboratories by animal rights extremists, the successful attempts to inhibit

funding of innocuous studies on the relation between heredity and sociopathic behavior and to close down scientific meetings on the subject, the assaults on evolutionary biologists for their advocacy of a not particularly doctrinaire sociobiological perspective, and the endless string of nuisance lawsuits brought by Jeremy Rifkin and his allies. All these actions have had the support, or at least the sympathy, of a substantial faction of the academic left. To most if not all scientists, however, they smack of the deepest anti- intellectualism. It would not be going too far to label them as superstitious outright. Yet they dovetail rather neatly with the emerging dogmas of the left concerning the innate fallibility of Western science.

Our speculations on the growing antipathy toward academic radicalism on the part of scientists are influenced by a certain sense of how the humanities and the arts enter into the actual lives of our scientific colleagues. On the whole, scientists are deeply cultured people, in the best and most honorable sense. The image of the scientific monomaniac, of science departments devoted to a "naive scientism,"⁹ is, to say the least, highly misleading. The range of knowledge of music, art, history, philosophy, and literature to be found in a random sample of scientists is, we know from long experience, extensive, and in some fortunate venues enormous. Most of this reaming has been acquired, of necessity, at odd moments here and there--not through formal or systematic study.  As humanists, therefore, scientists are autodidacts. One obvious consequence of this fact is to undercut the argument that traditional humanities departments, in their role as educators, are indispensable bearers of the great treasures of our cultural heritage. There are other, albeit less efficient, routes to erudition.

Let us be blunt: having come so far, we have little left to lose. If, taking a fanciful hypothesis, the humanities department of MIT (a bastion, by the way, of left wing rectitude) were to walk out in a huff, the scientific faculty could, at need and with enough released time, patch together a humanities curriculum, to be taught by the scientists themselves. It would have obvious gaps and rough spots, to be sure, and it might with some regularity prove inane; but on the whole it would be, we imagine, no worse than operative. What the opposite situation--a walkout by the scientists--would produce, as the humanities department tried to cope with the demand for science education, we leave to the reader's imagination. This little exercise in one upmanship is, of course, utter fantasy. But it does point to something real. The notion that scientists and engineers will always accept as axiomatic the competence and indispensability for higher education of humanists and social scientists is altogether too smug. Other sentiments are clearly astir.  How these matters play out in American intellectual life will depend, to some 

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degree, on the ability of the non-scientists to rein in the most grotesque tendencies in their respective fields.

We are not loath to propose that some, at least, of the "critiques of science" we have addressed must be counted among such grotesqueries. If they retain their current ascendancy among humanist radicals, it seems likely that the gap between C. P. Snow's "two cultures" will become a rigid barrier, maintained by mutual disesteem between scientists and their would-be critics. The sense of unity, of sharing in a common, though diverse, enterprise. will certainly diminish. The comity, the sense of mutual respect, that has been one of the graces of university life, compensating for its difficulties and penuries, will atrophy. At the same time, the tendency of the university to devolve into a cluster of rival satrapies, each eager to serve exclusively its own clientele, will be amplified. The thinning of the curriculum into a list of narrow, mutually incomprehensible specialties will be accelerated. Feuer's suggestion of a formal secession of the sciences from the radicalized world of no-longer-liberal arts may seem overblown. It would be premature, however, to rule it out.

The Debasement of Science Education

It is self evident that active and interested citizenship in this country, the frame of mind that follows public affairs and stands ready to participate to some degree in ongoing debates, requires a usable knowledge of science and technology--at the very least, a seat-of-the-pants ability to track disputes concerning science and public policy.. In a republic that counts Franklin and Jefferson among its founders, and whose culture heroes prominently include the participants in the Manhattan Project and the entrepreneurs who have endowed every desktop with its own computer, one might hope that such intellectual endowments would be commonplace, if not ubiquitous. All too obviously, this is not the case. Outside the community of professional scientists and engineers, understanding of even the most elementary science is thin and vague. Indeed, most of the population, including its iconic voices-- the television entertainers who comment on and not infrequently distort the news--seems to take a perverse pride in the self -abnegation "I'm no rocket scientist."¹⁰ The mass media have acquired a habit, deriving equally from fear and laziness, of presenting scientific matters in the most stripped-down terms; and they bail out in terror when any kind of nuance or subtlety threatens to intrude on the story. If scientists have acquired a quasi-sacredotal status in the popular imagination, it is not because they have pressed strongly for such recognition, but because so much of the population finds it more comfortable

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to declare itself awestruck than to acquire the knowledge that might dissipate the awe.

Like it or not, the responsibility for a remedy to this palpable and increasingly dangerous defect in the foundations of republican ex existence lies principally with the university. For all its failings, and despite its supposed economic decline relative to the other Western industrial powers, the United States remains unique in its ability to provide a large proportion of its young people with some kind of higher education. In the face of all just criticism of the race and gender biases of this society, the factt remains that a bright and energetic young person who is determined to get a college education can probably get one, no matter how "marginalized" or "disempowered" his or her social background. The campus culture not only shapes the maturation of most middle and upper class youth; it functions in a similar way for a large proportion of the "underclass"--at least those of its young people who manage to get through adolescence without major damage and with some hope left intact.

There is, however, an inevitable corollary to the praiseworthy demographics of American undergraduate education. The majority of students entering college are inadequately prepared for it across the board. In science and mathematics they are as a rule wretchedly prepared, so that undergraduate teaching responsibilities in the sciences involve a great deal of remedial work Even worse, many students in lower-level science courses are nor only ignorant of science but are ignorant as well of the fundamental frame of mind, the attitudes, the intellectual rhythms needed if one is to acquire useful knowledge. Thus, for better or worse, university scientists, as a body, have, in addition to their research goals and their duty to train new generations of scientific professionals, the responsibility of inculcating basic scientific literacy in enormous number of students who are unprepared, recalcitrant, and skeptical about the whole business. Superb teaching may overcome these obstacles; but excellence of that kind, like excellence of any kind, is rare and appears only fitfully in the population of college teachers.

In the face thereof we now confront the emergence of a new body of criticism of science, one that holds, when we get down to cases, that Western science is in fundamental ways blind or blinkered, that it is corrupted by its subtle bigotry and by its servile accommodation of power, that it is the artifact of a worldview liable, any day now, to be overthrown. The critics, by their stance, their language, ant the terms on which they engage the scientific views they criticize, offer another dispensation as well. They declare, in effect, that parallel, even superior ways of knowing--those of feminism or postmodernism or deep racial wisdom are available for the evaluation of scientific questions, and that from the heights of such alternative epis-

temologies the newly enlightened can discern the fundamental errors and weaknesses of traditional science--without troubling to become well informed about the substance and the inner logic of the scientific enterprise. Thus, with the aid of an unrelenting moralism that cloaks itself in political ant social virtue, a moralism seconded with reigning platitudes of activists and cowed, beleaguered college presidents alike, the critics enthrone a doctrine and a methodology for thinking about science that is at once scornful and ignorant.

We have been at pains to say why we think most of this is sheer puffery, and why the residue of genuine insights is negligibly small. Nevertheless, the odor of rectitude, as it is now defined in many areas of university life, can insulate a swarm of silly errors from criticism--indeed, it can silence the critics. Remarking on Robin Fox's critique of the extreme relativism prevalent among ethnographers and cultural anthropologists, Bernard Ortiz de Montellano has this to say:

I think that Fox is understating the amount of political correctness in certain fields. For example, the American Anthropological Association's last meeting had multiculturalism as a theme and ran a number of inane PC sessions on the topic. However, it rejected a session I proposed on "Multiculturalism and Pseudoanthropology." This session included the dean of Olmec and Maya studies and the only African-American Meso-American archaeologist, critiquing Ivan Van Sertima's idea that Nubians/Egyptians were here at the time of the Olmecs, which is received wisdom among African American circles . . . The foremost authority on Nubia was going to talk on "The Afrocentric Misuse of Nubia." Eugenie Scott . . . was going to give a case study of how multiculturalism is being used in the Berkeley schools; and I was going to give my talk on melanin. This problem is not just in anthropology. I have found extreme reluctance and avoidance of the topic of the Portland Baseline Essay and Afrocentric pseudoscience generally at the AAAS Education directorate . . . National Science Foundation Science Education, and even at the National Academy of Sciences Committee on National Science Standards. ¹¹

As we have noted, the criticism of science that we find so thin and unconvincing has been the making of a number of academic careers. To some degree at least, the attitudes it reflects and encourages have radiated into the general atmosphere of academic life. We encounter increasing numbers of students, graduate as well as undergraduate, whose primary contact with science has been through the work of feminist or cultural constructivist critics, and who

are convinced, moreover, that they have imbibed doctrines that are wise (as well as stylish). Even more sadly, we have run into bright and ambitious black students who have become emotionally committed to some of the most risible Afrocentric myths--those of the black Egyptian superscientists, for instance, or of white, government scientists having created HIV secretly, in the laboratory, as a tool for genocide. We know of mathematics departments where the most straightforward pedagogic housekeeping task--that of giving placement exams to insure that students are assigned courses commensurate with their background and ability--is complicated by the insufferable intervention of ideologues, who insist that such tests are inherently "culturally biased" or "gender biased, " an intervention whose probable consequence is to make life miserable for the poor undergraduates who are shoehorned, courtesy of their would be benefactors, into courses they aren't ready to handle.

At the level of primary or secondary education, where even in more halcyon times science education was often a stepchild, matters stand even worse The inanities of Afrocentric "science" now have free rein in a number of urban, predominantly black school districts Of course, simple charity urges us to see this as a desperate, if horridly ill- considered, response to a desperate educational and social situation; but that situation is not to be ameliorated by the teaching of nonsense. As Ortiz de Montellano points out, however, many professionals in science education, who should, presumably, see the danger of this situation and take action to defuse it, sit on their hands and even devise relativistic excuses for letting it continue and worsen. It is never easy to estimate how much of this nonresponse is due to ignorance of what is really going on and how much to simple cowardice.

Even more startling, however, is the attitude of school authorities in some upscale, politically "progressive" districts. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, reports (despite the apparent disapproval of the American Anthropological Association) that multicultural antiscientism fulminates in the progressive mecca of Berkeley, California.¹² According to Scott, some Berkeley textbook committees are now trying to bar history and social science books that assert (innocuously, one would think) that Native American populations arrived in this hemisphere from Asia toward the end of the last ice age. Native American myths, they point out, contain no such assertions; why, therefore, should the confabulations of scientists be privileged over the "narratives" that the indigenes tell about themselves? It is ironic that Scott, an anthropologist who has devoted her recent career to fighting the influence of presumably right-wing "scientific creationists," should now kind herself trying to ward off similarly appalling nonsense that is backed by a large faction of what now passes for the left. In

The Inanition of Public Discourse

If, as seems obvious, scientific and technical issues will become increasingly and urgently relevant to public policy in the decades ahead, how well will such matters be debated in this country? Obviously, we cannot hold high hopes. The historic record of American education in making the general public conversant with basic science has always been poor, except for a brief flurry of serious effort in the post Sputnik era. Superstition, whether about astrology, ancient astronauts, or alien abductions, has always had easy and profitable going. Fringe medicine and outright quackery, long endemic in American culture, have taken on new and ominous vigor, thanks in part to the dizzily rising costs and increasing impersonality of ordinary health care. The contrast between the incomparable virtuosity of professional American science and the general, public disregard of scientific substance, whether from complacency or hostility, grows ever more pronounced. It is one of the great social paradoxes of history.

Those on the left of the political spectrum are concerned, and rightly so, about the abridgment of democratic procedure and debate inherent in a system that delegates all responsibility for important policy matters to a technocratic elite. These misgivings are manifestations of a significant dilemma. How are such decisions to be made in a manner that takes serious and accurate account of technical and scientific matters without abrogating popular rule or reducing it to a mere symbol? Dozens of pressing issues, from AIDS to alternative energy sources, are complicated by this question. How do we permit a wide public to have a serious voice in such deliberations without inviting in gullibility, ignorance, and mere faddishness--without inviting in the PR operators? The easy answer, of course, is to educate the great mass of citizens in such away that thinking accurately about science is possible, if not quite second nature. The countervailing obstacle, however, is that wide spread ignorance of science in and of itself prevents the development of an educational system that could dispel it.

It is clear that many of the left wing thinkers whose ideas we find so unsatisfactory are, at bottom, obsessed by the same essential concern as the

one we are now trying to address. How do we democratize scientific and technological decision making? How do we give the heretofore powerless some measure of control over the decisions, technological and otherwise that so profoundly shape their lives? The unfortunate trajectory of academic radicalism has carried it to a position where this question is nor so much answered as dispelled by a fog of philosophical conceits. Andrew Ross, Sandra Harding, Simon Schaffer, Stanley Aronowitz, Carolyn Merchant--ever Jeremy Rifkin--are all, in their various ways, insisting that the mountain come to Mohammed. In this they are seconded by a squad of educational bureaucrats. Since science seems so difficult, so inaccessible and intimidating, when viewed on its own terms, the radical critics take the daring step of insisting that science can't be what it claims to be, no matter how well it backs up its claims with experiment and applied technology. Outwardly or covertly, they insist on supplanting standard science with other "ways of knowing" that, by their very nature, will be inclusive and welcoming. This is the true agendum of Harding's "strong objectivity," of Ross's insistence that New Agers and others on the far fringes of science will rally us against the omnivorous monster of technoculture.

The generosity of the democratic impulse when conjoined to this mode of thinking is instantly perverted to a kind of inverse intellectual snobbery, a form of coarse populism that is willing to exile the most stringent kinds of analytical thought and jettison the reliable devices of empiricism in the name of opening the doors of knowledge and driving the haughty priests of science from the temple. The theorizing done on behalf of this project is thus a species of incantation, a ritual rather than an argument. It does not conceive the need to examine science closely on the terms set by the logic of science because, in itself, that kind of examination would concede too much to the temperament and mind set of the scientist. It would require precisely the kind of education, or self education,  in the name of some kind of popular participation and empowerment, want desperately to prove superfluous.

A recent address by Carolyn Merchant gives voice to this sentiment in a fashion that reveals clearly the characteristic combination of earnest concern, wistfulness, and outright superciliousness that marks recent leftist criticism of science.¹⁴ Drawing upon the misleading characterizations of "chaos theory" that have controlled public consciousness of this topic, she further distorts those second hand characterizations in order to view it as a license to abandon the predictive strategies of science, to ignore "computers," in favor of a warm, cozy, inclusive discussion in which all voices--especially those of the formerly disempowered--will now have weight. Chaos theory, she reasons,

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 tells us that the predictive claims of science have been ill founded; so why not abandon, or at least demote them, in the name of communitarian solidarity and radical egalitarianism? Of course, Merchant's daydream ignores the simple reality that, popular images to the contrary, chaos theory as an actual science does not diminish the claims of science to provide accurate predictions, but rather enhances and extends them substantially. One would have guessed that a Berkeley professor, motivated to take an interest in such matters and having had scientific training, could easily have discovered the facts of the case--they are certainly readily available. But this would not have sorted well with the egalitarian and ultimately pastoral vision Merchant wants to vindicate. She seems to prefer a science that is unsure and a little bit helpless--it would be far more amenable to her ideology.

Back-door utopianism, so characteristic of academic-leftist critics of science, is a sad and, ultimately, a woefully impatient business. Behind it stands a Romantic discontent that echoes perilously certain sentiments that were once recognized as reactionary. How much it will add, in the end, to the burden of outright superstition and ignorance that has always plagued the American democratic experiment is difficult to say. It is plain, however, that the underlying disaffection is hostile to enlightenment as such, and not just to the Enlightenment. What is chiefly discouraging about its new ascendancy in academic life is the evidence it provides of a tradition of egalitarianism falling under the sway of obscurantism and muddle. We do not need to convict the paladins of the postmodern left of any particular superstitious foolishness, in the ordinary sense, to notice that they have an appalling tendency to condone such foolishness with a relativist nod and a deconstructionist wink.

Above all, the net effect of all this is to debase still further the already corrupt coinage of public debate. The damage wrought by denatured language is all too apparent. Public health officials struggle to gain the credibility that should rightfully be theirs, and have to fight continually to be heard over a hubbub of voices stridently denouncing the arrogance of Western scientific and materialist paradigms, and offering to replace them with "alternative modes of healing" that promise to make us better faster and cheaper than stodgy old M.D. 's. At the root of it all is an ancient amalgam of quackery and self-delusion, but now, the fashionable shibboleths of postmodern academic discourse have become available to array the old foolishness in up-to-date scholarly language. Discussion of environmental questions is now, at least to some degree, hostage to a rhetorical style and a technique of public relations in which unrelenting ecobabble plays an increasingly peremptory role. The locutions "environment friendly" and "environmentally sane" cover a broad

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range of styles and practices that, as we have seen, can be neither of those. This, too, ss a language fostered in large measure by the peculiar intellectual gamesmanship of the academic left, and it is as often as not employed for purely political purposes.

As we have seen, practical measures for making discussion of scientific issues effectively more democratic by what should be the straightforward process of extending scientific literacy ate continually subverted by the intrusion of "identity politics" into the pedagogy of science. In the case of "Afrocentric" science education, the phenomenon is nothing less than garish, although it remains strangely immune to criticism. It is clear that black youngsters who aspire to scientific careers will be in deep trouble if their early education is dominated by the Afrocentrism espoused by Ivan Van Sertima, Hunter Havelin Adams, and their co-workers.

The feminist critique of science is subtler and, superficially, less provocative in style; but it may, ultimately, have even more widely exclusionary results. Young women--or men, for that matter--who try to embark on scientific vocations with the explicit aim of reconstituting science along the lines advocated by Harding, or Haraway, or Keller, or Longino, are on a course leading, we submit, to frustration and disillusion. We are not imagining such young people: we encounter them regularly in our classes!

Science does not work the way the critics say it works, and the program of reforms mooted by the critics will turn it into something other, and less than, science. Enthusiastic recruits to the cause of "feminist" science will have to face this contradiction sooner or later--most likely sooner. They may then come to take the view, shared by most women scientists of our acquaintance, that feminism, whatever its strengths as a moral stance and a social program is not a methodology for doing science: it does not offer any privileged insights into scientific questions. That will be their victory. But if they attempt to hold fast to the most emphatic tenets of feminist dogma--for instance, Sandra Harding's assertion that "women" can't be "scientists" under the present order, because society constructs these as mutually exclusive categories , and thetefore that scientific practice must be reconstituted along radical-feminist lines before women can participate¹⁵--they will quickly find themselves effectively excluded from serious scientific work.

On the other hand, many women with scientific talent may not get even that far. They will be discouraged from the outset by the litany of the most prominent critics to the effect that science, as it is practiced, is innately antagonistic to women, that it reflects and embodies a system of' "patriarchal" domination and "violent" subordination of nature. Thus, to the degree that this sort of thing actually happens, feminism will find itself in the position of

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frustrating an original, legitimate, and honorable feminist goal: that of augmenting the proportion, as well as the absolute number, of women in science. We must also note that the left itself--not only the peculiar ideological tribe we have dubbed the "academic left," but the broader and deeper tradition of egalitarian social criticism that properly deserves such a designation--potentially, one of the ironic victims of the doctrinaire science criticism that has emerged, just as it has long been the victim of the worst kinds of Marxist, Leninist, and Stalinist cant. It is quite legitimate, for instance, to assert that socialist views, as such, have a place in the important debates about environmental questions. Without here endorsing--or rejecting--a socialist point of view, we appreciate that it exists, that it is distinguishable from alternative political visions, and that it has a certain force. The underlying argument is that free market capitalism, with its enthronement of profit ant its tendency to insulate crucial economic decisions from democratic oversight, is, in itself, an obstacle to changes we should make in our uses of technology if we are to develop sound environmental practices. In itself, this is a view that can be argued intelligently and that cannot simply be dismissed without specific, and historically informed, criticism. If, however, "eco- socialists" are forced to carry the ideological baggage of the academic left--the relativism of the social constructivists, the sophomoric skepticism of the postmodernists, the incipient Lysenkoism of feminist critics, the millenialism of the radical environmentalists, the racial chauvinism of the Afrocentrists--then they will, in effect, greatly accommodate their opponents, and facilitate the rapid dismissal of their own soundest points, since those will be embedded in a tissue of unscientific and antiscientific nonsense. Scientists, and the scientifically well informed, will simply not accept any form of "socialism" whose agenda include the subversion of legitimate science.

The Role of Scientists

If a jeremiad is to be more than a prolonged lament, it should, by custom, conclude with a call to arms, with a list of actions to be taken by people of goodwill. Thus are the diagnosed evils to be remedied and the disasters foreseen somehow avoided. Our list comes up, however, disconcertingly sparse; and the actions we can recommend are, on the whole, unheroic. We address ourselves chiefly to scientists, engineers, physicians, and other scientifically well informed people who arc members, by actual affiliation or by inclination, of the academic community. What ought they to do, as formal or informal educators, about the bizarre war against scientific thought and prac-

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tice being waged by the various ideological strands of the academic left?

Obviously--at least we hope that by now it's obvious--we are not calling for a purge of the institutions of higher learning in this country. We don't advocate supplanting one regime of "political correctness"" by another, even more odiously high handed one. Having made that disclaimer, however, we can in good conscience urge that certain forms of vigilance are appropriate, troublesome as they may be to preoccupied teachers and scholars. First and most important is the necessity of seeing to it that whatever is labeled as "science education" in our colleges and universities deserves that designation. Science courses must teach science. It's as simple as that. They should have substantive scientific content, validated by perfectly well-known and legitimate modes of scientific inference. As educators, scarred in battle and wearing a few tarnished medals, we have experience of the attempts to label shaky theorizing and tendentious quibbling as "science" for the sake of introducing it into the curriculum.

"Creation science" is an example that most of us are familiar with, although institutions of higher education (outside of sectarian colleges of dubious legitimacy) were rarely the targets of that campaign. We have also the example of various New Age confections peddled at some community colleges and in extension programs, under the pretext that they represent "science" of some kind. But the influence of the academic left is of a different kind, since it is seconded by the support, often enthusiastic, of many established senior members of the academic community. To dare, it has merely nibbled at the fringes of the "hard" sciences, although, as we have seen, such heretofore honorable fields as anthropology and psychology have been gravely contaminated. We cannot help feeling, however, that there will be many more calls for "feminist" courses in biology and "Afrocentric" courses in mathematics. How much force such campaigns will have is hard to predict. In any event scientists and science educators must, on their professional honor, be prepared to resist the insertion into the science curriculum of courses whose content is tailored to the demands of any ideological faction. It will be alleged, of course, that conventional science, like all knowledge, is inevitably "ideological," and that the proposed "reforms" are therefore just as legitimate and considerably more self aware than the traditional kinds of scientific education. This contention is, however, simply wrong, as we hope we have at least suggested: in fact, we think it comes very near to being nonsense. Scientists ought to reject it out of hand. This is not really a matter that demands intellectual acuity--the theories of the left-academic critics are not, on the intellectual plane, particularly intimidating. Rather, it is a question of not letting one's social ideals, which may well find much to admire in

In our experience, scientists who try to engage the radical critics of science in direct debate are in for a frustrating time of it. This is not because their foes are expert rhetoricians. In fact the critics of science are decidedly reluctant to contend with actual scientists in the flesh. They prefer a hermetic, self referential atmosphere for the promulgation of their ideas; often they appear to regard the presence of well informed scientists, unless invited for specific "technical" contributions, as intrusive. This is a characteristic of the sectarian mentality: it usually implies a skittishness on the part of the critics, one that may derive from inward knowledge that their theories rest as much on wishful thinking as on learning. In any case scientists oughtn't to be reluctant to stick their two cents in. They should insist--always within the bounds of courtesy, of course--on being included in debates and presentations that center on science and the relations between science and culture. If they are nevertheless excluded, as will sometimes happen, they should be prepared to make a bit of noise about it. They will be on very firm ground in today's academy, where few proceedings are allowed to proceed without proper repre-

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sensation of the affected class, and where noise is no longer taken, as it used to be, as evidence of an unfortunate class origin.

We realize, of course, that the greatest disincentive to participation in such controversies is the time and effort it takes, costs that will add greatly to the burden of sustaining a serious research program and meeting one's instructional and professional responsibilities. Intellectually, these quarrels tend to be tiresome. Nature is the scientist's worthy adversary (we use the figure in defiance of the fact that science critics will sniff out as evidence that we are slaves to the Western patriarchal paradigm of dominance and control) Academic leftists, on the other hand, tend to be unfocused bores, and a certain deliberate, cheerful simple mindedness is needed to hear them out sufficiently to catch the drift of the arguments and to formulate an apposite response. It is an unlikable chore, but one that a good many of us ought to be doing, out of loyalty to our own disciplines and to--forgive the pretentious ness of the word--civilization.

Finally, there is the unpleasant, but serious, question of careerism, which, conjoined to ideological enthusiasm, has been responsible for much of the misbegotten scholarship we have considered. It has been traditional, in the academy, for the humanists to let the scientists do their own hiring firing and promotion, and for the scientists to reciprocate. If representatives from one camp are obliged by local custom to rule on the other's actions in such matters (as in the case of tenure committees), they usually assent pro forma without making any inquiries beyond the superficial ones, for example, to ascertain that the letters of recommendation and so forth are adequately fulsome or lack, at least, the hint of bones rattling in closets. The proliferation of would be science critics and epistemologists among left wing humanists raises serious questions about this cozy arrangement. If an aspiring scholar is to be judged on work affecting to make deep pronouncements on questions of science, scientific methodology, history of science, or the very legitimacies of science, it strikes us that scientists should have some say in evaluating it. This holds even if the candidate resides academically in the English department or the art department or the sociology department. It will be objected that scientists, as a hermetic, self protective guild, ought not to sit in judgment of those who are studying them. But academic leftists, postmodernists, deconstructionists, and the like have their own self protective guilds, and experience shows that they are not at all reluctant to rally round their own. Elementary fairness requires that a broader spectrum of opinion should be brought into the process. If an assistant professor of English is to stake his bid for tenure on work that, for example, purports to analyze quantum mechanics

It will be argued immediately that this is an asymmetric, and therefore inequitable, proposition. If physicists are to judge scholars of English, why shouldn't English professors judge physicists? The fallacy here is that the asymmetry originates from the pretensions, legitimate or otherwise, of members of the English (or sociology or cultural studies or women's studies or African American studies) department to qualification on scientific questions. If, say, a member of the mathematics department were to engage in the (most unlikely) scholarly project of analyzing the rhetorical and stylistic elements of certain mathematics papers, it would be entirely legitimate for literary scholars to pronounce judgment on the work, and for the promotion process to take that judgment fully into account. To put it bluntly, it is humanists of the academic left who have transgressed the boundaries--as they are eager in most circumstances to proclaim. That's their privilege; but they are not (or should not be) exempt from customs duties!

Finally, there is the question of reconquering lost territory for the scientific approach. As we have noted, some fields, long recognized as scientific in principle, have fallen victim to antiscientific relativism. Anthropology is one example; other partial examples could be found within psychology and sociology. Plainly, there is no direct way to enjoin our counterparts in these fields to abandon the pleasures of subjective narrativity for the fuddy-duddy rigors of empirical and statistical research. Still, "hard" scientists should find someway of supporting those of their colleagues in these areas who are willing to honor the principle that the right to make knowledge claims, in a university, has to be earned by the methodologically sound sweat of one's brow. It's fine to argue about competing methodologies; it is not fine to congratulate oneself
on having abandoned method.

We must conclude on a note of melancholy. At this point in history, for anyone who has read it honestly, the status of science as a reliable, profound, and productive source of knowledge ought to be beyond serious question.  That vague but grandiloquent challenges nevertheless recur incessantly remains, after all our attempts to understand, a source of sad perplexity. That many of these challenges now issue from a community that consists, regardless of ideology, of people who have presumably enjoyed a first class education

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and who have, all their adult lives, played a central role in the larger intellectual world deepens our misgivings. We would have been much happier if this book had been unnecessary. We may be misguided; we may have made mistakes; our erudition may be more deficient than we already know; but we are not dishonest. Honestly, then, we care deeply about our students, and honestly we treasure that collegial life of the mind which no external insult--not of age nor loss nor straitened circumstances--has in our time been able to diminish. For us to believe that a book of this kind is needed means at very least that, in making our inquiries and absorbing a large and distressing literature, we have had to abandon the complacent feeling that the republic of intellectual inquiry is secure from internal decay.

Finally, and with an ironic nod to Andrew Ross, we would like to acknowledge with deepest gratitude the gifts of all the science teachers we have had throughout our lives. That includes colleagues, senior and junior, and most important, some of our students. This book could nor have been conceived let alone written, without them.

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Supplementary Note

The literature with which we are concerned is large and scattered. New items, and older ones of which we have become aware too late for mention in the text, continue to demand our attention. We feel obliged to take note of a few samples here. In the following paragraphs, number in square brackets refer to relevant pages of this book. Sources are identified in the supplementary list at the end of the references.

Andrew Ross [89-92] (now at New York University) has added to his bibliography on science with "The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life" ( 1993 ), a tantrum in the form of an essay that denounces science in general and genetics in particular. There is the predictable scourging of E. O. Wilson's sociobiological thought as some kind of capitalist patriarchalist conspiracy. We note, with some puzzlement, however, that Ross, through ignorance or unkindness, fails to credit Wilson's well-known and effective efforts on behalf of biodiversity, a cause that seems close to Ross's heart.

Meredith F. Small has just published Female Choices, a celebration of the bonobo that enlarges to book length her claim that this primate can and should serve our species as a nonsexist role model [1-25]. A brief, caustic review, "Oh, Those Bonobos!" by the biologist and feminist Helena Cronin, has appeared in the New York Times.

Freeman Dyson's recent article, "Science In Trouble," includes acute remarks on the obstacles put in the way of a safe and beneficial biotechnology by Jeremy Rifkin's endless scream of environmentalist lawsuits [170].

The postmodern sage Avltai Ronell has joined the list of thinkers who view AIDS as a product of the corrupt metaphysics of Western post Enlightenment discourse with "A Note on the Failure of Man's Custodianship." Sample sentences from this effusion: "The co-factors that have produced the destruction of internal self defense capabilities still need to be studied in a mood of Nietzschean defiance toward the metaphysico-scientific establishment. For surely AIDS is concert with the homologous aggression that is widely carried out against the weak within the ensemble of political, cultural, and medical procedures. It is not far fetched to observe that these procedures take comparable measure to destroy any living, menacing reactivity, and thus have to be considered precisely in terms of the disconcerting reciprocity of their ensemble" [60]. Ronell easily outshines, in sheer loopiness, the examples [191-93] to which our readers have already been introduced.

As to "medical procedures, " we are saddened to discover that one source of instruction for undergraduates in the history and practice of obstetrics is Alexandra Dundas Todd's Intimate Adversaries, the burden of which is that male physicians have turned the natural, healthy process of childbirth into a disease and that their destructive (to women) contribution, rooted in (patriarchal) science, should never have replaced midwifery. There is, of course, no serious discussion in this airy volume of such matters

as puerperal fever, infection, eclampsia, and the like, nor of the role of twentieth-century male physicians in the advocacy of "natural" childbirth. This book is a prototype of what happens when social-scientific disciplines (here sociology and anthropology) are recruited wholly to the service of an uncompromising sexual politics.

Among a number of comprehensive refutations of the strong form of cultural contructivism (as regards natural science) are several impressive recent books.  Steven Weinberg's new Dreams of a Final Theory contains devastating remarks on the culturral constructivist theory of scientific knowledge [42-70] (Weinberg, 184-90). We note with amusement that he, too, found the post-World War II cargo cults pertinent to his analysis [40-41]. Sociologist Stephen Cole provides a detailed refutation in Making Science; and Scrutinizing Science, a recently reprinted compendium of papers edited by Arthur Donovan, Larry Laudan, and Rachel Laudan on the philosophy and history of science, is a rich resource for those interested in empirical efforts to test major post-positivist claims on guiding principles ("paradigms") and theory choice.