Post-Modernism, Social Constructionism, and the Science Wars

Abstract

Any overview of the philosophy of science would not be complete without covering these recent views as they have received a lot of attention in the past few decades. Many of these views are quite controversial on a number of dimensions—sometimes the criticism is that these views are meaningless or at a minimum obscurantist (see the so-called Sokal affair that will be discussed below); sometimes the claim is that they are unfairly and unduly incendiary—for example, a prominent feminist critic of science Harding (1986) has called Newton’s classic Principia “a rape manual” because “science is the male rape of female nature”; and of course sometimes the criticism is simply that they are wrong.