I didn’t really think about it much then, but when I was growing up Newsweek and Time magazines were very important to me. They were little windows to the world outside of my rural New England town, and they arrived directly to my mailbox. I wasn’t devoted to them necessarily, though I would usually, at the least, skim them through. And I would be surprised if Sharon Begley’s article “The Science Wars: The Politics of Objectivity” from the April 21, 1997 issue of Newsweek didn’t catch my attention. The accompanying picture was probably engaging enough. It is of a slight, older gentleman in a white lab coat with half of his mouth, one ear, and one eye being covered up by white-gloved hands reaching in from outside the frame. The proverbial question seemed to be whether natural scientists should engage their post-structuralist critics (i.e., theorists at the time who were actively questioning the possibility of scientific truth), or if they should simply hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. I like to think thirteen-year-old Jordan would have read it, though that week’s cover story was “Does it matter what you weigh? The surprising new facts about fat,” so maybe that issue was one I did completely miss.
Reading (re-reading?) the article a quarter century later in preparation for writing this blog post, it is striking how accurate Begley’s analysis remains. While there may be a bit too much hyperbole, and too little investigation into what makes up “the scientific method,” it nevertheless seems that Begley painted some truthful, nuanced, approachable, broad strokes. She mentions but does not dwell on the alarmingly impractical claims made by some post-structuralists, for example that Newton’s Principia is “a rape manual”[1]; notes the many historical instances in which scientific “objectivity” has been bent to serve racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression; and provides a refreshingly concise review of the Sokol hoax – in which a physics professor published an article in a prominent cultural studies journal that he later revealed to be nonsense designed to appeal to and dupe the post-structural scholars on the journal’s board. Mainly, she spends the bulk of the article arguing that, more often than scientists care to admit, “values rather than facts inflect research. Nevertheless… (scientists) are still measuring something real” (p. 57).
This is a tension, one between how natural science is one of the best resources we have for explaining our interactions with the “real” world and the ways natural science is and will always be the creation of cultural, political, gendered, and otherwise fallible human beings, that has occupied a great deal of academic work (e.g. Daston & Galison 2007; Dewey, 1925; Du Bois, 2014; Steinmetz, 2005), including my own (e.g. Besek, 2019; Besek, Clark, and Greiner, 2021; Porcelli & Besek, 2022). For, as Tim Clark argued in a recent blog post in this series (hyperlink when published), while we need to do a better job of listening to the science, our belief that science is “real” cannot overshadow the ways in which “scientific jargon and research can become co-opted by politically powerful forces.” So, the question then becomes: How do we thread this needle? How can we best steer our thinking between the Scylla of naïve notions of scientific objectivity and the Charybdis of cultural determinism?
One of the best resources for engaging this struggle was actually published in the same issue of the same journal in which Sokol published his famous hoax. The “spring/summer” 1996 issue of Social Text has quite a few pieces that are not hoaxes and certainly worth reading. Though the one I return to over and over is Richard Levins’, “Ten Propositions on Science and AntiScience” (1996).
While I cannot be sure that Levins did not spend his nascent years reading Newsweek and Time, I do know that he grew up in a very politically and scientifically engaged Brooklyn household, was blacklisted after his graduation from Cornell, became an anti-war radical tropical farmer in Puerto Rico, then (after skipping ahead in his biography a bit) his specifically Marxist embrace of contradiction and process changed the way we think about population genetics (1968). He later became a fierce critic of sociobiology (Lewontin and Levins 1997), and, with Richard Lewontin, wrote one of the most influential collections on biology and the philosophy science of the twentieth century, The Dialectical Biologist (1984).
Much of Levins’ biography is apparent in “Ten Propositions,” which amounts to an openhearted, lucid take on the science wars. Without saying so directly, he spends the piece distilling the benefits (and blunders) of both sides in this “war,” letting his empathy and humility take center-stage. He demonstrates that, once we forego deterministic characterizations of one another’s work, we can appreciate the ways in which post-structuralists and natural scientists can each help us to grasp both the power and limits of scientific knowledge. The key is actually to let go of determinism all together and embrace the ways in which process, contingency, and change are essential to every part of science, a fact that does not lessen the value of natural science but deepens it.
For instance, like most post-structural critics, Levins treats folk and other forms of traditional knowledge with as much respect as he does western natural science. He emphasizes that every form of knowledge – whether it be traditional knowledge, western scientific, or something else – has common foundations. They all come from a combination of experience and previous knowledge, are all contextual (i.e. each comes from a specific place, time, and population), and are all potentially false. Western natural science and, say, Afro-American herbal medicine are no different in this regard. Indeed, these two ways of knowing are not as separate as might be assumed. There is little doubt that some aspects of Western medicine are derived from Afro-American herbal medicine, which is itself likely in-part borrowed from indigenous American healing techniques. Moreover, we should not rule out the possibility that Afro-American herbal medicine can be more beneficial than western pharmaceutical solutions in some cases, just as traditional land-use techniques are likely more sustainable in the long run than our dominant agriculture with its reliance on chemical fertilizer technology.
Yet, unlike many post-structural critics, Levins refuses to elide natural science with other forms of knowing. He argues that natural science is special. Though what makes it special is not that it is “objective” or follows any universal “scientific method.” It instead has to do with the social processes through which it is produced. The sheer number of efficient socio-technological resources that we have and continue to put towards science, combined with a well-organized tradition of valuing critical reflection, is the social foundation of its tremendous problem-solving power.
We should be mindful, however, that our successes do not automatically render claims of natural science “true.” Indeed, unbridled belief in scientific and technical dominance is rarely a good thing. “(M)ajor technical efforts based on science have been shown to lead to disastrous outcomes,” Levins writes, “pesticides increase pests; hospitals are foci of infection; antibiotics give rise to new pathogens; flood control increases flood damage; and economic development increases poverty… Error is intrinsic to actually existing science. The present has no unique epistemological status, we just happen to be living in it.” (102)
So, again, how can we best navigate between the ability of natural science to explain and manipulate the “real” world and the cultural, political, error-prone human action at the foundation of natural science? To answer this question, I usually turn to Levins’ fifth proposition; “Science has a dual nature” (103).
The first thing is to remember to always take the dual nature of science – its explanatory power as well as its very human foundations – into account. Science will always reflect the social conditions of production, from the agendas of its owners to the time and place it was created to the technologies and strategies then available for researchers to much else. We should therefore be weary of ideas that accept our own time, place, economies, and culture as “natural,” for these conditions change.
Nevertheless, to insist that natural science is a product of fallible, error-prone, human beings is not to insist that science is arbitrary. If we put too much stress on the culture-boundedness of science, we ignore “the common features of Babylonian, Mayan, Chinese, and British astronomies and their calendars. Each comes from a different cultural context but looks at (more or less) the same sky” (104). We all share a world that we can know a great deal about. Moreover, over-emphasizing the cultural context of western natural science often leads us to ignore the ways that non-western cultures also have their own unique cultural contexts, how their ways of knowing could be disastrously wrong, how they are also fallible, error-prone, human beings. Ultimately, while culture must be incorporated, any position that focuses on culture alone will ignore the fact that natural science is perhaps our greatest intellectual resource. For, as Begley says, even though sometimes “values rather than facts inflect research… (scientists) are still measuring something real” (57).
If we are to properly analyze an aspect of scientific knowledge – whether we are an environmental sociologist interested in incorporated some recent work on biodiversity loss, a marine biologist reviewing an exciting National Science Foundation grant, or are just interested in knowing more about a particular scientific problem – our basic task is to understand how that knowledge was produced. What were the social and technological conditions through which this science is being created, and how do they affect the questions being asked and/or the methods and technologies used? If these conditions were different would it impact the claims being made? Are the researchers cognizant of their own intellectual context, environmental context, cultural context, and political context? Are they aware, in other words, of their own material and social histories? Analyzing science is all about developing the sensitivity to incorporate the power and limits inherent in various conditions of production.
Levins ends “ten propositions” by insisting that if proper analyses of science must incorporate the conditions of its production, analyses must also demand that those conditions are expanded. “The optimal condition for science is with one foot in the university and one in the communities of struggle, so that we have both the richness and complexity of theory coming from the particular and the comparative view and generalizations that only some distance from the particular can provide.” (111) This also means combating the competitive individualism of science, the commodification of science, and the use of science as a means of control. In turn, this means celebrating collaboration, open-use, and the spontaneity of our contradictory world. I could not agree more.
Notes
As a brief postscript I would like to thank Tim Clark for inviting me to contribute to this blog series, one I have found immensely rewarding. I would also like to thank Apollonya Porcelli and the Ocean Nexus network for their support.
References
Begley, S. 1997. The Science Wars: The Politics of Objectivity. Newsweek April 21 Issue: 54-57.
Besek, Jordan. 2019. “Invasive Uncertainties: Environmental Change and the Politics of Limited Science.” Environmental Sociology 5(4):1–12.
Besek, Jordan Fox, Patrick Greiner, and Brett Clark. 2021. “W.E.B. Du Bois and Interdisciplinarity: A Comprehensive Understanding the Scholar’s Approach to Natural Science.” Journal of Classical Sociology 21(2):144–64.
Bois, W. E. B. Du. 2014 (1940). Dusk of Dawn: Towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Oxford University Press.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Princeton University Press.
Dewey, John. 1925. Experience and Nature. Chicago: Open Court.
Harding, Sandra. 1987. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press:
Harding, Sandra. 1998. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. Bloomington. Indiana University Press.
Harding, Sandra. 1998. “Two Influential Theories of Ignorance and Philosophy’s Interests in Ignoring Them.” Hypatia.
Harding, Sandra. 2008. Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press.
Levins, Richard. 1968. Evolution in Changing Environments: Some Theoretical Explorations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Levins, Richard. 1996. “Ten Propositions on Science and Antiscience.” Social Text 46/47:101-11.
Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin. 1984. The Dialectical Biologist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lewontin, Richard, and Richard Levins. 1997. “The Biological and the Social.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 8(3):89–92.
Porcelli, Apollonya, and Jordan Fox Besek. 2021. “Sub Disciplining Science in Sociology Bridges and Barriers between Environmental STS and Environmental Sociology.” Environmental Sociology 1–12.
Steinmetz, George (Ed.). 2005. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others.Durham: Duke University Press.
[1] Made by Sandra Harding (1987, p. 113). I should note that Harding has since stated she regretted the statement, as well as the fact that Harding’s work since contains much depth and sophistication (e.g. 1998; 2008).