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Article: You can't follow the science wars without a battle map.
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- December 13, 1997
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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SCHOLARLY argument comes in two varieties. In one sort, scholars use wisdom, learning and high ideals to fortify to the citadel of truth. In the other kind, they turn those same skills to raising their own exclusive fortresses, from where they rain down erudition and abuse on one another. As the name suggests, the "science wars" belong mostly to the second sort.
Though the science wars had burst on the university world years earlier, the event that brought them to public notice was the publication in May 1996 of an article by Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University, in an American cultural-studies discussion journal, Social Text. It argued that unifying the ...