The Opening Phase of the Science Wars

Kuhn’s monograph fed into the broad antiestablishment spirit of the 1960s and elicited polar-opposite responses, from the defense of objectivity and realism within scientific knowledge to an enthusiastic embrace of the view of scientific knowledge as ineluctably subjective interpretations of experience. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend aggressively attacked the rationality of scientific reasoning and eventually rationality itself. Kuhn’s new image of science fed into the emerging postmodernist critique of reason and truth as rhetorical devices wielded for political ends. Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” swept the humanities and social sciences, concluding that there could not be a single correct meaning of any text, including scientists’ “reading” of the “book” of nature. Concurrently, philosophers of science, among them Israel Scheffler, Imre Lakatos, and Karl Popper, began a counterattack against Kuhn, defending the rationality and objectivity of scientific knowledge and reason generally.