Taking Sides

From the 1970s on, the treatment of modern science as simultaneously an induction-based account of experience and a deduction-based account of reality became an increasingly contentious issue in the academic world. A great deal was at stake in how one answered the question of whether scientific knowledge was objective and validated by its correspondence with reality. Respect and privileged social status were accorded to science, not to mention public support for research. At the same time, however, scientists faced the more fundamental question of whether there existed a neutral arbiter of questions relating to truth, or at least truths about the world. Philosophers and social scientists lined up on both sides of this issue, either attacking scientific knowledge as a socially constructed belief system or defending it as objective and correlated with reality.