Science Wars

Abstract What do scientists actually know and what do they know about? Answers to these questions are crucial not only for our understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, but also for the formulation of effective science-based public policies, from global warming and energy to biotechnology and nanoscience. There is a lack of convincing answers to these questions because of an illogical conflation within modern science of epistemology and ontology, seeking to transcend experience and produce knowledge of reality using experience itself. Attempts at explaining the nature of scientific knowledge from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries reveal that scientific reasoning has selectively employed deduction and induction, rationalism and empiricism, the universal and the particular, and necessity and contingency as if these opposites were compatible. As Thomas Kuhn showed, the history of science belies the definitive truth of ontological claims deduced from theories and, as a corollary, the definitive truth of theories themselves. Science Wars reviews the competing conceptions of scientific knowledge from Plato and Aristotle in the fourth century bce to the “science wars” of the 1990s and provides thought-provoking analyses for understanding scientific thought in the twenty-first century.