109. "Science Wars"

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If there's one thing outsiders have learned about that dust-up in universities called "the science wars" — you remember, postmodernists versus scientists, Stanley Fish, the Sokal Hoax — it's that studying it is a high-risk operation. You know that this kind of conflict is going to break out again, you suspect it's fundamental, you feel you ought to understand it, then you get into it and the dust is so thick you lose any track you thought you were on. You waste hours, days.

Well, let me, as a frequent loser of tracks, tell you how to save time reading the people — postmodernists, scientists, philosophers of science, poets, general humanists, whatever — who might be attacking or defending a position in this war, or any future one.

First: don't read further in any author who uses the word "science" without meaning "product-testing." No, I don't mean torturing rabbits with your cosmetic to make sure it doesn't irritate humans. By product I mean what a scientist comes up with — article, proof, talk at a conference, scheme in a book — as an addition to or correction of what's known. It's what's out there for testing. I choose the word "product" to keep what's out there distinct from what got it there, the process.

This is a heads-or-tails distinction. If you don't believe that go to a conference of mathematicians, our model scientists. Try to imagine anything — sickness, low income, grinding oppression, pathetic dress — that will excuse a leaking proof. It's the testing of the product, and only the product, that gives meaning, the operative meaning, the one that has to be dealt with in the world, to the word "science." And it's the one that, perhaps because it's fatal to any attempt to displace science downward, is most commonly ignored. If your author ignores it, drop him. He's not going to say anything useful about science.

Second tip, for those whose author keeps them reading: stop when you find that the author fails to put his own favorite concepts — like paradigms, or vocabularies, or any other large, all-embracing idea — on the testing ground. That author has denied that science is an open-ended discipline, one with no boundaries, no limits, no categories safe from test — all that let us say that scientists were engaged in "a self-correcting enterprise." Unless your author quickly steps in and explains how he's redefining "science," drop him.

Now for those who hate the slightest waste of time a third, riskier, tip: look for the first signs of anything resembling creationism. Read an argument for intelligent design and you hear in the end, "See, there is room for God." In between there will be moves to get anything that crowds God out (the particulars of belief, the details in Scripture, the things people really want to believe in) off the testing ground.  The author wants to move the whole mass toward abstraction.  For a quick exit from the whole thing listen for the first "See, there is room for..."  But listen closely. We want there to be room for mystery, room for poetry, room for dreams, room for psychoanalysis, room for anger and pity.  The author is taking advantage of that desire in order to make room for garbage.  His first moves will look very much like the legitimate ones.  It will be difficult but if you can detect in them an interest in God, even the faintest, you can save yourself a ton of garbage.