Benighted elite: postmodernist critics of science get their comeuppance.

• Author: Olson, Walter

Some Navajo schoolchildren, like many other children, have trouble in math class. According to an article published in a leading journal for mathematics educators, one reason may be that "the Western world developed the notion of fractions and decimals out of a need to divide or segment a whole. The Navajo world view consistently appears not to segment the whole of an entity." Teachers in the rural Southwest might therefore want to begin with concepts more "naturally compatible with Navajo spatial knowledge," such as "non-Euclidean geometry, motion theories, and/or fundamentals of calculus," and de-emphasize or postpone "segmentation...into smaller parts."

One of the many high points of the essay collection A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodern Myths About Science (Oxford University Press) is watching the volume's editor, Indiana University philosopher of science Noretta Koertge, struggle to keep her patience as she apprises readers of such developments. The notion of teaching calculus before fractions is "quite astounding," writes Koertge, for reasons that begin with the difficulty of expressing the slope of a line, one of the fundamentals of calculus, in any way other than by using a fraction or decimal. And while well-meaning teachers puzzle out such difficulties, Navajo children are presumably supposed to grow up without learning how to compute sales tax.

The notion of a special "Navajo way of knowing," assuredly more spiritual and holistic than European ways, is just one of an array of by-now-familiar "standpoint epistemologies" associated with the idea that, as Koertge puts it, claims of fact "are always to be understood as a product of the culture, gender, ethnicity, [or] class of the observer who made them." Aside from Afrocentrism, there are such developments as "female-friendly science," some of whose supporters have proposed starting out girls in physics class on the study of wave phenomena or fluid mechanics, which they might find more congenial than the motions of "those darned old rigid bodies." (The phrase is Koertge's; in the 1994 book Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales From the Strange World of Women's Studies, she and co-author Daphne Patai brought to light many similar follies). Most widespread of all such doctrines is postmodernism, which treats assertions of scientific fact as indeterminate texts constructed by readers. All these various streams converge to form the body of work known as the "new sociology of science," a.k.a. Science and Technology Studies (STS) or simply Science Studies, brought to many readers' notice for the first time in Paul Gross and Norman Levitt's 1994 expose Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Gross and Levitt's polemic against "hermeneutic hootchy-koo" is so spirited that you might consider it overdrawn, until you check out what leaders of Science...