Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science.

• Author: Dembart, Lee

DO WE DISCOVER THE WORLD, OR DO we invent it?

Or, put another way, is there a difference between Newton and Shakespeare? We think that if Shakespeare had never lived, no one else would have written Hamlet. But if Newton had never lived, the law of gravity would still apply.

These seemingly simple questions touch the core of a fundamental and on-going fight over the very nature of truth that is being slugged out in universities, think tanks, and political arenas around the globe. This debate pits modernists against postmodernists. In this context, modernity refers to the idea, often associated with the likes of Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton, that reason and systematic observation should be preferred over tradition and dogmatic authority.

As children of the Enlightenment's drive for scientific knowledge and analysis, modernists claim that we discover the world. It is out there, separate from us and independent of our minds and wishes. Using our intelligence, we can learn about the world, but we are essentially passive observers of it. The laws of physics are external and objective, universal and socially neutral, true at all times and all places. In this "scientific" world view, the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence with observable evidence and its ability to predict future results. Truth is public.

But postmodernists, who rule much of the academy and many of today's political movements, believe in "the social construction of reality," meaning that all knowledge--even physics--is a cultural phenomenon, inextricable from human biases and desires. This view dismisses the very idea of objectivity and argues not just that we can never know what objective reality is but that no such thing exists. Some feminist scholars, for example, contend that "objectivity, rationality, and the scientific method are constructs that validate self-serving ideas of hierarchy and dominance by which mostly male scientists distance themselves from nature in an attempt to dominate and exploit it. In the postmodernist world view, truth is private and local, and there are fundamentally different truths perceived by blacks, by women, by gays and lesbians, and by other oppressed minorities. The standard of truth is not external but internal, and the central question is not "What is out there?" but "Who is speaking?"

Alan Cromer, a physicist at Northeastern University, jumps into this brawl with an impassioned, heavyweight defense of science...