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The Two Cultures

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The Two Cultures Introduction.......................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Two Cultures .................................................................................................................. 10 Snow the scientist, Leavis the literary critic......................................................................................... 12 Moralizing science.............................................................................................................................. 14 Neglect-of-science and the History of Science..................................................................................... 16 Envisioning a polarity......................................................................................................................... 18 Snow’s scientism............................................................................................................................ 21 Internationalization......................................................................................................................... 23 From thesis to debate – against Leavis ................................................................................................ 24 Concluding the debate inconclusively ................................................................................................. 30 Chapter 2: The Science Wars .................................................................................................................. 34 Who was fighting whom? ................................................................................................................... 37 Border Skirmishes .......................................................................................................................... 37 The wars continue…....................................................................................................................... 39 Seeking truce.................................................................................................................................. 43 Culture Wars, Cold Wars, Science Wars.......................................................................................... 50 The structure of the debate.................................................................................................................. 51 A basic opposition .......................................................................................................................... 52 Analyzing the terms........................................................................................................................ 55 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 59 Chapter 3: The Two Debates in comparison ............................................................................................ 62 How much has changed in the interval? .............................................................................................. 64 “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”................................................. 70 Structural Comparison........................................................................................................................ 72 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 77 Appendix A: The Two Cultures Revisited in print.................................................................................. 78 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 81 Benjamin R. Cohen Introduction 1 Introduction [T]he sciences are confined to certain and prescribed authors…imposed upon the old and instilled into the young so that now...authority is taken for truth, not truth for authority. --Francis Bacon (1620) [T]he bitterest clashes [between rival types of knowledge] have been concerned with the precise line which marks the frontier between their territories. Those who have made large claims for non-scientific knowledge have been accused by their adversaries of irrationalism and obscurantism, of the deliberate rejection, in favor of the emotions or blind prejudice, of reliable public standards of ascertainable truth; and have, in their turn, charged their opponents, the ambitious champions of science, with making absurd claims, promising the impossible, issuing false prospectuses, undertaking to explain history or the arts or the states of the individual soul (and to change them too) when quite plainly they do not begin to understand what they are… because they will not, being vain and headstrong, admit that too many factors in too many situations are always unknown, and not discoverable by the methods of natural science. -- Isaiah Berlin (1953) Considered more closely, it is evident that today's 'science wars' were begun by self- anointed paladins of science with the purpose of preventing just that merger, well under way, of the two cultures. Their crusade is directed against a dangerous heresy recently emanating from various fields of humanistic scholarship: denial that there is any rigorous distinction between allegedly objective fact and admittedly subjective value, with the claimed consequence that there is no inherent epistemic disjunction between the natural sciences on the one side and the humanities and social sciences on the other. --Paul Forman (1999) The purpose of this thesis is to compare the science wars of the 1990s with the two-culture debate of the 1960s. It is a work in the history of intellectual debates, focusing on contested concepts of science. Over the past decade, there have been numerous references made in science wars literature that evoke comparisons to the two- Benjamin R. Cohen Introduction 2 culture controversy.1 I intend to show that while these comparisons have merit for their popular cultural reference, they are not valid when we consider the structures of the two debates. Thus, I will compare those structures, summarizing the main points of argument between the relevant actors in each instance, to illustrate the differences. The thesis advanced by C.P. Snow in 1959, and responded to most pointedly by F.R. Leavis in 1962, was predicated on the existence of foundational differences between science and humanities (Snow 1959/1993; Leavis 1962/1972). The broader issues then were what validity a distinction between forms of knowledge had and which domain had the more reliable claim to knowledge. Just as the two-culture controversy called into question the credibility of literary knowledge, the credibility of science studies scholarship was ultimately at stake in the science wars, and is of central concern in this thesis. My contention is that recognizing the differences between the two-culture debate and the science wars can help guide the future of science studies, since those differences demonstrate the importance and validity of STS scholarship. When scholars ignore those differences, and presume that the two debates are comparable, they unintentionally give credibility to those who defend science against perceived assaults by STS scholars. In this thesis, I will show that Snow's articulation of the two cultures rested on a particular view of science that has been analyzed and superseded by science studies scholarship. The enterprise of studying science has changed the concept of Snow’s intellectual divide by reevaluating what science is and how it works, and by reconsidering the very premise of two sorts of intellectual inquiry. Thus, issues brought to the fore by science wars arguments must be understood in a context quite different from that of Snow and Leavis, and comparisons between the debates must be tempered with a fuller understanding of how science is conceptualized. The title of the thesis, Uniquely Structured?, is meant to be ambiguous, indicating two things at once. First, there is the question of whether or not the two debates are uniquely structured. If they are, then comparisons between them are subsequently 1 Barber (1998) passim; Bauer (2000) 53; Burnett (1999) 195, 207; Collins (1995) 306; Collins and Labinger (2001) Preface; Collins and Pinch (1998) 151; de Laet (1997); Dickson (1997) 333; Finneran (1998); Forman (1999); Franklin (1996) 151-167; Fuller (1995a) 117; Fuller (1995b) 21; Fuller (1996) passim; Fuller (2000) 180-190; Hakken (1995) 319; Hultberg (1997) passim; Koertge (1998) acknowledgements; Latour (1999) 17; Lynch (2001) 4-3 and 29-1; MacIlwain (1997) 331; Pinch (2001) Benjamin R. Cohen Introduction 3 unremarkable. If they are not, then the specific forms of comparison need to be explicated. Considering the range of descriptive possibilities available in any debate, a variety of aspects—such as rhetorical, conceptual, epistemological, and practical factors—contribute to the examination of this question. I will address each of these factors; however, I will emphasize the conceptualizations of science that the opposing sides of each controversy brought into their debates. This leads to the second interpretation of the title: whether or not science itself is uniquely structured. This notion illustrates the difference between the debates. Science in the two-culture controversy was conceptualized as a unique, morally superior, objective epistemology,
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