Editing Science wars (section)

==Historical background==
Until the mid-20th century, the [[philosophy of science]] had concentrated on the viability of scientific method and knowledge, proposing justifications for the truth of scientific theories and observations and attempting to discover at a philosophical level why science worked. 
[[Karl Popper]], an early opponent of [[logical positivism]] in the 20th century, repudiated the classical observationalist/[[Inductivism|inductivist]] form of [[scientific method]] in favour of [[Falsifiability|empirical falsification]]. He is also known for his opposition to the classical [[justificationism|justificationist]]/[[verificationism|verificationist]] account of knowledge which he replaced with [[critical rationalism]], "the first ''non justificational philosophy of criticism'' in the history of philosophy".<ref>[[William W. Bartley|Bartley, William W.]] (1964). [http://www.the-rathouse.com/2008/Bartley1964CCR.html "Rationality versus the Theory of Rationality".] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130102095820/http://www.the-rathouse.com/2008/Bartley1964CCR.html |date=2 January 2013 }} In Mario Bunge: ''The Critical Approach to Science and Philosophy''. The Free Press of Glencoe, section IX.</ref>
His criticisms of scientific method were adopted by several postmodernist critiques.<ref>[[David Stove|Stove, David Charles]] (1982). ''[[Popper and After]]: [http://ontology.buffalo.edu/stove/500-600.htm Four Modern Irrationalists] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131019064528/http://ontology.buffalo.edu/stove/500-600.htm |date=19 October 2013 }}'', Oxford: [[Pergamon Press]].</ref>

A number of 20th-century philosophers maintained that logical models of pure science do not apply to actual scientific practice. It was the publication of [[Thomas Kuhn]]'s ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'' in 1962, however, which fully opened the study of science to new disciplines by suggesting that the evolution of science was in part socially determined and that it did not operate under the simple logical laws put forward by the logical positivist school of philosophy.

Kuhn described the development of scientific knowledge not as a linear increase in truth and understanding, but as a series of periodic revolutions which overturned the old scientific order and replaced it with new orders (what he called "[[paradigm]]s"). Kuhn attributed much of this process to the interactions and strategies of the human participants in science rather than its own innate logical structure. (See [[sociology of scientific knowledge]]).

Some interpreted Kuhn's ideas to mean that scientific theories were, either wholly or in part, [[social construction|social constructs]], which many interpreted as diminishing the claim of science to representing objective reality, and that reality had a lesser or potentially irrelevant role in the formation of scientific theories.{{citation needed|date=May 2022}} In 1971,  [[Jerome Ravetz]] published ''[[Scientific knowledge and its social problems]]'', a book describing the role that the scientific community, as a social construct, plays in accepting or rejecting objective scientific knowledge.<ref name="isbn0195197216 ">{{cite book |author=Ravetz, Jerome R. |title=Scientific knowledge and its social problems |url=https://archive.org/details/scientificknowle0000rave |url-access=registration |publisher=Oxford Univ. Press |location=Oxford |year=1979 |isbn=978-0-19-519721-1 }}</ref>

=== Postmodernism ===
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A number of different philosophical and historical schools, often grouped together as "[[postmodernism]]", began reinterpreting scientific achievements of the past through the lens of the practitioners, often positing the influence of politics and economics in the development of scientific theories in addition to scientific observations. Rather than being presented as working entirely from positivistic observations, many scientists of the past were scrutinized for their connection to issues of gender, sexual orientation, race, and class. Some more radical philosophers, such as [[Paul Feyerabend]], argued that scientific theories were themselves incoherent and that other forms of knowledge production (such as those used in [[religion]]) served the material and spiritual needs of their practitioners with equal validity as did scientific explanations.

[[Imre Lakatos]] advanced a midway view between the "postmodernist" and "realist" camps. For Lakatos, scientific knowledge is progressive; however, it progresses not by a strict linear path where every new element builds upon and incorporates every other, but by an approach where a "core" of a "research program" is established by auxiliary theories which can themselves be falsified or replaced without compromising the core. Social conditions and attitudes affect how strongly one attempts to resist falsification for the core of a program, but the program has an objective status based on its relative explanatory power. Resisting falsification only becomes ''ad-hoc'' and damaging to knowledge when an alternate program with greater explanatory power is rejected in favor of another with less. But because it is changing a theoretical core, which has broad ramifications for other areas of study, accepting a new program is also revolutionary as well as progressive. Thus, for Lakatos the character of science is that of being both revolutionary and progressive; both socially informed and objectively justified.