This Bruno Latour piece in the New York Times has come across my radar several times in the last week and a bit, including via faculty email. I’ve had the tab open for quite a while now, and probably ought to just bang out something quick to be done with it.

To my mind, the most striking part of the article was the early anecdote about Latour being amused that a scientist he met asking him whether he believed in reality. The story notes that “Latour had never seen himself as doing anything so radical, or absurd, as calling into question the existence of reality,” and was surprised to learn that scientists thought he had. That story got me thinking about whether the whole “Science Wars” phenomenon, with its Sokal hoaxes and all the rest, isn’t really just a problem of marketing gone mad.

When you boil it down, social constructivism is basically the claim that human factors play a role in the process of hashing out what theories of science get accepted. This is not actually a surprise to anyone in science who has ever worked in a research lab, or dealt with the dread Reviewer 2. And yet, this has been a massive source of bad blood between scientists and academics from “science studies” for decades.

So why is this controversial? I half think it’s because what’s actually a fairly benign idea was wildly oversold as revolutionary stuff, completely overturning the authority of science. This happens for a lot of reasons– the general academic need to puff up the importance of your field, and some petty cross-disciplinary point-scoring being the two biggest– but the problem is that folks on the science side took the hype more literally than they should’ve.

That is, if the point is just “social factors play an important role in the process of getting scientific theories accepted,” well, that doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary or authority-overthrowing. Denying the existence of objective reality, though, that would be revolutionary enough to justify the dramatic claims made about social constructivism, and the infamous opacity of academic prose makes it seem plausible to folks not in the field that that’s actually what’s being claimed.

Thus, scientists decide that folks from “science studies” are a bunch of reality-denying lunatics. And on the other side, the “science studies” crowd figures that reaction can’t possibly be sincere, and thus is actually a political move to preserve the social power of science, and respond accordingly. And then everything spirals out of control until you get people running around pranking journals and pretending that they’ve made a brilliant point of some sort.

I’m not entirely confident that this is an accurate assessment– I haven’t read any of Latour’s work; just looking at the chapter titles of his new book made me sigh heavily, so I’m not in a huge hurry to do that. It does fit fairly well with most of my encounters with the whole giant mess of arguments around this area, though. And I think you could quite reasonably construct (heh) a view of the world in which social factors are important for shaping the scientific consensus and that scientific consensus is also a highly accurate reflection of an objective reality.

So for the purposes of this blog post, at least, that’s what I’m going to run with: the whole mess is a result of “science studies” academics overhyping their work, and too-credulous scientists taking those inflated claims too seriously.