The scientific realists argued that large swathes of scholarship, amounting to a rejection of objectivity and realism, had been influenced by major 20th-century post-structuralist philosophers (such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and others), whose work they declare to be incomprehensible or meaningless.
Karl Popper, an early opponent of logical positivism in the 20th century, repudiated the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification.
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.
In the introduction to the issue, the Social Text editor, activist Andrew Ross, said that the attack upon science studies was a conservative reaction to reduced funding for scientific research.
[13] In another Social Text article, the postmodern sociologist Dorothy Nelkin characterised Gross and Levitt's vigorous response as a "call to arms in response to the failed marriage of Science and the State"—in contrast to the scientists' historical tendency to avoid participating in perceived political threats, such as creation science, the animal rights movement, and anti-abortionists' attempts to curb fetal research.
He concluded, as the title indicates, that Sokal was not serious in his approach, but had used the spectacle of a "quick practical joke" to displace the scholarship Derrida believed the public deserved.
[18] In the first few years after the 'Science Wars' edition of Social Text, the seriousness and volume of discussion increased significantly, much of it focused on reconciling the 'warring' camps of postmodernists and scientists.
One significant event was the 'Science and Its Critics' conference in early 1997; it brought together scientists and scholars who study science and featured Alan Sokal and Steve Fuller as keynote speakers.
The conference generated the final wave of substantial press coverage (in both news media and scientific journals), though by no means resolved the fundamental issues of social construction and objectivity in science.
Mike Nauenberg, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, organized a small conference in May 1997 that was attended by scientists and sociologists of science alike, among them Alan Sokal, N. David Mermin and Harry Collins.
[20] Other significant publications related to the science wars include Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998), The Social Construction of What?
To John C. Baez, the Bogdanov Affair in 2002[21] served as the bookend to the Sokal controversy: the review, acceptance, and publication of papers, later alleged to be nonsense, in peer-reviewed physics journals.
Cornell physics professor Paul Ginsparg, argued that the cases are not at all similar and that the fact that some journals and scientific institutions have low standards is "hardly a revelation".
"[23] Subsequently, Latour has suggested a re-evaluation of sociology's epistemology based on lessons learned from the Science Wars: "... scientists made us realize that there was not the slightest chance that the type of social forces we use as a cause could have objective facts as their effects".
[25] Writing about these developments in the context of global warming, Latour noted that "dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives.