The postmodern assault on science

The scientific method has been the guiding principle for investigating natural phenomena, but post modernist thought is starting to threaten the foundations of the scientific approach. The rational, scientific view of the world has been painstakingly built over millennia to guarantee that research can have access to objective reality: the world, for science, contains real objects and is governed by physical laws that existed before our knowledge of these objects and laws. Science attempts to describe the world independently of belief by seeking universal truths, on the basis of observation, measurement and experimentation. The postmodernist school of thought arose to question these assumptions, postulating that claims about the existence of a real world—the knowledge of which is attainable as an objective truth—have only been relevant in Western civilization since the Enlightenment. In recent decades, the movement has begun to question the validity of claims of scientific truth, whether on the basis of their belonging to larger cultural frames or through heavy criticism of the scientific method. However, postmodernist thought has mostly gone unnoticed by scientists, despite its growing importance in the twentieth century. The origins of this ‘deconstruction’ of the ‘Enlightenment project’ can be traced back to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was among the first to question our ability to discern objective truth: “In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings” (The Will to Power, 1883–1888; [1]) . During the late twentieth century, postmodern philosophy picked up where Nietzsche left off. In his book, Against Method (1975; [2]), philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend argued that the progress of acquiring scientific knowledge is not governed by any useful and universal methodological rules, and summarized this “epistemo logical anarchy” as “anything goes”. The concept of paradigm shift proposed by Thomas Kuhn in his famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; [3]), has also given weight to the critics of science and of its pretension to understand reality. If science is not a gradual process of accumulation of knowledge, but rather subject to sudden “revolutions” that overwhelm outdated theories, they argue, how can one trust scientific knowledge? If, as according to Kuhn, scientific revolutions are also political upheavals in scientific policy, it is easy to understand why Kuhn’s theory has attracted so much attention in a period that calls into question the established political order in the Western world.