Editing Postmodernism (section)

===The "Science Wars"===
The basis for what became known later as the [[Science Wars]] was the 1962 publication of ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'' by the physicist and historian of science [[Thomas Kuhn]].{{sfn|Goldman|2021|p=208}} Kuhn presented the direction of scientific inquiry — the kind of questions that can be asked, and what counts as a correct answer — as governed by a "paradigm" defining what counts as "normal science" during any given period.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|p=201}} While not based on postmodern ideas or [[Continental philosophy]], Kuhn's intervention set the agenda for much of ''The Postmodern Condition'' and has subsequently been presented as the beginning of "postmodern epistemology" in the philosophy of science.{{sfn|Jameson|1984|p=vii}}{{sfn|Grant|2011|pages=95–96}}

In Kuhn's 1962 framework, the assumptions introduced by new paradigms make them "mutually incommensurable" with previous ones, although they may provide improved explanations of the material world.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|pages=203–06}}{{efn|By this Kuhn did not mean that scientific revolutions did not progressively reveal truths about objective reality, only that their lack of a shared vocabulary makes one-to-one comparison impossible, and so requires conceptual translation from one paradigm to another.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|pages=206–07}} In spite of Kuhn's own interpretation, ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was widely interpreted by its readers as undermining the basic objectivity and rationality of scientific knowledge itself.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|p=208}}}} A more radical version of incommensurablity, introduced by the philosopher of science [[Paul Feyerabend]], made stronger claims that connected the largely Anglo-American debate about science to the development of poststructuralism in France.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|page=218}}

To some, the stakes were more than epistemological.{{efn|Or financial: In the counter-culture in the 1960s, U.S. military spending on science – which, post-WWII, had been unquestioned – was again made an object of controversy.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|pages=198–99}}{{sfn|Grossmann|2021|p=55}} }} The philosopher [[Israel Scheffler]], for instance, argued that the ever-expanding body of scientific knowledge embodies a sort of "moral principle" protecting society from its authoritarian and tribal tendencies.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|pages=209–10}} In this way, with the addition of the poststructuralist influence, the debate about science expanded into a debate about Western culture in general.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|p=243}} 

The French political philosophers {{ill|Alain Renaut|fr|Alain Renaut}} and [[Luc Ferry]] began a series of responses to this interpretation of postmodernism, and these inspired the physicist [[Alan Sokal]] to submit a deliberately nonsensical paper to a postmodernist journal, where it was accepted and published in 1996.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|pages=244–47}} Although the so-called [[Sokal hoax]] proved nothing about postmodernism or science, it added to the public perception of a high-stakes intellectual "war" that had already been introduced to the general public by popular books published in the late '80s and '90s.{{sfn|Goldman|2021|pages=244–45}}{{efn|Their subtitles speak for themselves: philosopher [[Allan Bloom]]'s 1987 ''[[The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students]]'' and biologist [[Paul Gross]] and mathematician [[Norman Levitt]]'s 1994 ''[[Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science]].{{sfn|Goldman|2021|pages=244–45}}{{sfn|Grossmann|2021|p=55}} }} By the late '90s, however, the debate had largely subsided, in part due to the recognition that it had been staged between [[strawman]] versions of postmodernism and science alike.{{sfn|Grossmann|2021|p=55}}