E does not equal mc2: review of Who Rules In Science: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars

by James Robert Brown:

Few terms, when uttered in academic circles, are so instantly polarizing as the phrase “social construction.” Taken at face value, the notion is innocuous enough: some things that we come to know, like the rules of baseball and the letters of the alphabet, are not objective truths about the universe but products of social convention. The problem is that “constructivists,” whose ranks now include many—if not most—scholars of the humanities, are not content to stop there. From their point of view, all knowledge is subjective and all facts are arbitrary; in baseball, for example, we “construct” not only what counts as a strike, but also the trajectory of a pitch and the physiology of a batter’s swing.

For postmodern humanists, the constructivist enterprise is exciting and subversive, liberating them from the supposedly racist and sexist shackles of Western thought. For many scientists and philosophers, on the other hand, whose business it is to describe the world as it exists, the idea is confusing and absurd; in the words of the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson, it “menaces rational thought.” And not only that. To the extent that postmodernists have come to dominate the study of literature and the arts, their way of thinking has had a corrosive effect on the academy, giving rise to intellectual balkanization and a general decline of standards. Commentary