The document discusses the concept of "The Two Cultures" proposed by C.P. Snow, referring to the lack of communication between sciences and humanities. It also summarizes perspectives from the sociology of scientific knowledge arguing that scientific concepts are social constructs dependent on language and culture rather than objective truths. Critics like Alan Sokal and Steven Pinker argue this "strong form" dismisses the objective realities discovered by science.

1. Science & Humanities
The Two Cultures?

2. “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

3. “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

15. Mary Shelly
1818

16. The Nineteenth Century

17. JulesVerne

26. H.G.Wells
1896

52. The Two Cultures
Lack of communication
between the sciences and
humanities prevents the
solution of the world’s
problems.
Incomprehension & hostility
from literary intellectuals
towards science and scientists.

53. The Two Cultures
“A good many times I have been present
at gatherings of people who, by the
standards of the traditional culture, are
thought highly educated and who have
with considerable gusto been expressing
their incredulity at the illiteracy of
scientists. Once or twice I have been
provoked and have asked the company
how many of them could describe the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. The
response was cold: it was also negative.
Yet I was asking something which is the
scientific equivalent of: Have you read a
work of Shakespeare’s?”

54. The Two Cultures
“I now believe that if I had asked an
even simpler question -- such as,
What do you mean by mass, or
acceleration, which is the scientific
equivalent of saying, Can you read? --
not more than one in ten of the highly
educated would have felt that I was
speaking the same language. So the
great edifice of modern physics goes
up, and the majority of the cleverest
people in the western world have
about as much insight into it as their
Neolithic ancestors would have had.”

55. NSF S&E Indicators
Continental drift occurs - 77%
Earth orbits the sun - 72%
It takes a year for the earth to orbit the sun - 51%
Human evolution - 45%
Big Bang - 33%

57. Two Cultures &
Two World views
The constructivist world view within the
humanities, which sees the scientific method
as embedded within language and culture; and
The scientific viewpoint, in which the
observer can still objectively make unbiased and
non-culturally embedded observations about
nature.

58. Thomas Kuhn

59. Social Constructionism
Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann (1965) The
Social Construction of Reality.
A social construction is a concept or practice
which may appear to be natural and obvious to
those who accept it, but in reality is an invention
or artifact of a particular culture or society.
Individuals and groups participate in the
creation of their perceived social reality.

60. Weak Form
“[S]ome categories really are
social constructions: they
exist only because people
tacitly agree to act as if they
exist. Examples include
money, tenure, citizenship,
decorations for bravery, and
the presidency of the United
States.”
Steven Pinker

61. Strong Form
All reality is a social construction.
Science does not have any ontological primacy;
all scientific constructs, physical laws, or
concepts, are essentially arrived at by consensus
and are social constructs
Reality is really a narrative, a discourse rooted
in consensus.

62. Long From of the Strong
Form
Science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one
particular culture in the circumstances of one particular historical
period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of
knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the real world. It is a
discourse, devised by and for one specialized interpretive community,
under terms created by the complex net of social circumstance,
political opinion, economic incentive and ideological
climate that constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the
scientist.Thus, orthodox science is but one discursive community
among the many that now exist and that have existed historically.
Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly self-referential, in that they
can be upheld only by appeal to the standards that define the scientific
community and distinguish it from other social formations.

63. Sociology of Scientific
Knowledge
The outcome of all scientific controversies should be
explained by social factors and not by appeal to
“truth”
Causality: it examines the conditions (psychological,
social, and cultural) that bring about claims to a certain
kind of knowledge.
Impartiality: it examines successful as well as
unsuccessful knowledge claims.
Symmetry: the same types of explanations are used
for successful and unsuccessful knowledge claims alike.

65. Steve Fuller
Kitzmiller v Dover (2005)
“Truth” claims are socially
constructed
Intelligent design is being held
back by socio-political forces
and should be thus give an
‘equal opportunity program’
and be included in high school
biology class.

66. Andrew Ross
“This book [StrangeWeather]
is dedicated to all the science
teachers I never had. It could
only have been written
without them.”

67. Bruno Latour
“How could he [Ramses
II] pass away due to a
[tuberculosis] bacillus
discovered by Koch in
1882? ... Before Koch, the
bacillus has no real
existence.”

68. Jacques Derrida
“The Einsteinian constant is not a
constant, is not a center. It is the
very concept of variability – it is,
finally, the concept of the game. In
other words, it is not the concept
of something – of a center
starting from which an observer
could master the field – but the
very concept of the game.”

70. Alan Sokal
Submitted a paper:“Transgressing
the Boundaries:Towards a
Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity,” for a special issue
of SocialText (1996)
Aimed to see if the academic left
would “publish an article liberally
salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered
the editors' ideological
preconceptions.”

71. Transgressing the Boundaries
“There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists,
who … cling to the dogma imposed by the long post-
Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual
outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there
exists an external world, whose properties are independent of
any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole;
that these properties are encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and
that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and
tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ‘objective’
procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the
(so-called) scientific method.”

72. Transgressing the Boundaries
“It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical
‘reality’ … is at bottom a social and linguistic
construct; that scientific ‘knowledge’, far from being
objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies
and power relations of the culture that produced it; that
the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and
self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the
scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot
assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to
counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from
dissident or marginalized communities.”

73. Transgressing the Boundaries
“Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther,
by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity:
the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum
mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once
synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we
shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective
physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual;
and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science -
among them, existence itself - become problematized and
relativized.This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has
profound implications for the content of a future
postmodern and liberatory science.”

74. Transgressing the Boundaries
A “liberatory science’ and
“emancipatory mathematics”
must be developed that
spurn “the elite caste canon
of ‘high science’” for a
“postmodern science [that]
provide[s] powerful
intellectual support for the
progressive political project.”

75. Alan Sokal
“My goal isn't to defend science from
the barbarian hordes of lit crit (we'll
survive just fine, thank you), but to
defend the Left from a trendy
segment of itself. ...There are
hundreds of important political and
economic issues surrounding science
and technology. Sociology of science,
at its best, has done much to clarify
these issues. But sloppy sociology,
like sloppy science, is useless
or even counterproductive.”

76. Alan Sokal
“Anyone who believes that
the laws of physics are mere
social conventions is invited
to try transgressing those
conventions from the
windows of my apartment. (I
live on the twenty-first
floor.)”

77. Bruno Latour
“[D]angerous extremists are
using the very same argument
of social construction to
destroy hard-won evidence
that could save our lives.Was
I wrong to participate in the
invention of this field known
as science studies? Is it
enough to say that we did not
really mean what we meant?”