Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science

Where is psychology going? Structural fault lines revealed by psychologists' use of Kuhn.

“…The so-called science wars (Gross & Levitt, 1998;Rorty, 1999;Ross, 1996) are in essence disagreements about what constitutes good science. These disagreements are derived partly from the split between natural and social science traditions.…”

“…The rationalist camp assumes that the practice of science and, by extension, the products of science are not contaminated by external effects, whereas the relativists are almost defined by their challenge to that assumption. Skirmishes in this war have been waged and reviewed in several books Erin DriverLinn (e.g., Brante, Fuller, & Lynch, 1993;Cromer, 1997;Gross & Levitt, 1998;Hacking, 1999;Ross, 1996), by philosophers of science (e.g., Laudan, 1990), and doubtless in the cocktail chitchat of many a faculty club.…”

Thinking/acting locally/globally: Western science and environmental education in a global knowledge economy

“…Aggressive (and well-publicised) defenders of an imperialist position include scientists such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994) who heap scorn and derision on any sociologists, feminists, postcolonialists, and poststructuralists who have the temerity to question the androcentric, Eurocentric, and capitalist determinants of scientific knowledge production. 10 Although I am sure that many Western science educators take a similar position to Gross and Levitt, 11 I prefer to attend to the more subtle and insidious forms of imperialism manifested by science and environmental educators whose ideological standpoints appear to be much closer to my own.…”

“…Nevertheless, I will argue that for all of their undeniably good intentions, these authors maintain a culturally imperialistic view of science through the use of rhetorical strategies that privilege Western scientists' representations of 'reality' and reproduce the conceit that the knowledge Western science produces is universal. 10 Gross and Levitt (1994) give the impression that the academic left's 'quarrels with science' are chiefly the result of ignorance, scholarly incompetence, irrationality and/or ideological prejudice, an impression they underscore with a litany of personal abuse: for example, they refer to Sandra Harding's 'megalomania' (132), Donna Haraway's 'delusions of adequacy' (134), and Katherine Hayles's 'mathematical subliteracy' (104) for whose work 'the word crackpot unkindly leaps to mind' (103, emphasis in original).…”

Evolutionary program in sociology

“…Подразумева се и да не нуде сви теоријски програми једнак потенцијал за интеграцију. Они који јој се највише супрот-стављају су (симболички) интеракционизам, драматуршки приступи, етно-методологија и разне варијанте постмодерне и интерпретативне традиције (за одличне критике постмодернизма, конструктивизма, релативизма и разних варијанти ирационализма види Holton 1993; Levitt 1994/ 1998;Gross, Levitt, and Lewis 1996;Koertge 1998;The Editors of Lingua Franca 2000).…”