| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

John H. Zammito. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. x, 390. $27.00.

In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal laid a trap for the nonreviewed, self-consciously radical journal Social Text, in the form of an article entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Simultaneously with its publication, he exposed the piece as a hoax in the highbrow magazine of academic gossip, Lingua Franca. The ensuing arguments were covered by the mass press in America and elsewhere, usually with a disdainful or mocking tone. Mostly the critique took the form of one-liners, often by scientists, exposing the strange things that these humanists and social critics liked to say about science. I would agree with John H. Zammito that at least some of these arrows hit their mark, while others, by ignoring the context of argument, revealed only the incompetence or ill will of the critic. The disputes generated a cottage industry of replies and rebuttals, which by now have died down. But Athena's owl takes flight at dusk. This book provides a thoroughly fair-minded and rather exhaustive assessment of these "science wars," which really began with Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt's 1994 book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Zammito's perspective is critical rather than historical, but he tracks the development of philosophical and sociological writing on science back beyond Thomas S. Kuhn to the doubts of Harvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine as to whether scientific theories can really be tested empirically.

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