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(Written long before I began blogging.)
The Marxism list has just spent several days debating out the issues
surrounding the discovery of a 9000 year old skeleton with "non-Indian"
features on the Columbia River in Washington State. One on side you have
what I basically would call a "Sokal-esque" defense of the scientists'
prerogatives. It argues that science is somehow untainted by the class
struggle unless you are talking about Stalin's Russia or Hitler's
Germany. In a free society, the more science the better. In totalitarian
societies, science is abused in order to promote the goals of the
dictatorship. If there are occasional abuses in bourgeois democracies,
as Alan Sokal put it to me, the antidote is more science. This kind of
"free marketplace of ideas" approach to the question has little to do
with Marxist views on science. During the height of the Social Text
controversy, there was a very poor understanding of this.
full: http://wsarch.ucr.edu/wsnmail/2001/msg01177.html
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