While not within the original scope of this paper, the science wars of the 1990s were a consequence of not just political, but also ideological competition between the two cultures. The science wars help to illustrate the philosophical divide between the social and natural sciences. (Segerstrale)

Science is in a sense the victim of its own success. By helping to win the world wars (WWI was known as the "chemists" war and WWII as the "physicists" war), science has gained unparalleled access to funding. However the funding is generally to build things or obtain a specific research result (to produce more "Z" particles or find a specific enzyme. While such tasks are important, they are demanding masters–there is not time for would-be scientists to spend much time philosophizing, and established faculty and other researchers send all of the signals consistent with this. Admittedly there are programs that discuss both science and philosophy, but such tend to be targeted to undergraduate students, many of whom lack a background in science and will never fully participate as did the Descartes, Spinozas, Newtons and Franklins of bygone days.

One of the "Homer Simpson rules of the playground" is to make fun of people who are different from you. It seems odd to compare academic with a cartoon playground, but some rules are universal. With an increased divide between natural and social scientists, hostilities began to increase, resulting in humanistic and social science attacks upon the natural sciences in the "science wars" of the 1990s. Oddly enough, the roots of this war begin within the physical science camp and in the types of programs that should have fostered cooperation: the science and technology studies (STS) and studies of scientific knowledge (SSK) programs. Some of these programs were initiated in the 1960s and 1970s to study moral obligations of scientists and to help bring scientists into social issues. That these programs convinced students to move from pure to applied science programs indicated the success of such programs in this goal, However, these programs moved from their original teaching emphasis to a more academically respectable research emphasis and began to launch attacks on the validity of scientific knowledge. Where there was some justification for studying issues such as how do scientific controversies get resolved, some STS researchers questioned the possibility of scientific objectivity, while others suggested that objectivity was really a "masculine" cult or that scientific knowledge is all socially constructed.

Unfortunately the view was perpetuated that these attacks were being launched, generally by social scientists, while evidence suggests that mainstream sociology did not participate much in such attacks. It was STS extremists versus natural science extremists. More moderate figures in these disciplines have begun to establish a dialogue to reduce tensions, but the root problem still exists: the segregation of philosophers and natural scientists.

Contemporary social science still incorporates a mystical approach toward humans and their societies by continuing the mind versus matter dualism of Aristotle and perpetuated in modern philosophy by Descartes. Is this reminiscent of Silicon Valley "philosophers" debating the distinctions between computer hardware on one hand and software and data on the other?

Human organisms are still differentiated from non-human animal organisms in a qualitative manner, much as ancient Greeks differentiated between Earthly matter such as rocks and water and heavenly matter such as planets and the sun. Giddens sums up such differences perhaps the most clearly of any of the sources by advocating that human s are both the products and the creators of human society and that while atoms "blindly" follow the laws of nature, humans can use intelligence and knowledge to change the course of their future. And, so things presently stand in the philosophy most widely adopted by the social sciences.

1. U. Segerstrale, Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2000.