Post-truth,Anti-science,and the Science Wars: Does Science and Technology Studies (STS) Need to Redefine Its Agenda?

Abstract

It will not be far-fetched to suggest that the present era is marred by concerns over post-truth and anti-science. These concerns have also come with accusations against Science and Technology Studies (STS) for fostering an environment in which post-truth and anti-science beliefs thrive. Such accusations have resulted in a debate within STS about how, for example, the symmetry principle should be defined and whether it should be circumscribed. This article contributes to this ongoing debate by offering a somewhat different approach to understanding post-truth and anti-science and by presenting an often-unnoticed genealogy of the Science Wars. It suggests that in the investigations of post-truth and anti-science, we should not limit ourselves to exploring the veracity of the expressed beliefs (whether complete or partial) but also read the meanings and valence through their displacement and alignment with other concerns and analyse them as story-shaping activities. Such an approach, along with providing a better understanding of post-truth, anti-science, and the Science Wars, also brings to the fore the role of race/racism and coloniality that have often been forgotten while analysing these concerns.

Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science.

—Ava Kofman, The New York Times Magazine, 25 October 2018.

The STS moment of post-truth was triggered by the recognition that the relativist tenets widely endorsed in the STS community are echoed by anti-vaccinationists, climate change-sceptics, anti-evolutionists, and their ilk.

—Johan Söderberg, Post-Truth Imaginations, 2021, p. 87.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been caught in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, although the Science Wars may be a thing of the past, lingering resistance to critiques of universalist and context-free science have remained. ¹ Even the most influential STS scholars have not been spared from criticism and accusations. Bruno Latour, for example, was literally called a post-truth philosopher and that too in The New York Times Magazine (Kofman, 2018). Similarly, Donna Haraway was told in an interview with The Guardian that ‘critics have blamed philosophers like yourself for creating the environment of “relativism” in which “post-truth” flourishes’ (Kean, 2019). In the post-COVID era, when concerns with anti-science and post-truth have surged, these critiques and accusations have become even more acute. Several STS scholars have responded to such critiques and argued against characterisation of their efforts at ‘epistemic democratization’ to ‘mean a wholesale cheapening of technoscientific knowledge’ (Sismondo, 2017, p. 3). Mike Lynch, while declaring ‘we have never been anti-science’, similarly stated: ‘As originally proposed, symmetry and relativism in STS were circumscribed’ (Lynch, 2020, p. 53).

On the other hand, STS has been chided for throwing in the towel or at least for not recognising the resonance between STS and post-truth. Steve Fuller, for example, characterises ‘post-truth world … the inevitable outcome of greater epistemic democracy’ that reflects ‘the STS symmetry principle universalized’ (Fuller, 2016; see also Fuller, 2017, 2018). Harry Collins and his co-authors, in their response to the debate on post-truth, do not go as far as Fuller but criticise STS scholars trying to circumscribe the symmetry principle of STS. They argue that ‘whether or not STS had a causal influence on the emergence of post-truth politics, there is a clear resonance between the two positions’ (Collins et al., 2017, p. 580). They do not call for an embrace of post-truth but emphasise investigations of ‘what kinds of work are required to sustain post-truth and how does this differ from the kind of work needed to sustain the scientific form of life’ (Collins et al., 2017, p. 581).

The characterisation of the present as the post-truth era has also been questioned within STS. Sheila Jasanoff and Hilton Simmet argue that the ‘very idea of a “post” implies a past where things were radically different, a past whose loss we should mourn’ (Jasanoff & Simmet, 2017, p. 752). ² They suggest that the ‘term post-truth … constructs a false view of public opinion’ and offer ‘a more complex story of how we got here’, adding, ‘it was not from a past where politics was governed by pure veritas’ (Jasanoff & Simmet, 2017, p. 752). Indeed, ‘debates about public facts have always also been debates about social meanings’, and we could, following Jasanoff and Simmet, show how these are ‘rooted in realities that are subjectively experienced as all-encompassing and complete, even when they are partial and contingent’ (Jasanoff & Simmet, 2017, p. 752).

This article builds upon and contributes to this ongoing debate by offering a somewhat different approach to our understanding of post-truth and its expression in what has been characterised as anti-science. It argues that instead of seeing and analysing post-truth as a negation of the veridicality or truth-value of a representation or claim, it should be seen as a story-shaping activity. Recent times have indeed seen a proliferation of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracies, and because of the widespread use of social media, these commonly go viral. A closer look, however, shows that the particular claims are intimately tied to other issues and concerns, even if not explicitly presented as such. For example, false claims about reasons to vote for Brexit were indeed continually peddled. That, nevertheless, did not imply that people’s reasons for voting for Brexit were bereft of ‘objective truths’; for example, anti-immigration was a key factor guiding support for Brexit. As such, treating the false claims for Brexit as simply empirically incorrect misses their role in story-shaping that is brought about through displacement and alignment with other concerns.

Concerns with ‘anti-science’ claims and attitudes are a part of the broader concern with post-truth, but in these cases, misinformation and disinformation are specifically directed in relation to science, which has been widely considered the ultimate repository and arbiter of truth and reality. The parallel emergence of an ‘infodemic’ with the COVID-19 pandemic further consolidated concerns over anti-science and post-truth. ³ This infodemic not only propelled anti-vaccination and anti-mask protests, but it also led to a proliferation of all kinds of quack treatments (some proposed even by the heads of nation-states). The situation, not surprisingly, resulted in significant alarm over anti-science beliefs and activities. Such characterisations—of, for example, anti-vaccination as anti-science—thus seem understandable and also objectively valid. However, as I show in the article, because of the term anti-science’s over-determination as a result of long-standing beliefs in an idealised understanding of science, the underlying concerns are being displaced, and effective engagement has been hindered. In short, albeit the concerns in relation to say anti-vaccination are valid, their framing as anti-science displaces those concerns into contestations in which both sides deploy the idealised understanding of science to shape their stories.

In this context, the issue for us, methodologically and analytically, is not to limit ourselves to the veracity (whether complete or partial) of the expressed beliefs. Rather, we need to analyse post-truth and anti-science claims as story-shaping activities and investigate the meaning and valence of such claims through their displacement and alignment with other concerns. ⁴ Such an understanding of post-truth and anti-science also forces us to rethink the underlying reasons for critiques of STS for creating an environment within which post-truth and anti-science are fostered. In fact, as I show in the article, such claims against STS, which started with the Science Wars in the 1990s, are also story-shaping activities that are intimately tied to Orientalist and racialised concerns even while they are presented as epistemological concerns with truth and reality. The article is divided into two sections. First section critically interrogates the concepts of post-truth and anti-science, and the second section traces the Orientalist and racialised genealogy of the Science Wars that often hides behind epistemological concerns with objectivity and truth. Through an excavation of this largely unnoticed genealogy of the Science Wars, I also wish to argue that epistemological responses of STS in this context will make little difference in stopping the accusations and criticisms.

Situating Post-truth and Anti-science

When the Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth as the Word of the Year in 2016, it was not inventing the term. As it candidly highlighted, ‘[t]he concept of post-truth … [had] been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries’ saw ‘a spike in frequency’ in 2016 ‘in the context of the EU [European Union] referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States’ (Oxford Languages, 2016). Oxford Dictionaries went on to define the term post-truth as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (emphasis added). This definition of post-truth, which is undergirded by a dualist opposition between ‘objective facts’ and ‘appeals to emotion and personal beliefs’, has been commonly used to either support or criticise claims of post-truth. For example, an entry on post-truth in the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography states at the outset: ‘Post-truth refers to a situation whereby facts have lost their currency in contemporary political and public debate’ (O’Callaghan, 2020, p. 339). STS scholars, while presenting their responses on this issue, also situate their responses in relation to the Oxford Dictionaries definition (see e.g., Collins et al., 2017; Jasanoff & Simmet, 2017; Lynch, 2020). Fuller, while calling for STS to embrace post-truth, does not challenge the definition. Instead, he calls ‘the Oxford Dictionary’s definition … the lion’s truth, which tries to create as much moral and epistemic distance as possible from … the truth the fox might be peddling’ (Fuller, 2016). ⁵

The Oxford Dictionaries, while presenting the case for naming post-truth the Word of the Year, also traced the genealogy of the term. It stated: ‘Post-truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine’ (Oxford Languages, 2016). Tesich, although he used several examples to illustrate his claim, did not substantively define post-truth in that essay (Tesich, 1992). Writing in relation to the Iran-Contra affair and in the context of the Iraq war, Tesich highlighted that the United States administration ‘was no longer afraid of the truth because it knows that truth will have little impact on us’. He put it plainly: ‘The administration’s message to us was this: We’ve given you a glorious victory, and we’ve given you back your self-esteem. Now here’s the truth. Which do you prefer’. And in ‘a very fundamental way we … freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’ (Tesich, 1992, p. 13).

Tesich partly echoes Oxford Dictionaries’ representation of post-truth, wherein ‘objective facts … [seem] less influential in shaping public opinion’, but frames it as an expediency—We are guided by expediency alone (Tesich, 1992, p. 14, emphasis added). Framed this way, investigations of post-truth do not (necessarily) become a question of veracity of facts (which Oxford Dictionaries’ definition forces us towards). Instead, they present to us the problem of excavating the expediency or expediencies that underlie acceptance of misinformation and lies (Tesich’s concern was with the rejection of fundamental moral principles as truth). Moreover, we have to bear in mind that in the process, what constitutes truth or reality becomes not only expedient but also an artefact of story-shaping activities. Perhaps the best expression of post-truth has been by an unnamed adviser to former President George W. Bush (later identified as possibly Karl Rove), who said in 2004: ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore … We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality … we’ll act again, creating other new realities … We’re history’s actors’ (as quoted in Suskind, 2004, emphasis added). Story-shaping, thus, seeks to completely displace truth or reality in this case. In this context, the reference to empire should not be treated as incidental and arbitrary either. ⁶ We need to pay attention to not only the ‘colonial forgetting machine’ (Césaire, 2000 [1950]) but also the colonial story-shaping machine.

Even in relation to Brexit, which had prompted Oxford Dictionaries to designate post-truth as the Word of the Year, expediency played a key role in the spread and acceptance of misinformation and disinformation. Those who voted for Brexit may or may not have necessarily believed in, for example, Boris Johnson’s persistent (false) argument for leaving the European Union (EU) that ‘we send the European Union £350m a week’ and the money could be used to ‘fund our NHS [National Health Service] instead’ (Walker, 2021). A YouGov survey conducted on 23 June 2016, the day Brexit referendum took place, found that 45% of those supporting leaving the EU cited ‘Britain’s right to act independently’ as the reason, and 26% suggested it would ‘help us deal better with the issue of immigration’ (YouGov, 2016). In fact, these two are not necessarily independent issues - being able to control immigration was intimately tied to the concern with Britain’s right to act independently, because, as a part of the EU, there could be no immigration controls for the citizens of the EU nations. These two issues also have a longer and complex genealogy, as the introduction to a special issue on ‘Brexit, race and migration’ in the journal Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space highlighted:

[R]ace is implicated [in the ‘Brexit referendum campaign, result and aftermath’] through the colonial invocations and nostalgias of Brexit discourses, and most fundamentally, played out in people’s lives through rises in recorded hate crime and the creation of new racially stratified vulnerabilities. (Burrell & Hopkins, 2020, p. 4)

These racialised and colonial reasons for Brexit can get hidden or at least may not become the central focus if we remain entrapped within the Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of post-truth that directs us towards the veracity of claims such as the one made by Boris Johnson. An important consequence of a shift in understanding of circulations of fake news and misinformation, as I am suggesting, would be that simply providing correct information to rebut false claims will not be very helpful and may not work (as we have also seen consistently). We have to explore and understand how false claims are story-shaping activities that operate through the displacement of some concerns and alignment with some others.

Such story-shaping also undergirds claims and counterclaims with regard to anti-science beliefs, which, because of the understanding of science as the ultimate arbiter of truth, are also seen as exemplifications of post-truth. The meaning and reference of the term anti-science seem obvious (and are commonly and endlessly repeated), and yet if probed carefully, they reflect displacement of other concerns and alignment with some others. Anti-science is not a new term either, but during the COVID pandemic, it gained wide currency. At one level, the concern with it is understandable. Even when hundreds of thousands of people were dying all over the world with the spread of the pandemic, large sections of the population, particularly in some of the Western nations, were marching against vaccination and mask-wearing. Peter Hotez, the Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, who has become one of the most vocal critics of ‘anti-science movement’, had, in fact, warned in an op-ed in The New York Times before the pandemic had started (Hotez, 2017). When the COVID pandemic also ushered in a pandemic of misinformation, he candidly wrote: ‘This is a dark and tragic story of how a significant segment of the population in the United States suddenly, defiantly, and without precedent turned against biomedical science and scientists’ (Hotez, 2023, p. 3). ⁷

Hotez laments that in the twentieth century, in fact, until the ‘years immediately preceding’ the COVID pandemic ‘Americans understood why becoming a scientist was a special and noble pursuit. And [s]cience dedicated to the betterment of humanity ranked among our nation’s highest professional callings’ (Hotez, 2023, p. 4). However, something changed during COVID. He recounts how ‘ugly e-mails’ and ‘threats on … [his] social media account became common’—an experience that other scientists have shared as well. The attacks on scientists, not only from the public but also from lawmakers and administration that Hotez and others have faced are indeed horrific, and they need to be tackled effectively.

The firing of the Director of the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), who was confirmed by the United States Congress, initiated another furious debate on science versus anti-science. On the one hand, the present United States administration is being accused of ‘weaponizing public health’, and there are concerns of the administration ‘rejecting science’ (Atwood & Cohen, 2025). On the other hand, Robert Kennedy Jr., the present Department of Health and Human Services secretary, justified the firing by stating: ‘We need to look into the priorities of the agency’ so that we are ‘able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions to restore this agency to gold standard of science’ (emphasis added) (Fox News, 2025). This firing is also concerning because it has been accompanied by several dubious medical claims that are being instituted (e.g., with regard to vaccination for measles). Nevertheless, we need to ask why, even when evidently false information is presented, science is invoked? Such invocations of science in the spread of misinformation and conspiracies are not unusual. For example, science, scientists, and scientific journals were commonly invoked to spread misinformation and conspiracies during the COVID pandemic (Prasad, 2022a, 2022b). We cannot simply argue that the invocation of science in such cases is merely a rhetorical strategy. The question we need to ask is why such invocations of science are seen as a useful rhetorical strategy. If anti-science attitudes are so prevalent and openly accepted and displayed, as is often argued, then why is anti-science not embraced openly?

There can be little dispute that the authority of science, scientists, and scientific institutions is being challenged as never before. However, we need to ask whether older strategies of demarcating science from non-science, pseudo-science, and fake claims are working. ⁸ In this regard, we also need to carefully investigate whether the idealised and context-independent understanding of science is at all useful or has become a liability. More specifically, is it helpful to call the opposition to say vaccinations and attacks on a section of scientists (particularly those like Hotez who have publicly and stridently criticised such actions) anti-science? I am sure if we were to investigate the lives of those who oppose vaccination or evolution theory, we would find that not only do they regularly use science and technology (and include scientists), but they would also often support other aspects of science(s). I do not think it would come as a surprise to find that those espousing an anti-vaccination position do not believe that the invocation of their religious faith will warm the food rather than a microwave.

Moreover, if scientific beliefs and values are the panacea, how are we to explain well-respected scientists, albeit a minority, supporting, for example, the lab origin theory of COVID without providing substantive evidence? For example, a group of very reputable scientists published a letter in the journal Science (Bloom et al., 2021) calling for further investigations of the lab origin theory of the coronavirus, and rather than providing evidence for such a call, they used the same rhetorical strategy that has been commonly used to discredit scientific findings in relation to, say, vaccination, climate change, or evolution. They wrote: ‘We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data’ (Bloom et al., 2021, p. 694, emphasis added). Is not their argument similar to those of ‘“sceptic” scientists [who] went on to claim that observational data failed to confirm the models’ that predicted climate change? In the climate science debate, the invocation of not having ‘sound science’—‘near-absolute empirical confirmation’—was then presented as the ground for not taking action in relation to climate change (Edwards, 1999, pp. 456–457). The call for absolute certainty in the lab origin hypothesis for COVID is a story-shaping exercise that made these sceptical scientists a part of the geopolitical contest between some Western nations and China.

I am not discrediting attacks on scientists and scientific institutions, and the problem with arguments against, for example, vaccination without any evidence. However, will we not be better off if we have a more situated understanding of these issues, as STS has consistently espoused for all knowledge and actions? For example, should not exploration and highlighting of the demographic profile, broader cultural and religious beliefs, etc., of the anti-vaxxers and whether support from political leaders (and the administration and the state) further enhances rejection of vaccination, provide a better understanding? That is to say, it would be useful to investigate whether we can better understand such positions by exploring their displacement and alignment with other concerns instead of classifying them as anti-science. Moreover, if anything, the partisan attacks on the scientists during the pandemic also showed that scientists were very much like others who were also being attacked. Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination against minority groups commonly undergirded COVID misinformation and conspiracies all over the world, including in the United States, right from the start (see Jaiswal et al., 2020; Prasad, 2022b; Shimizu, 2020). The various book bans in the United States, for example, have neither singled out nor are primarily targeted against science. Should not those of us concerned with anti-vaccinations and peddling of fake treatments situate these as a broader problem of democracy and civil and human rights, and investigate them much more carefully, rather than blandly calling them anti-science beliefs and an anti-science movement?

Hotez, while blaming authoritarianism and right-wing politics for the rise in anti-science beliefs, slips into a very idealised understanding of science and scientists in his diagnosis of the problem and in offering solutions (Hotez, 2023). For example, even though Hotez acknowledges the role of politics in science, he quickly undercuts the role of politics in scientific practice. In a recent interview, he states that ‘the idea that science is politically neutral [was] shattered with the Hiroshima bomb’ and suggests that ‘we have to start thinking in those terms’ (Dunavan & Hotez, 2024, pp. 216–217). Yet he also decouples science/scientists from politics by shifting the entanglement of those two to the public: ‘It’s not that we [scientists] really care about people’s politics. But how do we uncouple the anti-science attacks from politics’. The issue then becomes about people’s politics while affirming faith in scientists’ training to ‘be politically neutral’ (Dunavan & Hotez, 2024, p. 216). Hotez’s framing of the relationship between science and politics is an exemplification of boundary work that relies on older tropes and strategies of boundary making (as highlighted earlier).

The problem with such a framing is two-fold. First, it is evidently not working. For example, during the COVID pandemic, one of the bestsellers (on the Amazon chart, The New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists) was The Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science (Mikovits & Heckenlively, 2020). The book had a foreword by Robert Kennedy Jr. and an endorsement by Luc Montagnier, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for medicine. Such commentaries, essays, and books proliferated during the pandemic, and they continue to have wide acceptance and readership. In such a context, attempts at separating science from politics become a liability because they can be easily debunked by showing cases that undercut such boundary making. Second, as Troy Duster had pointed out, there is an idealised belief that ‘scientists are, for the most part, able to levitate above the prevailing social context’, even though there is ‘no hesitation in acknowledging that in earlier times, their [scientists’] predecessors’ got ‘mired in, or even swept away by the social and political maelstrom of the day [e.g., with scientific racism, Nazi science, or atom bomb]’ (Duster, 2006, p. 487).

Characterisation of scientists and science as neutral (at least largely) and the knowledge of the rest as socially and politically grounded is not only untrue, as STS has consistently shown, but it no longer works. It also results in scientists and scientific institutions being classified as elites, thus providing further basis for discrediting scientific claims. Quite simply, when anti-anti-science and post-truth activists suggest that the claims of STS that science is a situated knowledge result in post-truth and anti-science beliefs, should not we ask how the CDC’s claim about vaccination is any different. According to CDC: ‘Vaccine effectiveness is a measure of how well vaccination works under real-world conditions to protect people against health outcomes such as infection, symptomatic illness, hospitalization, and death’ (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d., 29 August 2025). CDC then goes on to suggest how the effectiveness of vaccines depends on factors such as age group, risk group, risk setting, outcome, vaccine, product, and vaccine dose (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d., 27 August 2025). Is not CDC claiming that scientific knowledge of a vaccine is situated and contingent upon certain social and technical factors? Should we also accuse it of ‘creating the environment of “relativism” in which “post-truth” flourishes’ that was labelled against, for example, Haraway? Interestingly, Haraway had warned way back in 1988 (when the Science Wars had not even started): ‘Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalisation in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 584). ⁹

STS scholars have responded to claims of post-truth and anti-science levelled against it. But the response, as I show in the next section, has been largely epistemological. As such, the concern that has been addressed is largely in relation to claims of the reality of representations or scientific authority. And not enough attention has been paid to investigations of how, for example, the Science Wars, albeit expressed in epistemological terms, reflect displacement of and alignment with other factors and concerns, in particular racial and Orientalist ones.

In the Fog of Science Wars, Did STS Miss Something

‘I have a question for you’, he said, taking out of his pocket a crumpled piece of paper on which he had scribbled a few key words. He took a breath: ‘Do you believe in reality?’

‘But of course!’ I laughed. ‘What a question! Is reality something we have to believe in?’ (Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, 1999, p. 1).

Latour, recounting the above-quoted exchange that he had in Brazil, shared how this line of questioning seemed incredulous and unfair at first. The ‘Science Wars’ that started with the publication of Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Gross & Levitt, 1998 [1994]) evidently formed the context of such an exchange. ¹⁰ Latour thought that such a question was unfair because we were the ones being attacked (Latour, 1999; see also Latour & Noor, 2002). However, as he later noted: ‘I realized that I was wrong’. He felt he was wrong because what he had ‘called “adding realism to science” was really seen, by the scientists at this meeting, as a threat to the calling of science, as a way decreasing its stake to truth and of their claims to certainty’ (Latour, 1999, p. 3). The question—‘Do you believe in reality?’—‘had shown the distance between what … [Latour] thought we had achieved in science studies and what was implied by this question was so vast that … [he] needed to retrace … [his] steps a bit. And so this book [Pandora’s Hope] was born’ (Latour, 1999, p. 3).

The claims of STS not believing in reality and as such being anti-science and a proponent of post-truth still haunt the field. Michael Lynch, writing in 2020, noted that STS was again being ‘dragged into what has been called a “war on science”’. He added that ‘[a]lthough the context and stakes are quite different, this recalls a “science war” that occurred two decades ago’ (Lynch, 2020, p. 52). Reflecting on the methodological principle of symmetry (Bloor, 1991 [1976]), which has formed the bedrock of STS analyses, Lynch distinguishes two kinds of symmetry. ¹¹ He argues that the principle of symmetry, as it was originally conceived, was circumscribed and does not include the politicised version that ‘purport[s] to be a “post-truth” that applies in the same way in all cases’ (Lynch, 2020, p. 54).

The very fact that, despite concerted responses, claims of STS being anti-science and enablers of post-truth continue to persist should make us pause and more critically interrogate what is at stake in such claims. Perhaps we should ask why our responses to epistemological concerns in relation to STS have not held that much water? Does the indictment of STS on epistemological terms—as enablers of anti-science and post-truth—reflect a displacement of and alignment with other concerns?

It is not that extra-epistemological factors in the criticisms of STS during the Science Wars have not been addressed. Sarah Franklin, in her response essay on the Science Wars, had, for example, stated at the outset: ‘It is no coincidence the Science Wars have erupted in British and American academic circles close on the heels of the Culture Wars preceding them: they are both about cultural values’ (Franklin, 1996, p. 141). Franklin went on to argue that ‘Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition is a “war picture” for their fellow academicians … based on the trope of imperilled progeny’ (Franklin, 1996). Thereafter, she added: ‘Gross and Levitt espouse a paternalistic Right-to-Life discourse concerning the vital essence of the scientific ethos, and the importance of its salvation on behalf of our children’s futures’ (Franklin, 1996, p. 154). The concern of Gross and Levitt (as well as that of several others who fought the Science Wars) was indeed paternalistic and gendered. While chiding the academic left, they put their concern clearly:

From this perspective [academic left to which STS is assigned as well] feminism, for example, means more than full juridical equality for women, more than income parity and equal access to careers, more than irrevocable ‘reproductive rights’. It means, in fact, a complete overthrow of traditional gender categories, with all their conscious and unconscious postulates. (Gross & Levitt, 1998 [1994], p. 3, emphasis added)

It will be, however, short-sighted to see their paternalistic (and anti-feminist) goal as similarly directed at all humans—that is, aimed at ‘salvation on behalf of our children’s futures’ (emphasis added). Gross and Levitt were very clear about which futures mattered and how those futures must align with those envisaged by the ‘whites’. To quote them again:

[R]acial justice, on this [academic left] view, does not mean peaceful assimilation of blacks into the dominant culture, but the forging of an entirely new culture, in which ‘black’ (or ‘African’) values—in social relations, economics, aesthetics, personal sensibilities—will have at least equal standing with ‘white’ values. (Gross & Levitt, 1998 [1994], p. 3, emphasis added)

Notice the turn of sentiment in the above two quotes, one in relation to feminists/women and the other regarding ‘blacks’. The concern with feminists is for wanting more, but for ‘blacks’ it is against seeking at least equal standing with ‘white’ values. Gross and Levitt’s paternalistic espousal ‘concerning the vital essence of the scientific ethos’ needs to be further unpacked as well. They wrote: ‘Natural science is one of the last major features of Western life and thought to come systematically under the critical gaze of the academic left’ and the academic left, informed by postmodernism ‘is grounded in the assumption that the ideological system sustaining the cultural and material practices of Western European civilisation is bankrupt and on the point of collapse’ (Gross & Levitt, 1998 [1994], pp. 4–5). Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition (and other such interventions), albeit highlighting concern with anti-science ethos, is filled with a ‘sense of injury, resentment, and indignation against’ the perceived (or real) fall of Western and ‘white’ values. ¹² They, and many other science warriors, indeed reflect a paternalistic concern with an imperilled progeny, but their concern, to draw on Sylvia Wynter’s argument (Wynter, 2001), reflects a sociogenic principle that is aimed at preserving and passing on of ‘white’/Western values. Gross and Levitt’s argument illustrates that clearly:

[S]cience, together with its immediate realization as technology, is—as much as anything can be—the single aspect of Western thought and social practice that defines the Western outlook and accounts for its special position in the world. Non-Western societies—Japan, to take the obvious example—can simultaneously succeed and maintain their identities only to the degree that they naturalise the science and technology of Western culture. (Gross & Levitt, 1998 [1994], pp. 5–6, emphasis added)

They also made it evident that their epistemological concern against the relativising of science is guided by another concern, whose genealogy can be traced to the colonial and Orientalist discourse within which technology and science served as tools of empire (see e.g., Baber, 1996; Headrick, 1981) and the machine became a measure of societies (Adas, 1989):

[I]f one is predisposed to regard the Western position of privilege as wicked, for its prejudices and for its history of conquest, then one will inevitably regard Western science with suspicion and perhaps with contempt. Sooner or later any critique of Western values aspiring to be comprehensive must offer an analysis of natural science, preferably scathing. (Gross & Levitt, 1998 [1994], p. 6, emphasis added)

Ironically, STS has paid very little attention to the colonial and racial dimension of the Science Wars. Latour, for example, while presenting his response to the Science Wars through his book, Pandora’s Hope, literally brackets out the role of colonialism: ‘(I apologize in advance to the reader, because I am going to omit many aspects of this field trip that pertain to the colonial situation … )’ (Latour, 1999, p. 27). This should not be surprising because it is often not even noticed that STS has bracketed out the role of colonialism since its birth in the 1970s, and such bracketing has resulted in their own narratives becoming Orientalist and colonial (Prasad, 2022b).

Let me clarify, I am not accusing Latour and other STS scholars of any malice or ill intention in forgetting or misrepresenting the role of European/Western colonialism. Rather, such erasures are reflective of their/our embeddedness within a discourse of coloniality that has relied on erasures to constitute a reified identity of modern science and the West that continues to haunt us and make us complicit in colonial story-shaping, even when we are critiquing modern science and the associated Euro/West-centrism. Such erasures should not be seen simply as empirical limitations or errors. Rather, they are artefacts of and further reinforce the identity of Europe/West as independent of colonisation (and more broadly from that of the history of the non-West) or at best only marginally affected by it, which is used to present Europe/West as the referent and model for the rest of the world. ¹³ The Eurocentric historicism of ‘first in Europe and then elsewhere’ (Chakrabarty, 2000) depends upon separation and denial of colonialism as constitutive of Europe/West. As such, although concerns with decentering of the West or decentralising of knowledges may be useful (see Medina & Harding, 2025; Narayan & Harding, 2000), postcolonial interventions need to highlight how colonialism/coloniality was/is ‘centered’ and constitutive of the West (indeed, the very category of the West is inextricable from colonialism). And we need to investigate the ‘structurality’ of the colonial structure, that is, how what is erased gives meaning and stability to the ‘center’ and has to be ‘supplemented’ to understand the very identity and structurality of the ‘center’ (Derrida, 1978). In relation to the Science Wars, it is important to supplement what has been forgotten and displaced in STS responses, namely race/racism and colonialism, in order to better understand what provides meaning and stability to such Wars.

Conclusion

My interest in this article is not to suggest that STS can have no links with what has been characterised as ‘post-truth’ or ‘anti-science’. STS, not unlike the natural sciences, has a wide spectrum of scholars with different beliefs and positions. Differing views among STS scholars, including open support for post-truth, as has been acknowledged and debated, put the field squarely in line for further attacks. However, any attempt to discipline what should or should not be included as a part of the STS agenda may not be helpful, and I doubt it would lessen the attacks on STS. Moreover, it has to be acknowledged that attempts to define what should qualify as the boundaries of the symmetry principle reflect boundary work that, as STS scholars have shown in relation to the natural sciences, cannot be extricated from impositions of authority. It is, nevertheless, important to bear in mind that the symmetry principle is a methodological principle to impartially investigate what are considered true as well as false claims, that is, without an a priori judgement. Intrinsic to Bloor’s symmetry principle is a call to pay careful attention to the context, such that investigations of the context are used to explain the outcome, rather than outcomes (whether true or false) deciding how and which context will be mobilised. Bloor put this plainly through a comparison with the methodologies of the natural sciences. He wrote:

The aim of physiology is to explain the organism in health and disease, the aim of mechanics is to understand machines which work and machines which fail … Similarly, the sociologist seeks theories which explain beliefs … regardless of how the investigator evaluates them. (Bloor, 1991 [1976], p. 5)

Bruno Latour and other Actor Network Theorists (ANT) expanded the concept of symmetry because, according to them, the epistemological question of true and false or rational and irrational is inherently a question of how resources and different actors, both human and non-human, are mobilised (Callon, 1986b; Latour, 1987; Law, 1986, 1992). In the words of Latour,

[S]ince the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Society’s stability, we cannot use Society to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. We should consider symmetrically the efforts to enrol and control human and non-human resources. (Latour, 1987, p. 144)

Such an expansion of the symmetry principle was necessary and useful. Latour and ANT, in broad terms, highlighted the role of context in the application of the symmetry principle, specifically the (differential) role of various actors in technoscientific knowledge-making. Quite simply, without a consideration of the role of actors and how they mobilise resources, the symmetry principle would remain an idealised (and possibly reductive) epistemological goal.

Nevertheless, on the one hand, such an expansion of the symmetry principle does not go far enough in interrogating the context; on the other, the commitment to the agency and actions of heterogeneous actors often over-determines the investigation and analysis of the context. An illustrative example in this regard is John Law’s study of the Portuguese voyages to India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Law, 1986). Law, highlighting the disciplining of human and non-human actors/actants involved in the Portuguese voyages, argued that ‘revolutionary improvement in textual means of long-distance control … goes some way to explaining both the hegemony of the West and the “great divide” between primitive and modern’ (Law, 1986, pp. 255–256). Law does not critically and carefully ‘deconstruct’ the context in which the human and non-human actors of the Portuguese voyages were acting, including the colonial and Orientalist historical constructions of these voyages and the actors involved therein, for example, the myth of Vasco da Gama (see e.g., Subrahmanyam, 1997). Moreover, the commitment to investigating the role of heterogeneous actors becomes a story-shaping exercise (as the above quote highlights). Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, Law ends up not only mischaracterising the role of both the human and non-human actors but also replicating Orientalist tropes and stories, albeit with a non-human actor twist (Prasad, 2022b). In other words, although the role of non-human actors is introduced and a twist in the explanation for the ‘great divide’ is presented, these actors and the explanation remain embedded within the colonial and Orientalist discourse. ¹⁴

Steve Fuller’s claim in support of post-truth, which I discussed at the start of the paper, similarly, does not directly challenge the methodological principle of symmetry. He asks us to accept what he calls ‘the inevitable outcome of greater epistemic democracy’, which entails taking a side in story-shaping; specifically, the side of what he calls the fox’s version of truth as opposed to the lion’s one. However, his position conflates the methodological investigation of a claim or a representation with the concern with that claim’s imbrication and role in story-shaping (lion’s vs. fox’s version). If pushed to its limits, Fuller’s claim cannot allow him to distinguish whether, for example, a genocide has occurred or not, and in that context, the issue that also arises is which is the fox’s version of truth; that is, the claim for ‘greater epistemic democracy’ itself becomes superfluous. The broader point I wish to make is two-fold. Firstly, although the goals of the symmetry principle and epistemic democracy may overlap, they should not be treated as synonymous. For example, epistemic democracy, which can be pursued by taking the side of a group of actors or a particular agenda, may not be a result of the application of the symmetry principle and may even contradict it. Secondly, neither of these—epistemic democracy and symmetry principle—should be treated as politically innocent and ethically value-free. STS claims, much like the knowledge claims of natural sciences, are situated and context-dependent.

Fuller, Collins and their co-authors raise an extremely important issue by calling attention to how we (STS scholars and more broadly the field of STS) are implicated in politics. In the words of Collins et al., the ‘claim that STS never came down on the side of politics rather than technical expertise’ would be ‘falsifying our own history’ (Collins et al., 2017, p. 581). I would like to reformulate the issue as a broader question—what politics has STS taken the side of? How are we to, for example, understand some of the most critical STS scholars having slipped into bracketing the role of colonialism or forgetting the colonial genealogy of, for example, the discourse on overpopulation and ending up displacing ‘black embodiment’ in plantations (Davis et al., 2019) even while discussing colonialism and slave plantations (see Haraway, 2016)? In fact, even postcolonial science studies scholars have ended up replicating colonial and Orientalist tropes and presented certain STS studies as postcolonial without even noticing that these studies erase the agency of the natives and the role of colonialism (Prasad, 2022b). The issue is not that this or that scholar’s work reflects colonial or other erasures, even when those erasures critically affect their claims. Rather, similar to such debates in several disciplines (e.g., anthropology), it is necessary for us to critically engage with whether and how STS has been implicated in the politics of erasure and misrepresentations of those who have been, and continue to be, ‘othered’ and reorient our attention and agenda accordingly.