Truth, reason, and objectivity--can we survive without them? What happens to law, science, and the pursuit of social justice when such ideas and ideals are rejected? These questions are at the heart of the controversies between traditionalists and "postmodernists" that Barbara Herrnstein Smith examines in her wide-ranging book, which also offers an original perspective on the perennial--perhaps eternal--clash of belief and skepticism, on our need for intellectual stability and our experience of its inevitable disruption.

Focusing on the mutually frustrating impasses to which these controversies often lead and on the charges--"absurdity," "irrationalism," "complicity," "blindness," "stubbornness"--that typically accompany them, Smith stresses our tendency to give self-flattering reasons for our own beliefs and to discount or demonize the motives of those who disagree with us. Her account of the resulting cognitive and rhetorical dynamics of intellectual conflict draws on recent research and theory in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and the history and sociology of science, as well as on contemporary philosophy and language theory.

Smith's analyses take her into important ongoing debates over the possibility of an objective grounding of legal and political judgments, the continuing value of Enlightenment rationalism, significant challenges to dominant ideas of scientific truth, and proper responses to denials of the factuality of the Holocaust. As she explores these and other controversies, Smith develops fresh ways to understand their motives and energies, and more positive ways to see the operations of intellectual conflict more generally.

The sociology of science is dominated today by relativists who boldly argue that the content of science is not influenced by evidence from the empirical world but is instead socially constructed in the laboratory. Making Science is the first serious critique by a sociologist of the social constructivist position.

Stephen Cole begins by making a distinction between two kinds of knowledge: the core, which consists of those contributions that have passed the test of evaluation and are universally accepted as true and important, and the research frontier, which is composed of all work in progress that is still under evaluation. Of the thousands of scientific contributions made each year, only a handful end up in the core. What distinguishes those that are successful?

Agreeing with the constructivists, Cole argues that there exists no set of rules that enables scientists to certify the validity of frontier knowledge. This knowledge is “underdetermined” by the evidence, and therefore social factors—such as professional characteristics and intellectual authority—can and do play a crucial role in its evaluation. But Cole parts company with the constructivists when he asserts that it is impossible to understand which frontier knowledge wins a place in the core without first considering the cognitive characteristics of the contributions. He concludes that although the focus of scientific research, the rate of advance, and indeed the everyday making of science are influenced by social variables and processes, the content of the core of science is constrained by nature. In Making Science, Cole shows how social variables and cognitive variables interact in the evaluation of frontier knowledge.

We live in a world of technical systems designed in accordance with technical disciplines and operated by personnel trained in those disciplines. This is a unique form of social organization that largely determines our way of life, but the actions of individuals and social protest still play a role in developing and purposing these rational systems. In Technosystem, Andrew Feenberg builds a theory of both the threats of technocratic modernity and the potential for democratic change.

Feenberg draws on the tradition of radical social criticism represented by Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, which recognized the social effects of instrumental rationality but did not advance a convincing alternative to the new forms of domination imposed by rational systems. That is where the fine-grained analyses of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies can contribute. Feenberg uses these approaches to reconcile the claims of rationality with the agency of a public increasingly mobilized to intervene in technically based decisions. The resulting social theory recognizes emerging forms of resistance, such as protests and hacking, as essential expressions of public life in the “rational society.”

Combining the most salient insights from critical theory with the empirical findings of STS, Technosystem advances the philosophical debate over the nature and practice of reason in modern society.