Science Wars

In the philosophy of science, the science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world. Encyclopedia.com, citing the Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, describes the science wars as the "complex of discussions about the way the sciences are related to or incarnated in culture, history, and practice. [...] [which] came to be called a 'war' in the mid 1990s because of a strong polarization over questions of legitimacy and authority. One side [...] is concerned with defending the authority of science as rooted in objective evidence and rational procedures. The other side argues that it is legitimate and fruitful to study the sciences as institutions and social-technical networks whose development is influenced by linguistics, economics, politics, and other factors surrounding formally rational procedures and isolated established facts." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars

• Though much of the theory associated with 'postmodernism' (see post-structuralism) did not make any interventions into the natural sciences, the scientific realists took aim at its general influence. The scientific realists argued that large swathes of scholarship, amounting to a rejection of objectivity and realism, had been influenced by major 20th-century post-structuralist philosophers (such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard and others), whose work they declare to be incomprehensible or meaningless. They implicate a broad range of fields in this trend, including cultural studies, feminist studies, comparative literature, media studies, and especially science and technology studies, which does apply such methods to the study of science.
  Physicist N. David Mermin understands the science wars as a series of exchanges between scientists and "sociologists, historians and literary critics" who the scientists "thought ...were ludicrously ignorant of science, making all kinds of nonsensical pronouncements. The other side dismissed these charges as naive, ill-informed and self-serving."[2] Sociologist Harry Collins wrote that the "science wars" began "in the early 1990s with attacks by natural scientists or ex-natural scientists who had assumed the role of spokespersons for science. The subject of the attacks was the analysis of science coming out of literary studies and the social sciences."
• Karl Popper, an early opponent of logical positivism in the 20th century, repudiated the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification (Falsifiability). He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist/verificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy".[4] His criticisms of scientific method were adopted by several postmodernist critiques.[5].
  A number of 20th-century philosophers maintained that logical models of pure science do not apply to actual scientific practice. It was the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, however, which fully opened the study of science to new disciplines by suggesting that the evolution of science was in part socially determined and that it did not operate under the simple logical laws put forward by the logical positivist school of philosophy.

2025 book: Did the Science Wars Take Place? The Political & Ethical Stakes of Radical Realism, by Matilde Marcolli, William Gillis. Authoritarian regimes of the past have, of course, meddled with science in similar ways, from Stalin’s science wars to Hitler’s hunt for Jewish science, while still reaping the technological apparatus of modernity for belligerent use. Yet there is something that is especially prominent in current American fascism: extreme philosophical antirealism.
While anti-Rationalism has deep roots in the historical fascism of the past century, the absolute irrationalism, the blend of occultism, magical thinking, and the mysticism that permeated both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascisms, what is new in contemporary fascism is the way that postmodernism has served as an engine of legitimization.