Since the 1960s, relativism about natural science has been a major trend in parts of the social sciences. Proponents of social constructivism, the strong program, deconstructionism, and postmodernism describe results from natural science as power-based social constructions rather than the currently best knowledge about the natural world. Critics have accused them of contributing to the onslaught of corporate and politicized science denial that has accelerated in the past three decades. In their defense, leading relativists have responded that their work has no connection whatsoever with right-wing movements that, for example, deny evolution and climate change. For instance, Sergio Sismondo, editor of the influential journal Social Studies in Science, wrote in an editorial that “views and debates within STS [science and technology studies] about the nature of expertise” are “oddly irrelevant” in the context of politicized “post-truth” and rejection of scientific expertise (Sismondo 2017, 4). Others have claimed that the critics are attacking a strawman, because social constructivism is just a methodological approach, and there is “little basis for the realists’ criticism that social constructivists deny the reality of environmental problems” (Burningham and Cooper 1999, 306).

Whether knowledge relativism is just a methodological tool that cannot be used to promote pseudoscience and science denial is an empirical question. To answer it, I have conducted an extensive study of social science literature since the 1960s. The picture that emerges shows that to an astonishing extent, academic relativists have themselves used their relativist methods to defend and promote a wide range of pseudoscientific and science-denying doctrines.

Cold Fusion and Spoon Bending

In an academic paper, sociologist Malcolm Ashmore defended Prosper-René Blondlot’s spurious so-called N-rays. According to Ashmore, Robert W. Wood’s disclosures, which convinced the scientific world that N-rays do not exist, were “more of the flavour of stage magic, con artistry, or even slapstick, than serious science” (Ashmore 1993, 89). In the same article, Ashmore demanded “justice” for cold fusion (Ashmore 1993, 70). Sociologist Trevor Pinch described cold fusion as an example of normal science (Collins and Pinch 1998, 77) and maintained that “experiments are never alone capable of settling a controversy,” such as whether cold fusion exists (Pinch 1994, 93). Bart Simon, yet another sociologist, described the replicability of cold fusion experiments as a “rationally interminable” issue (Simon 1999, 76).

In 1979, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch defended claims of the paranormal, maintaining that “nothing unscientific is happening” in the psychological laboratories where paranormal phenomena allegedly occurred (Collins and Pinch 1979, 237). They rejected as “semi-philosophical” the basic scientific requirement of stringent evidence for claims that are highly implausible against the background of previous knowledge (Collins and Pinch 1979, 245). They also repudiated the requirement of repeatability in experimentation and dismissed the “fraud hypothesis” as applied to the infamous spoon bender Uri Geller (Collins and Pinch 1979, 249–251). Their two major examples of high-quality parapsychological research were the “paradigmatically convincing” work by Helmut Schmidt and the experiments with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute (Collins and Pinch 1979, 244, 250–251). When they wrote this, competent investigators had already revealed severe flaws in both these series of experiments.

AIDS Denial and Vaccine Denial

Quite a few academic relativists have endorsed spurious medical claims. Brian Martin, professor of social sciences, applied the “tools of relativist analysis” to fluoridation (Scott et al. 1990, 482). He noted that “my symmetrical analysis of the controversy meant that the antifluoridationists were given much more credence than is usually the case in the standard scientific or sociological literature” (Scott et al. 1990, 483). The studies by historian Evelleen Richards of the claim that massive doses of vitamin C cure cancer developed into outright advocacy. In her own words, she “personally intervened” to promote this alleged cure (Richards 1996, 343). Other academic relativists have supported her conclusions as well; in 2005, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch described the efficacy of vitamin C against cancer as an open issue, arguing that it was “never conclusively shown” that it lacks positive effects (Collins and Pinch 2005, 110). As late as in 2009, Sergio Sismondo used Richards’s work to argue against the view that “consensus developed because Vitamin C has no power to cure cancer.” Instead, he said, “consensus develops out of persuasive arguments, social pressures, and the like” (Sismondo 2009, 120).

According to Richards, randomized controlled clinical trials are “an inappropriate and increasingly redundant method of treatment assessment” (Richards 1996, 341). In her view, questions about the efficacy of medical treatments “must be treated as essentially political issues where there are no impartial experts.” She proposed a “radical review” of the role of medical expertise, such that “the medical expert must be seen as a necessarily ‘partisan participant’ in a political debate, not as an apolitical arbiter
of medical truth” (Richards 1988, 686). (If you are curious how this would work out in practice, look for videos of White House press conferences in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Sociologist Steve Fuller is highly influential in sociological studies of science, not least as editor of the journal Social Epistemology. He maintains that “the jury is still out on the intellectual merits of Duesberg’s position” on AIDS (Fuller 2015, 152). Peter Duesberg claims that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiretroviral therapy causes instead of suppresses the disease. Brian Martin promotes another thoroughly refuted claim about AIDS, namely that AIDS was originally disseminated by a polio vaccine. He correctly describes his activity in this issue as a “partisan intervention” in which he “helped set the agenda for future promotion of the theory” (Martin 1996, 245, 257, 262–263; Martin 2010). He still runs a website promoting this theory. In 2015, he published an academic paper defending disgraced researcher Andrew Wakefield and his fraudulent claim that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism (Martin 2015).

Creationism

The role of academic relativism in creationism has already been documented. Robert T. Pennock has shown its central role in the construction of “intelligent design” creationism. Phillip Johnson, one of the inventors of this pseudoscience, has identified as a deconstructionist and postmodernist. The influence can also be seen in the writings of other prominent advocates (Pennock 2010). Steve Fuller is an active defender of “intelligent design” creationism and acted as an expert witness for the creationists in Kitzmuller v. Dover School Board (Lambert 2006).

Creationists were invited as speakers at a meeting of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST) and their presentations published in a special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs in 1998, edited by the rhetoric professor John Angus Campbell and later republished as a book. This publication, which was obviously not based on competent biological peer review, has been employed by creationists to prove their scientific respectability (Ceccarelli 2011).

Climate Change

Climate science has suffered more attacks from academic relativists than any other branch of science. In the 1990s, social constructivists saw the complicated mathematical models of the earth’s climate as a perfect illustration of their claim that natural science produces only social constructions rather than reports reflecting the actual state of the natural world. Beginning in 1990, the influential American sociologist Frederick H. Buttel (1948–2005) and his coworkers took the lead in several articles attacking climate science. They described their own stance as relativistic and explicitly treated science as “one of many social modalities by which interests are expressed or served” (Buttel and Taylor 1992, 219). In particular, climate science should be seen “as ordinary social constructions or as derived from interests, political-economic relations, class structure, socially defined constraints on discourse, styles of persuasion, and so on” (Buttel and Taylor 1992, 220). They were well aware of “the current consensus on the greenhouse effect” (Buttel et al. 1990, 58) but dismissed it as “much or more a matter of the social construction and politics of knowledge production as it is a straightforward reflection of biophysical reality” (Buttel and Taylor 1992, 214).

Brian Wynne, a leading sociologist of science, wrote several articles between 1994 and 1996 in which he promoted “sociological deconstruction of global environmental science” (Wynne 1994, 185) and criticized “the reductionist idiom of the powerful supercomputer models of the IPCC” (Wynne 1994, 174). He claimed that what came out from these models should not be described as “discovered, when in effect it may have been preordained by the culture of modelling” (Wynne 1996, 370). He was aware that his arguments would have policy conclusions and said of his criticism of climate science that “we should not be afraid to acknowledge that this does entail questioning the scientific knowledge involved” (Wynne 1996, 379).

Mary Douglas (1921–2007) and Aaron Wildavsky (1930–1993), whose influential “cultural theory of risk” introduced knowledge relativism in the study of risk (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982), have both attacked climate science. In 1992, Wildavsky dismissed global warming as an “environmental scare” (Wildavsky 1992, xv) and claimed that “the greater danger comes from people who would control our behavior in the name of global warming” (Wildavsky 1992, xx). As late as in 2006, Mary Douglas coauthored a paper that repudiated the IPCC as “erosive of democracy” and called its “clear separation of facts and values” a “flawed” policy precept (Verweij et al. 2006, 20).

Steve Fuller is one of the few academic relativists who still apply their relativism to climate science. He dismisses climate models, claiming that they “enable the user to manipulate the initial parameters by introducing new evidence, resulting in different anticipated outcomes that constitute a new actual world” (Fuller 2015, 278–279) and maintains that the so-called Climategate “reveals the micro-processes by which a scientific consensus is normally and literally ‘manufactured’” (Fuller 2018, 22).

The Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology has been active in this area as well. In 1998, they arranged a debate between a proponent and an opponent of the consensus on climate science (Ceccarelli 2011). The two were presented by the moderator as “two of the most established and accomplished scientific authorities” in the world (Wander and Jaehne 2000, 219). Critics pointed out that this debate created an “illusion of uncertainty” despite “a reasonably firm consensus among scientists” (Wander and Jaehne 2000, 220). More examples of the contributions by academic relativists to climate science denial can be found in Hansson (2020).

The Impact of Academic Relativism

But are these examples merely rare failures in a social science that has in general respected and made efficient use of natural science? Concerning climate science in the 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium, this was definitely not so. In the social science literature from this period, there is a notable scarcity of papers accepting the consensus of climate science. This was also observed in the debate at the time. British sociologist Nicholas J. Fox wrote in an article that it could be “very foolish for sociologists to assume that the natural world ‘really’ is changing” as described in the consensus view in climate science (Fox 1991, 24). Two of his American colleagues criticized him, noting that “Fox’s heavy emphasis on the social construction of the environment is consistent with the views of a majority of the few American environmental sociologists who have thus far published on G[lobal ]E[nvironmental] C[hange]” (Dunlap and Catton 1994, 19). The sociology of global environmental change had “adopted a staunch constructivist orientation.” This was regrettable, they said, because “if global change is seen as primarily a social construction rather than an objective (albeit imperfectly understood) condition, then it poses little threat to the future of our species” (Dunlap and Catton 1994, 7).

In 1995, an 832-page Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Jasanoff et al. 1995) was published, obviously intended to cover the whole area of science studies. Climate science was discussed only in a chapter by Steven Yearley, in which he claimed that “the fundamental insight that science studies brings to the analysis of environmentalism and environmental policy concerns the disputability of scientific knowledge per se” (Yearley 1995, 467). His only reference to the natural science of climate change was a popular summary of an article from 1991 in which global warming was attributed to variations in solar activity (Kerr 1991; Friis-Christensen and Lassen 1991). The conclusions of that article had been shown to be wrong already in 1992 (Lacis and Carlson 1992; Kelly and Wigley 1992; Schlesinger and Ramankutty 1992), but he did not mention the refutations. Instead, he claimed that the 1991 article “could provoke a huge reevaluation of views on global warming. Thus something that scientists ‘know’ with great certainty at one time may come to be denied with equal confidence at a later stage” (Yearley 1995, 463).

Another example from this period is the 1994 book Beyond Left and Right by the highly influential sociologist Anthony Giddens. He mentioned climate change only briefly, maintaining, contrary to the established scientific consensus, that “whether or not global warming is occurring is a contentious matter” (Giddens 1994, 219, cf. 3–4). His only reference was to a denialist who claimed that the effects of greenhouse gas emissions were unknown; “we could frizzle or freeze or there may be no change” (Giddens 1994, 203; Lol 1996, 156).

Criticism of climate science by social scientists had its heyday in the 1990s, and since then it has become increasingly uncommon. Its decline does not seem to have depended on the consensus among climatologists, because that consensus was well established already when Buttel wrote his first article attacking climate science. Another factor seems to have had a major impact, namely that denial of climate science became more and more associated with corporate and right-wing organizations. For most of the academic relativists, this was unwelcome political company (Wynne 1996, 363). It seems to have been for political rather than scientific reasons that social scientists’ criticism of climate science has declined since the 1990s. Steve Fuller, who still perseveres in open criticism of climate science, has chided his colleagues for recoiling from their arguments against the scientific consensus “whenever such politically undesirable elements as climate change deniers or creationists appropriate them effectively for their own purposes” (Fuller 2017). It is also interesting to note that Brian Wynne, who has turned into a supporter of climate science, still denies the scientific consensus on genetic modification (Hilbeck et al. 2015). The consensus in that area is about as strong as that on climate change, but denialism does not have the associations with corporate interests that it has in the case of climate science.

The effects of academic relativism on social studies of climate change have been long-lasting. As late as in 2008, Constance Lever-Tracy worried that her fellow sociologists paid so little attention to climate change. She attributed the problem to “our continuing foundational suspicion of naturalistic explanations for social facts, which has often led us to question or ignore the authority of natural scientists, even in their own field of study” (Lever-Tracy 2008, 452). In a reply, two of her colleagues defended social constructivism but conceded:

There has been little engagement with climate change on the part of sociologists (and especially science studies scholars) because they are aware of the political implications and anxious of not wanting to play into the hands of climate change sceptics. (Grundmann and Stehr 2010, 905)

Overconfidence in Social Science

Some academic relativists have exhibited a remarkable overconfidence in their own competence, sometimes implying that they are more capable than specialized natural scientists to judge issues in natural science. For instance, Brian Martin “used a sociological assessment of the issues to help draw a conclusion about the scientific merits of the theory” that AIDS had its origin in a polio vaccine (Martin 1996, 249). He also used the “tools of relativist analysis” to reach conclusions on fluoridation that contradicted those of natural scientists (Scott et al. 1990, 482). Aaron Wildavsky unabashedly announced that his rejection of mainstream environmental science was largely based on assessments of natural science made by graduate and undergraduate students, “most of whom had no scientific background.” They performed these assessments for course credits (Wildavsky 1995, 3).

In a joint publication, Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch strongly rebuked James Randi for his exposures of scientific misconduct, claiming that his criticism was inappropriate because he did not belong to those who “worked on the frontiers of science themselves.” In their view it “might destroy science itself” if scientists leave it to people such as Randi to defend them (Collins and Pinch 1998, 141–142). However, as we have already seen, Collins and Pinch have not hesitated to express unconventional views on issues such as cold fusion and vitamin C, seemingly without having any experience from work at the relevant research frontiers.

The Underdog Theory

Academic relativism is commonly presented as a form of neutrality between knowledge claims with and without support from conventional science. However, this neutrality has often been taken to justify compensatory support of views that are disadvantaged by not having the support of science. Pinch maintained that in controversial areas such as parapsychology, if one side is “clearly marginalized,” then it is “inevitable that the analyst has to do most work in making plausible the rejected view” (Pinch 1993, 370–371). In an article published in 1990, three proponents of relativism argued that relativism “is almost always more useful to the side with less scientific credibility or cognitive authority” (Scott et al. 1990, 490). In 1996, Evelleen Richards wrote that “it is quite proper for the analyst who is critical, to set aside the principle of neutrality and claim justice for underdogs” (Richards 1996, 346). Malcolm Ashmore, another exponent of the “underdog theory,” claimed that in the conflict over smoking and health, it implied siding with the tobacco industry, because “it is the tobacco companies, not the dying smoker, who could make use of our—SSK’s [sociology of scientific knowledge’s]—form of analytic understanding. As epistemological losers, it is they who are the underdogs.” A dying smoker was an overdog in relation to the tobacco company, because he or she had “the authority of cognitive credibility, the power that comes from being right, from being on the side of the winners in technoscientific disputes” (Ashmore 1996, 314–315).

Conclusion

The aim of this investigation was to find out if academic relativism can contribute to pseudoscience and science denial or if it is just a methodological tool that cannot be used for such purposes. We see that to a surprisingly large extent academic relativists have themselves used their relativism to promote a wide range of pseudoscientific and denialist ideas. Although this activity appears to have diminished in recent years, highly influential scholars are still actively defending AIDs denialism, vaccination disinformation, “intelligent design” creationism, and climate science denial.

Given this evidence, there should no longer be any doubt that academic relativism can be, and has been, used to promote socially dangerous pseudoscience and science denial. But we should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. We can do without social science that is so overblown that its practitioners believe they are better judges of natural science than specialized natural scientists. But we certainly need competent historical, sociological, and anthropological studies of science that explore its social structures and mechanisms—warts and all. There is a lot of excellent such research, and we need more of it.

References

Ashmore, Malcolm. 1993. The theatre of the blind: Starring a Promethean prankster, a phoney phenomenon, a prism, a pocket, and a piece of wood. Social Studies of Science 23(1): 67–106.

———. 1996. Ending up on the wrong side: Must the two forms of radicalism always be at war? Social Studies of Science 26(2): 305–322.

Burningham, Kate, and Geoff Cooper. 1999. Being constructive: Social constructionism and the environment. Sociology 33(2): 297–316.

Buttel, Frederick H., and Peter J. Taylor. 1992. Environmental sociology and global environmental change: A critical assessment. Society and Natural Resources 5(3): 211–230.

Buttel, Frederick H., Ann P. Hawkins, and Alison G. Power. 1990. From limits to growth to global change: Constraints and contradictions in the evolution of environmental science and ideology. Global Environmental Change 1(1): 57–66.

Ceccarelli, Leah. 2011. Manufactured scientific controversy: Science, rhetoric, and public debate. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 14(2):195–228.

Collins, Harry M., and Trevor J. Pinch. 1979. The construction of the paranormal: Nothing unscientific is happening. The Sociological Review 27(1 suppl): 237–270.

———. 1998. The Golem. What You Should Know about Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2005. The Golem. How to Think about Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky. 1982. Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dunlap, Riley E., and William R. Catton. 1994. Struggling with human exemptionalism: The rise, decline and revitalization of environmental sociology. American Sociologist 25(1): 5–30.

Fox, Nick. 1991. Green sociology. Network. Newsletter of the British Sociological Association 50(May): 23–24.

Friis-Christensen, Eigil, and Knud Lassen. 1991. Length of the solar cycle: An indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate. Science 254(5032): 698–700.

Fuller, Steve. 2015. Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History. London, UK: Routledge.

———. 2017. Is STS all talk and no walk? EASST Review 36(1): 21–22.

———. 2018. What can philosophy teach us about the post-truth condition? In Michael A. Peters, Sharon Rider, Mats Hyvönen, et al. (eds). Post-Truth, Fake News. Viral Modernity and Higher Education. Singapore: Springer, 13–26.

Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Grundmann, Reiner, and Nico Stehr. 2010. Climate change: What role for sociology? A response to Constance Lever-Tracy. Current Sociology 58(6): 897–910.

Hansson, Sven Ove. 2020. Social constructivism and climate science denial. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 10: 37.

Hilbeck, Angelika, Rosa Binimelis, Nicolas Defarge, et al. 2015. No scientific consensus on GMO safety. Environmental Sciences Europe 27(1): 1–6.

Jasanoff, Sheila, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Peterson, et al. (eds). 1995. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Society for Social Studies of Science and Sage Publications.

Kelly, P.M., and T.M.L. Wigley. 1992. Solar cycle length, greenhouse forcing and global climate. Nature 360(6402): 328–330.

Kerr, Richard A. 1991. Could the sun be warming the climate? Science 254(5032): 652–654.

Lacis, Andrew A., and Barbara E. Carlson. 1992. Keeping the sun in proportion. Nature 360: 297.

Lambert, Kevin. 2006. Fuller’s folly, Kuhnian paradigms, and intelligent design. Social Studies of Science 36(6): 835–842.

Lever-Tracy, Constance. 2008. Global warming and sociology. Current Sociology 56(3): 455–466.

Lol, Deepak. 1996. The limits of international cooperation. In Geoffrey E. Wood (ed.). Explorations in Economic Liberalism: The Wincott Lectures. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 141–171.

Martin, Brian. 1996. Sticking a needle into science: The case of polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS. Social Studies of Science 26: 245–276.

———. 2010. How to attack a scientific theory and get away with it (usually): The attempt to destroy an origin-of-AIDS hypothesis. Science as Culture 19(2): 215–239.

———. 2015. On the suppression of vaccination dissent. Science and Engineering Ethics 21(1): 143–157.

Pennock, Robert T. 2010. The postmodern sin of intelligent design creationism. Science and Education 19(6–8): 757–778.

Pinch, Trevor. 1993. Generations of SSK. Social Studies of Science 23(2): 363–373.

———. 1994. Cold fusion and the sociology of scientific knowledge. Technical Communication Quarterly 3(1): 85–100.

Richards, Evelleen. 1988. The politics of therapeutic evaluation: The vitamin C and cancer controversy. Social Studies of Science 18(4): 653–701.

———. 1996. (Un)boxing the monster. Social Studies of Science 26(2): 323–356.

Schlesinger, Michael E., and Navin Ramankutty. 1992. Implications for global warming of intercycle solar irradiance variations. Nature 360(6402): 330–333.

Scott, Pam, Evelleen Richards, and Brian Martin. 1990. Captives of controversy. The myth of the neutral social researcher in contemporary scientific controversies. Science, Technology, and Human Values 15(4): 474–494.

Simon, Bart. 1999. Undead science: Making sense of cold fusion after the (arti)fact. Social Studies of Science 29(1): 61–85.

Sismondo, Sergio. 2009. An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, second edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

———. 2017. Post-truth? Social Studies of Science 47(1): 3–6.

Verweij, Marco, Mary Douglas, Richard Ellis, et al. 2006. The case for clumsiness. In Marco Verweij and Micheal Thompson (eds). Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World. Governance, Politics, and Plural Perceptions. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–27.

Wander, Philip C., and Dennis Jaehne. 2000. Prospects for ‘a rhetoric of science.’ Social Epistemology 14(2–3): 211–233.

Wildavsky, Aaron. 1992. Global warming as a means of achieving an egalitarian society: An introduction. In R.C. Balling Jr. (ed.). The Heated Debate. Greenhouse Predictions versus Climate Reality. San Francisco, CA: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, xv–xxxvi.

———. 1995. But Is It True? A Citizen’s Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wynne, Brian. 1994. Scientific knowledge and the global environment. In Michael Redclift and Ted Benton (eds). Social Theory and the Global Environment. London, UK: Routledge, 169–189.

———. 1996. SSK’s identity parade: Signing-up, off-and-on. Social Studies of Science 26(2): 357–391.

Yearley, Steven. 1995. The environmental challenge to science studies. In Jasanoff et al. 1995, 457–479.