Steve Fuller (sociologist)

Steve Fuller
Born	Steve William Fuller July 12, 1959 (1959-07-12) New York City, USA
Residence	Coventry, England
Occupation	Academic philosopher and sociologist
Title	Professor of sociology at University of Warwick, England
Religion	Secular Humanist
Website
Home page

Steve William Fuller (born July 12, 1959 in New York City) is an American philosopher-sociologist in the field of science and technology studies.

Biography

Fuller was admitted as a John Jay Scholar to Columbia University in 1976, from where he graduated summa cum laude in History and Sociology in 1979. He then studied at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, from which he received an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science in 1981. He then received a Ph. D. in the same subject from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985, where he was an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow. Fuller's Ph.D. was entitled "Bounded Rationality in Law and Science", which explored the implications of the views of Herbert Simon for political theory and philosophy of science.

Fuller subsequently held assistant and associate professorships at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Virginia Tech and, again, the University of Pittsburgh. In 1994, at the age of 35, he was appointed to the chair in sociology and social policy at the University of Durham, England, from which he moved in 1999 to his current post at the University of Warwick, England. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in 1995. In July 2007 Fuller was awarded a higher doctorate (D. Litt.) by Warwick for recognition of "published work or papers which demonstrate a high standard of important original work forming a major contribution to a subject". In 2008, Fuller served as President of the Sociology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In that capacity, he staged a play, 'Lincoln and Darwin—Live for One Night Only!' at the BA's annual 'Festival of Science' in Liverpool. The play was subsequently produced as a podcast in Australia.

Fuller has been a visiting professor in Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden (where he held a Fulbright Professorship in 1995 at Gothenburg University), and the United States (UCLA).

In 2011, the University of Warwick appointed Fuller to the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology.

In 2011, Fuller was appointed a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences.

Academic and public work

Fuller is most closely associated with social epistemology as an interdisciplinary research program. Social epistemology is a normative discipline that addresses philosophical problems of knowledge using the tools of history and the social sciences. Fuller founded the first journal (1987) and wrote the first book (1988) devoted to this topic. The most obvious feature of Fuller's approach, already present in his 1988 book, is that he rejects out of hand the Cartesian problem of scepticism.

Along with 17 books, Fuller has written 65 book chapters, 155 academic articles and many minor pieces. He has given many distinguished lectures and plenary addresses, and has presented to academic and non-academic audiences throughout the world, including over 100 media interviews. His works have been translated into fifteen languages. 23 academic symposia have been published on his work. He moved to the United Kingdom in 1994, the year he organized a conference in Durham on "Science's Social Standing".

Since moving to the UK, Fuller has increasingly oriented himself towards public intellectual expression, including television and radio, which he interprets as a natural outgrowth of his version of social epistemology. Two of his books have been recognised in this regard. Kuhn vs. Popper was Book of the Month for February 2005 in the US mass circulation magazine, Popular Science. However, Rupert Read wrote: "I did not have to read far into this book in order to conclude that it is worthless. ... In sum: this book offers only a cartoon opposition of a fake 'Popper' to a fake 'Kuhn.'" The Intellectual was selected as a Book of the Year in 2005 by the UK liberal-left magazine, New Statesman. He periodically contributes a column to the Project Syndicate, associated with George Soros' Open Society project, which appears in several languages in newspapers across the world. In 2006 he also taught a course on the epistemology of journalism at an international summer school at the University of Lund, Sweden.

Academic freedom

Fuller believes (modeled on what he takes to be the German model) that academic freedom refers to a freedom reserved for academics, not a special case of freedom of speech. This includes the right to 'cause reasoned offence', if within the terms of reason and evidence appropriate to the academic profession. He believes it important for academics to be able to express intellectual opinions for further debate which can result in progress. He also argues that students are equally entitled to academic freedom.

Intelligent design

Fuller has made many statements relating to his support for intelligent design (ID), including two books, and in 2005, he testified for Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and the decision, which ruled against intelligent design, cited Fuller's testimony. Fuller has stated his position in an article he wrote in The Times Higher Education Supplement. Fuller has been criticised for his allegedly postmodernist views on science (Fuller's views can more accurately be characterised as the related viewpoint of social constructionism), as well as his support for intelligent design. Where this criticism has come from pro-Science blogs, it has largely centred on his testimony, for the defense, at the Kitzmiller trial. This testimony was frequently quoted by Judge Jones, though not in a way helpful to the defense, as noted by critics of intelligent design. Some critics within the Science and Technology Studies community have described Fuller's participation at this trial as "naive" and have suggested that the field needs further development before it can constructively engage the legal community on the nature of science.

On 21 February 2007, Fuller debated with Lewis Wolpert at Royal Holloway, University of London on whether evolution and intelligent design should be accorded equal status as scientific theories. Fuller supported the proposition. Fuller has written a complimentary endorsement of the pro-Intelligent Design Discovery Institute's textbook Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism (published in 2007), which is featured on this book's website.

Fuller appeared in the 2008 film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein:

If you take seriously that evolution has to do with the transition of life forms, and that life and death are just natural processes, then one gets to be liberal about abortion and euthanasia. All of those kinds of ideas seem to me follow very naturally from a Darwinian perspective-- a deprivileging of human beings, basically. And I think people who want to endorse Darwinism have to take this kind of viewpoint very seriously.

Other

In 2004, Fuller expressed objection to the idea that a human can be defined as a molecule, taking issue with physicists and chemists, such as Philip Ball, who reason that people can be studied in groups atomically and that sciences such as physics or statistical mechanics can be used to describe human behavior.

Books

Science Vs Religion?

In 2007, Fuller wrote Science Vs Religion?: Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. In addition to introductory and conclusionary chapters, it has chapters on the history of the relationship between religion and science, the thesis that that modern science has its basis in an attempt by humanity to transcend itself and reach God, how Fuller believes complexity distinguishes ID from "other versions of creationism", legal issues, and the future of "Darwinism".

Professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, Norman Levitt in a review described it as "a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological". Levitt took issue with the following points:

• Fuller's acceptance at face value of William Dembski's claims on complexity and randomness, and his failure to come to grips with the wealth of results that this field has generated and with the trenchant criticism of Dembski's claims (or even to describe these claims accurately);
• Fuller's disparagement of evolutionary biology, without doing "serious analysis of the working methods and logical structure of biology itself" on which to base it;
• Fuller's misrepresentation of Isaac Newton's religious beliefs in order to make a point that is in fact antithetical to Newton's views;

Levitt infers that Fuller's views arise from an "animosity to science as such and to its cognitive authority [that] still pervades academic life outside the dominion of the science faculty". Fuller later responded to these points, accusing Levitt of axe-grinding and questioning his understanding of the book, which Fuller claimed was less a defense of contemporary intelligent design theory than a demonstration of its rootedness in the history of science. Fuller also claims that Levitt misquotes one of the three passages Levitt cites from the book, making it mean the opposite of the original. Levitt subsequently responded at length to Fuller, concluding that "Fuller’s misreading of the politics that generated and sustains the ID movement is so complete as to constitute a peculiar pathology all its own." Fuller has long been highly critical of the views of science of his opponents in the Science Wars, including Levitt, dating back at least to 1994.

Sahotra Sarkar, a philosophy professor and integrative biologist at the University of Texas at Austin also criticised Fuller's book for the following for presenting an "analysis of the intellectual disputes over contemporary ID creationism [that] is almost vacuous". Sarkar further states that the book has an idiosyncratic interpretation of the history of philosophy, including of Kant, and of logical positivism; having a limited grasp of the history of science, including making claims about Newton, Cuvier, Agassiz, Lamarck, Mendel, Pearson and Galton that are not supported by their writings; failure to engage the "debate over naturalism that ID creationism has generated" with "remarks on supernaturalism [that show] him to be equally non-cognizant of the work of ... Philip Johnson"; and other scientific errors.

Science vs. Religion? is now translated into Polish.

Dissent Over Descent

In 2008 Fuller's book on the intelligent design controversy, Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism was published. Steven Poole of The Guardian wrote: "book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name." Michael Ruse, Philosopher of Science at Florida State University wrote in the journal Science that Fuller's book "is completely wrong and is backed by no sound scholarship whatsoever. In at least one case, Fuller makes his case by an egregious misreading—of something I wrote about the role of genetic drift in Sewall Wright's shifting balance theory. For the record, Charles Darwin set out to provide a cause, what he called—following his mentors like William Whewell (who in turn referred back to Newton)—a true cause or vera causa. Darwin felt, and historians and philosophers of science as well as practicing evolutionary biologists still feel, that he succeeded…" In a "book of the week" review by retired Divinity Professor Keith Ward in the Times Higher Education Supplement, the book was praised for providing often overlooked information and provocative interpretations, but was criticised for a number of inaccuracies and misrepresentations.

A. C. Grayling, in New Humanist, wrote that the book contains a "mark of ignorance and historical short-sightedness on Fuller’s part". In response, Fuller wrote an online response saying "if Grayling’s grasp of the history of science went beyond head-banging standards, he would realise that our current level of scientific achievement would never have been reached, and more importantly that we would not be striving to achieve more, had chance-based explanations dominated over the design-based ones in our thinking about reality." To which Grayling wrote: "Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all)." He continued, "I'll take on Fuller any day regarding the history and theology of the various versions of Christianity with which humanity has been burdened. […] The same applies to the history of science."

Bibliography

• Social Epistemology, Indiana University Press, 1988 (2nd edition, 2002).
• Philosophy of Science and Its Discontents, Westview Press, 1989 (2nd edition, Guilford Press, 1993).
• Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993 (2nd edition, with James H. Collier, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004)
• Science, Open University Press (UK) and University of Minnesota Press (US), 1997.
• The Governance of Science, Open University Press, 2000.
• Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, University of Chicago Press, 2000.
• Knowledge Management Foundations, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2002. ISBN 0-7506-7365-6
• Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science, Icon Books (UK) and Columbia University Press (US), 2003.
• The Intellectual, Icon Books, 2005.
• The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, Routledge, 2006
• The New Sociological Imagination, Sage, 2006.
• The Knowledge Book: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture, Acumen (UK) and McGill-Queens University Press (NA), 2007
• New Frontiers in Science and Technology Studies, Polity, 2007
• Science vs. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution, Polity, 2007
• Dissent Over Descent: Intelligent Design's Challenge to Darwinism, Icon Books, 2008
• The Sociology of Intellectual Life: The Career of the Mind In and Around the Academy, Sage, 2009.
• Science, (The Art of Living Series, Ed. Mark Vernon) Acumen, 2010

Further reading

• Two essays written as part of a debate on the Sokal hoax and published in The Independent on Sunday on 28 June 1998:
  • Who's Afraid of Science Studies by Steve Fuller, defending science studies.
  • an annotated bibliography of nonsense by Kenan Malik, takes a contrary view to Fuller's (but does not refer to him), criticising what he considers to be the unrealistically excessive relativism of science studies.
• Special Issue of Social Epistemology (2003) on Fuller's Kuhn thesis.
• Remedios, F. (2003). Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge: An Introduction to Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, USA.

• Fuller, S. (2004). The Case of Fuller vs Kuhn, Social Epistemology 18, 3-49. (Fuller's response to the Social Epistemology Special Issue)

• Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005):
  • Fuller expert report
  • Transcript Day 15 AM (Steve Fuller direct)
  • Transcript Day 15 PM (Steve Fuller cross, redirect & recross)

• Lambert, K. (2006). Fuller’s Folly, Kuhnian Paradigms, and Intelligent Design, Social Studies of Science 36, 835-842.
• Edmond, G. and Mercer, D. (2006). Anti-social Epistemologies, Social Studies of Science 36, 843-853.
• Essays by Jeremy Shearmur and others on Steve Fuller's approach to intelligent design, with a response by Fuller, in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, September 2010.

External links

• Fuller’s Homepage (includes audio lectures)
• Older homepage
• Blog: 'Making the University Safe for Intellectual Life in the 21st Century'
• Profile in the US Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2000
• Profile in The Guardian, January 2006
• Social Epistemology’s Homepage
• Steve Fuller and The Hidden Agenda of Social Constructivism, Norman Levitt, TalkReason essay
• Steve Fuller lecture at ThinkTank Science Museum in Birmingham UK discussing the Dover, PA Intelligent Design Trial
• Discussion of Fuller's contribution to the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial
• Podcast of debate on ID between Fuller and Jack Cohen (scientist)
• Audio recording of the debate between Fuller and Wolpert.
• Video of Steve Fuller, October 28, 2007, at the Evolution Panel Discussion. Battle of Ideas Festival 2007, London
• Long video of Fuller at Alchemists' Cafe in Dublin, 15 May 2008, speaking on the revival of 'human nature' and including an extensive discussion of evolutionary theory and audience questions