Paul R. Gross

A higher superstition? A reply to Steve Fuller's review

We will not abuse the privilege acknowledged with sincere gratitude of responding to Steve Fuller. Not for us the comforts of essay form, of historical stories and speculations, of elaborating the obvious difficulty, say, of building a supercomputer, even with all the ’specialized knowledge’ to hand, without social input and support. Facts should suffice to deal with the troubling assertions that spice Fuller’s potage, without running to quite his generous length. In what follows we try to address the addressable points, seriatim. So, first, to mean spirits. Of the reviews printed to date, nearly all have been favorable; none of those detects mean-spiritedness, although one reviewer smells anger. Very few have been outright hostile: one of these is by a sociologist (who is interested in ’ideological work’) writing in Science; another by a reviewer for the Times Higher Education Supplement, whose knowledge of our views seems to have been acquired without reading the book. Only the sociologist reported mean-spititedness (that, presumably, which sociologists do not display towards science or objectivity). It is fair to note that some of the magnanimous spirits who follow Internet ’Sci-Tech-Studies’ also judge us ungenerous to a fault, and that