A resposta de Steve Fuller para Mike Lynch

Response to Lynch

Author(s): Steve Fuller

Source: Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and
Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2009) 220-222.

Published by: The University of Toronto

DOI: 10.4245/sponge.v3i1.8473

Response to Lynch

Steve Fuller

Mike Lynch has now published several articles in several journals condemning (typically under the guise of analysis) my role as an expert witness for the defence in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, where I claimed that intelligent design theory should be taught to high school students in publicly supported schools in the United States. His argument in each case–the latest being Lynch (2009)–consists in drawn-out exercises of bafflement and outrage, which appear only to increase as I continue to defend the proposition outside the courtroom. I leave it to readers to speculate why he finds it necessary to reiterate this position so much. My own–by my own lights charitable–opinion is that as editor of the leading journal and now president of the leading association in our field, he sees it as his professional duty to oppose what I have been doing whenever he can. At least this would explain his outrage at my claim that tenured academics in science studies are obliged to get involved in public controversies where the nature of science is at stake (Fuller 2008).

Although he claims broad familiarity with my work, Lynch cannot fathom the source of my deontological stance. It follows from my endorsement of the principle of negative responsibility, which I have been long developing as a normative response to Kuhn’s political quiescence during the Cold War, most recently in Fuller (2009). People are negatively responsible for actions in which their distinctive position would enable them to do much good for others at relatively little cost to themselves. From this principle it follows that tenured academics bear enormous negative responsibility
in society because their unique combination of intellectual credentials and institutional security permits them to challenge established authorities and command public attention in ways unavailable to others. Whatever one thinks of their specific views, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and ...

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Steve Fuller foi testemunha no caso de Dover onde defendeu o ensino da teoria do Design Inteligente nas escolas públicas americanas.