When Sokal discovers that the cultural left he believes he has outsmarted really doesn't give much of a hoot about what Lacan said about topology in his 1966 seminar, then we can talk turkey. More important to us is the gulf of power between experts and lay voices, and the currently shifting relationship between science and the corporate state. Nor are these concerns extrinsic to the practice of science. Prior to deciding whether science intrinsically tells the truth, we must ask, again and again, whether it is possible, or prudent, to isolate facts from values. Because its power, as a civil religion, as a social and political authority, affects our daily lives and the parlous condition of the natural world more than does any other domain of knowledge.
All hell breaks loose, however, when the following question is asked.
After centuries of scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific domination of nature one might have thought this was a pertinent question to ask.