Question: "Social Text" was probably an attempt to criticize people who believe that scientific theories are what?

Context articles: Basic research
Bible version debate
Commensurability (philosophy of science)
Science wars
Social Text
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Feminist method
Alan Sokal
Scientific Charity Movement
Entity realism

Basic research, also called pure research or fundamental research, is scientific research aimed to improve scientific theories for improved understanding or prediction of natural or other phenomena.
 Applied research, in turn, uses scientific theories to develop technology or techniques to intervene and "alter" natural or other phenomena.
 Though often driven by curiosity, basic research fuels applied science's innovations.
 The two aims are often coordinated in research and development.
There have been various debates concerning the proper family of biblical manuscripts and translation techniques that should be used to translate the Bible into other languages.
 Biblical translation has been employed since the first translations were made from the Hebrew Bible (Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic) into Greek (see Septuagint) and Aramaic (see Targum).
 Until the late Middle Ages, the Western Church used the Latin Vulgate almost entirely while the Eastern Church, centered in Constantinople, mostly used the Greek Byzantine text.
 Beginning with the 14th century, there have been increasing numbers of vernacular translations into various languages.
 With the development of modern printing techniques, these increased enormously.
 The English King James Version or "Authorized Version", published in 1611, has been one of the most debated English versions.
 Many supporters of the King James Version are disappointed with the departure from this translation to newer translations that use the Critical Text instead of the Byzantine text as the base text.
 There have also been debates regarding the benefits of formal translations over dynamic equivalence translations.
 Supporters of formal translation such as the King James Version criticize translations that use dynamic equivalence because the accuracy is compromised because this technique tends to reword the meaning of the text instead of translating it accurately in a word for word fashion.
 Additionally, these supporters are critical of translations using the critical text because they believe that biblical text has been deliberately deleted from the original autographs.
 Debates of this type involve theological concepts as well as translation techniques which are outlined in the process of textual criticism.
Commensurability is a concept, in the philosophy of science, whereby scientific theories are commensurable if scientists can discuss them using a shared nomenclature that allows direct comparison of theories to determine which theory is more valid or useful.
 On the other hand, theories are incommensurable if they are embedded in starkly contrasting conceptual frameworks whose languages do not overlap sufficiently to permit scientists to directly compare the theories or to cite empirical evidence favoring one theory over the other.
 Discussed by Ludwik Fleck in the 1930s, and popularized by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, the problem of incommensurability results in scientists talking past each other, as it were, while comparison of theories is muddled by confusions about terms, contexts and consequences.
The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of scientific theory and intellectual inquiry.
 They took place principally in the United States in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press.
 Scientific realists (such as Norman Levitt, Paul R. Gross, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal) argued that scientific knowledge is real, and accused the postmodernists of having effectively rejected scientific objectivity, the scientific method, Empiricism, and scientific knowledge.
 Postmodernists interpreted Thomas Kuhn's ideas about scientific paradigms to mean that scientific theories are social constructs, and philosophers like Paul Feyerabend argued that other, non-realist forms of knowledge production were better suited to serve people's personal and spiritual needs.
Social Text is an academic journal published by Duke University Press.
 Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, "Social Text" has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment.
 Each issue covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture.
 The journal has since been run by different collectives over the years, mostly based at New York City universities.
 It has maintained an avowedly progressive political orientation and scholarship over these years, if also a less and less socialist or Marxist one.
 Since 1992, it is published by Duke University Press.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a 2008 documentary film directed by Nathan Frankowski and starring Ben Stein.
 The film contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design (ID) in nature and who criticize evidence supporting Darwinian evolution and the modern evolutionary synthesis as part of a "scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nation's laboratories and classrooms."
 The scientific theory of evolution is portrayed by the film as contributing to communism, fascism, atheism, eugenics and, in particular, Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust.
 The film portrays intelligent design as motivated by science, rather than religion, though it does not give a detailed definition of the phrase or attempt to explain it on a scientific level.
 Other than briefly addressing issues of irreducible complexity, "Expelled" examines it as a political issue.
The feminist method is a means of conducting of scientific investigations and generating theory from an explicitly feminist standpoint.
 Feminist methodologies are varied, but tend to have a few common aims or characteristics, including seeking to overcome biases in research, bringing about social change, displaying human diversity, and acknowledging the position of the researcher.
 Questioning normal scientific reasoning is another form of the feminist method.
 Each of these methods must consist of different parts including: collection of evidence, testing of theories, presentation of data, and room for rebuttals.
 How research is scientifically backed up affects the results.
 Like consciousness raising, some feminist methods affect the collective emotions of women, when things like political statistics are more of a structural result When knowledge is either constructed by experiences, or discovered, it needs to both be reliable and valid.
 Strong feminist supporters of this are Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, and finally Sandra Harding.
 Feminist sociologists have made important contributions to this debate as they began to criticize positivism as a philosophical framework and, more specifically, its most acute methodological instrument—that of quantitative methods for its practice of detached and objective scientific research and the objectification of research subjects (Graham 1983b; Reinharz 1979).
 These methodological critiques were well placed against a backdrop of feminist scholarship struggling to find a place for alternative values within the academy.
 Such concerns emerged from a sense of despair and anger that knowledge, both academic and popular, was based on men’s lives, male ways of thinking, and directed toward the problems articulated by men.
 Dorothy Smith (1974) argued that “sociology . . . has been based on and built up within the male social universe”
Alan David Sokal ( ; born January 24, 1955) is a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University.
 He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics.
 He is best known to the wider public for his criticism of postmodernism, after the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University's "Social Text".
 He also works to counter faulty scientific reasoning, as seen with his involvement in criticising the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
The Scientific Charity Movement was a movement that arose in the early 1870s in the United States to stop poverty.
 It sought to move the role of supporting the impoverished away from government and religious organizations and into the hands of Charity Organization Societies.
 These Societies claimed the altruistic goals of lifting the poor out of poverty through the means of education and employment, and did make some strides to help young children involved in immoral underaged labor practices.
 However when it came to the COS's treatment of the "defective class" as they were labeled (insane, feeble-minded, blind, crippled, maimed, deaf and dumb, epileptic, criminal types, prostitutes, drug addicts, and alcoholics), the Scientific Charity Movement's other goals based in the popular post civil war social scientific theories of eugenics and social Darwinism came to light.
 Many of these "defective classes" were moved from the streets and into insane asylums where they were often experimented on by scientists of the time.
Entity realism, sometimes equated with referential realism, is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism.
 Whereas traditional scientific realism argues that our best scientific theories are true, or approximately true, or closer to the truth than their predecessors, entity realism does not commit itself to judgments concerning the truth of scientific theories.
 Instead, entity realism claims that the theoretical entities that feature in scientific theories, e.g. 'electrons', should be regarded as real if and only if they refer to phenomena that can be routinely used to create effects in domains that can be investigated independently.
 'Manipulative success' thus becomes the criterion by which to judge the reality of (typically unobservable) scientific entities.
 As Ian Hacking, the main proponent of this formulation of entity realism, puts it (referring to an experiment he observed in a Stanford laboratory, where electrons and positrons were sprayed, one after the other, onto a superconducting metal sphere), "if you can spray them, then they are real."