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Physics has had ever-increasing success in explaining phenomena that since Neolithic times people mistakenly thought were in the domain of interpretation, meaning, or purpose. Only after Darwin’s achievement in 1859 did the threat begin to be taken seriously by humanists. A great deal of the intellectual history of the last 150 years can be understood as the struggle between purpose and cause, between meaning and mechanism, first in the realm of biology and then in human affairs. It has been a somewhat one-sided debate: while humanists have been following Kant and constructing arguments to show that what the sciences aim to accomplish is impossible, the scientists have been hard at work actually accomplishing it.

In the struggle to maintain their intellectual supremacy, the humanists had the great advantage that everyone could understand their explanations, while few people could understand the explanations science provided. However, despite its impenetrable mathematics and its inability to tell stories, science has been relentlessly pushing the humanities off the playing field. Its technological impact inevitably secured for science the material resources, the influence, and the social standing that first equaled and then exceeded the interpretative disciplines—from history and cultural anthropology through literature, philology, criticism, and art, to mythology and theology.

How were the humanities to limit the writ of science and even regain their ascendancy? Two bold strokes suggested themselves. First, the humanities could help themselves to the scientific study of science itself to denigrate its claims to knowledge. Second, they could make themselves look more like the sciences. The fact that these two stratagems were at cross-purposes did not occur to every humanist.

First, humanists sought to show that science provided no more objective knowledge than did any other system of inquiry or, for that matter, any system of inquiry suppression, like religion. The strategy here was to turn the institutionalized fallibility of science against science itself: if earlier scientific theory was shown to be wrong by later scientific results, well then probably these later theories are mistaken, too. What if later scientific theories could be shown to be no closer to the truth about reality than earlier theories? Then humanists would be able to rebut the claim that science progresses and the humanities merely change. Humanists found an unexpected source for such arguments in the work of a historian of physics, Thomas Kuhn.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn introduced the term paradigm shift to explain how major scientific theories succeed each other. (The “paradigm” meme went viral in a perfect example of Darwinian cultural evolution.) Kuhn noticed that when paradigms shift in science, new problems are solved, but sometimes older, previously solved problems are reopened. Since weighing gains against losses in such shifts is a matter of comparing apples and oranges, there is no single yardstick for measuring scientific progress, Kuhn thought. Thus, hanging on to an older superseded theory cannot be judged completely irrational. As a result, Kuhn suggested, a new paradigm finally triumphs in a science only when its older generation dies off.

This was a history of science made in heaven for those eager to deny the objectivity of science. To Kuhn’s horror, they used his analysis that there is no single yardstick for measuring scientific progress to conclude that there is never any yardstick at all. Therefore, the success of new theories in science was more political than epistemic. In the 1970s, Kuhn was the most heavily cited author in all the humanities as scholars sought to identify the deforming roles of ideology, prestige, power, and material rewards in determining paradigm shifts. This argument, it was hoped, would turn each successive scientific theory into just another tenet of political or religious faith—sustained by the masses and in the interests of the elect. The argument was convincing