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Science is a domain of knowledge that is controversial by its very nature, in that what is considered to be "established fact," itself a provisional state, is determined through a process of challenge and debate in which one school of thought emerges, for a time, victorious over the others. Such debates are never offically settled with any finality whatsoever, and it is expected that if and when conflicting evidence is discovered and confirmed, the science will be modified to include that discovery. As Sharon Dunwoody writes in Communicating Uncertainty, "all science is inherently uncertain."
The term controversial science however has been traditionally used of those ideas and theories which have been advanced by individuals either from outside the field of science which they are addressing and in which they are proposing views at odds with generally agreed-upon findings, or from scientists outside the mainstream of their disciplines. An example of controversial science is the work of Wilhelm Reich a psychiatrist whose controversial work with "orgone," a physical energy he claimed to have discovered, contributed to his alienation from the psychiatric and eventually resulted in his jailing.
Another example of the traditional understanding of the term is the title of a work on the supernatural, "Parapsychology: The Controversial Science."
Towards the end of the 20th century, religiously inspired critics of certain fields of scientific research attempted to brand as "controversial" a host of scientific fields wich contradicted literal or fundamentalist readings of certain ancient religious texts. Among these fields were paleo-anthropology, human sexuality, evolution, geology, and paleontology.
The media also play a role in the creation and propagation of controversies and the view that certain fields of science are controversial. In "Optimising Public Understanding of Science: A Comparative Perspective" by Jan Nolin et al., the authors claim that From a media perspective it is evident that controversial science sells, not only because of its dramatic value but also since it is often connected to high-stake societal issues.
References
- Controversial Science: From Content to Contention by Thomas Brante et al.
- Communicating uncertainty: Media coverage of new and controversial science by Sharon Dunwoody et al.