The Science Wars in the late 1990s were the inevitable consequence of the post-modern mindset among humanities and social science scholars when it meets the distinctly modernist outlook of the majority of scientists.

The post-modern scholar would declare that all truth and information is socially constructed and cannot be considered independent or absolute. This was applied to science by philosophers of science and scientific knowledge was declared relative. It was knowledge that came out of a particular cultural outlook and not universal according to these scholars.

Many empirical scientists hit back with declarations that science was asocial, that it was based in absolute values and proceeded by logic and rationality which is unaffected by cultural bias.

The role of the "wars" that developed from this debate was to question what the nature of "truth" is. Just as literature and history has been subjected to the post-modern microscope, showing that texts must be interpreted according to the context of both writer and reader, so too must science.

Scientists found themselves defending the empirical nature of their work, which hopeful caused them to reflect on how much of their work is indeed empirical and how much comes out of a certain cultural viewpoint.