THE ONE CULTURE? A conversation about science. By Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins, editors. 342pp. University Press of Chicago; distributed in the UK by Wiley. Paperback, Pounds 11. 0 226 46723 6

The Science Wars began in the early 1990s when scholars in the humanities and social sciences began to look critically at science.

Scientists resented this encroachment on to their territory, fearing a threat to those scientific shibboleths: rationality and truth. In 1996, the debate entered the public arena following the publication of Alan Sokal's spoof article in Social Text. The physicist's now infamous parody of postmodernism exposed what he saw as the gullibility and wilful misunderstanding of science in critical theory and "science studies".

But just as the war was becoming nasty, some of the leading players came together at the Southampton Peace Workshop in 1997, a forum for scientists and sociologists organized by the sociologist Harry Collins. The result is The One Culture? Twelve introductory position statements are followed by two rounds of commentaries and rebuttals by each protagonist. There are excellent contributions from Collins, Steven Shapin, Trevor Pinch and Steven Weinberg.

The book offers a fascinating insight into the arguments on both sides. As the contributions show, the stakes are high. Sociologists of science fear a loss of intellectual credibility if they fail to contest the criticisms of their methodology. Scientists believe their authority and research funding will decline due to public suspicion of science. Some even predict a new dark age of superstition and antiscience, ushered in by postmodernist intellectuals who want to replace the hard facticity of science with a relativistic melange of Wittgensteinian language-games and Foucaldian power struggles.

Sokal and Jean Bricmont write cogently on these threats. And yet, as Jane Gregory and Steve Miller emphasize, it is unrealistic nowadays to expect "awe-struck admiration for the mysterious men in white coats" from the public.

After the atomic bomb and genetic engineering, the need to understand science is more urgent than ever and sociologists, historians and, yes, even writers and artists, have a part to play in this project. It is premature to speak of one culture, but this important book, motivated by an exemplary spirit of academic tolerance and debate, shows how bridges might be built in the future.