We can derive some sense of the way intellectual life is experienced in some era from the recurrence of certain metaphors used to describe its conduct – for example, the frequency with which, in our own time, intellectual projects and achievements are described in terms of navigational finesse: the charting of passages between extremes, the steering of middle courses, the avoidance of the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis. Thus an advertisement for philosopher Susan Haack's book, Evidence and Inquiry, features a statement by Hilary Putnam praising the author for ‘elaborating and persuasively defending a position … which adroitly steers between the Scylla of apriorism and the Charybdis of scientism’. Or again, Image and Logic, by historian of science Peter Galison, is commended by its reviewer, professor of physics Michael Riordan, for ‘adroitly side-step[ping] one of the most contentious issues at the heart of current science wars … whether scientific measurements stand on their own as arbiters of reality, as the positivists insist [o]r, … as the relativists counter … predominantly reflect the biases of the culture that constructs them’. Riordan concludes the review by applauding Galison for ‘tak[ing] a mighty stand in the middle of these debates, a richly philosophical voice of moderation with which both extremes must now reckon’.

There is some question, of course, as to whether Riordan's statement of the issue in the so-called science wars is altogether even-handed and, relatedly, whether his report of the views of whomever he means by ‘the relativists’ (he alludes in passing to Thomas Kuhn) is itself accurate.