The metamorphosis of scientific knowledge in the postmodern period and American science fiction cinema

The postmodern period, which defines the new period that the Western world went into after the Second World War, witnessed many changes in social and cultural context. Postmodernity, the concept that describes the new point of view of the postmodern period, has gradually become encompassing everything that reacts to modernity and transformed its values. In this period, science and scientific knowledge, which were the founding elements of Enlightenment philosophy and modernity, were also transformed; its method has been heavily criticized for its relation to capital and the state, and its claim to objectivity. As a result this, many views and orientations of philosophy of science has emerged; science has moved away from its meaning and value in the modern period and created new areas of discussion. Science fiction genre, which is a reflection of science, that is one of the founding elements of modernity, in literature, met with cinema shortly after the development and rise of technology in the 19th century. The science fiction genre in cinema, whose first examples were given in Europe, appeared in the later periods mostly in American cinema. The science fiction genre remained in the background of genres such as horror and fantasy in American cinema, which met audiences with similar formal and contextual preferences until the end of the 1950s. Although qualified science fiction films began to be produced in World Cinema in the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the movie that redefined the genre, so to speak. After this film, science fiction, which became a genre with high transfer power, artistic value and profit margin in the hands of young directors who shot their first motion pictures especially after the second half of the 1970s, has become a dominant cinema genre with an increasing production and consumption acceleration day by day. This study is based on highlighting the relationship between science fiction as a genre and science, scientific knowledge and the philosophy of science which is their intellectual equivalent. The aim of the study is to explain the transformation of science fiction cinema at the end of the 1960s through the metamorphosis of scientific knowledge in the postmodern period and more importantly; to express the effect of emerging philosophy of science views and orientations on American science fiction cinema. The idea that the metamorphosis in science and scientific knowledge in the postmodern period affected American science fiction cinema formally and contextually constitutes the main argument of this study. In this sense, the sample films of the study, which takes as a reference to the significant works of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and the New Atheism formation, one of the important thinkers and formations of the field of philosophy of science in the postmodern period, were evaluated and concluded based on these approaches.