The Trouble With Science
Subtitle: Science, Magic and Religion
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: March 1995
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780571174478
Subjects: Occultism & quasi-religious beliefs; Philosophy of religion; Science: General Issues
Genres: non fiction
First sentence: Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination (Max Planek)
Description: Synopsis:
The 'trouble' with science began in 1632, when Galileo demolished the belief that the earth is the centre of the universe. Yet despite the bewildering success of the scientific revolution, many continue to hanker after the cosy certainties of a man-centred universe, and young people increasingly turn away from science.
Robin Dunbar's The Trouble With Science examines the sources of contemporary hostility to science, explains how real scientists go about their daily work and how the reality differs from the ideas we have about it, and clarifies why science is still a good thing. Dunbar examines some of the reasons people find science difficult, alarming, threatening, and inimical, such as fears about runaway technology and worries people have about science's destruction of "spirituality" and emotion. He gives a clear and useful history of philosophy of science, from Hume's demonstration of the problem with induction to Kuhn and Feyerabend, Popper and Lakatos, and on to the "Strong Programme," social anthropology and postmodernism. There is a chapter on ways in which science can be seen as both universal and natural: rules of thumb and cookbook science can be found in all cultures and at all times, and even in animals. But at the same time, he explains, science is also highly unnatural. He cites the Wason selection test, and the experiments on "rational choice" by Tversky and Kahneman, winners of this year's Nobel Prize in economics. Our minds have evolved to be good at rough and ready, approximate, problem-solving kinds of science, he says, but that's a different thing from the highly logical and abstract kind of thinking needed in such disciplines as physics and mathematics. But Dunbar is convinced of the value of explanation and understanding, and he makes an excellent case for them here.
Notes: In The Trouble with Science, Professor Robin Dunbar launches a vigorous counter-blast. Drawing on studies of traditional societies and animal behaviour, his argument ranges from Charles Darwin to Nigerian Fulani herdsman, from lab rats to the mathematicians of ancient Babylonia. Along the way, he asks whether science really is unique to western culture - even to mankind - and suggests that our 'trouble with science' may lie in the fact that evolution has left our minds better able to cope with day-to-day social interaction than with the complexities of the external world.
Table of contents: title: Table of Contents; title: Index 201